More on the Shebbear erratic boulder

Found in the NDAS Newsletter, Autumn 2017
http://www.ndas.org.uk/NDAS%20Newsletter%20Autumn%202017.pdf


This is very interesting. More on Shebbear........... John Bradbeer is quite certain that the Shebbear and Berry House stones are both sarsens, related to those on Salisbury Plain and other parts of southern England. He suggests that the two stones have come from destroyed Tertiary deposits, and have been "let down" onto the present land surface.  Until further evidence is forthcoming, this sounds like a reasonable explanation.  More research please, from those who live over that way......

The Devil’s Stone at Shebbear: A Landscape Enigma

John Bradbeer

Members will probably be aware of the Devil’s Stone, which lies at the west end of the square, just outside the churchyard in Shebbear. It represents an enigma taking in archaeology, geology and geomorphology (the study of landforms). The stone itself is at the centre of much folklore, culminating in a ceremony every 5th November, when the stone is turned. This is to flush the Devil out from his
possible hiding place under the stone and failure to do so puts next year’s crops in jeopardy. Another element to the story is that the Devil was escaping from Northlew, where he was in danger of catching his death of cold and to hasten his progress, he dropped the stone in Shebbear. We can probably explain the November timing of the turning of the stone with reference to the Celtic year in which the
first of November, Samhain (pronounced sawin) marks the start of winter. The shift to 5th November almost certainly came about after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

The stone itself is around 500 to 700 kilograms in weight and sub-angular rather than round in shape. It is described geologically as a conglomerate orthoquartzite, and to the untrained eye, the shiny quartz grains resemble the quartz crystals in granite. It is in fact a sedimentary rock and current thinking suggests that it is Tertiary in age and thus comparable with the sarsen stones (or ‘grey wethers’) that are found on Salisbury Plain and which, of course, were famously used at Avebury and Stonehenge. It is generally accepted that sea levels were very much higher in the Tertiary period, roughly 5 to 50 million years ago, and many of the succession of erosion surfaces (from c 50 to c 350 metres OD) that give such flat skylines across much of the county were cut at this time. Most of the presumed Tertiary cover of South West England has long since been eroded away, but Tertiary deposits are preserved on the top of Haldon Hill, south west of Exeter and in the down-faulted Bovey Basin in South Devon and here in North Devon in the Petrockstow Basin and the off- shore Stanley Basin near Lundy. Orleigh in Buckland Brewer has a flint gravel deposit presumed to be of Tertiary age and derived from a former cover of chalk. The Tithe Apportionment of 1841 records some fields as ‘Flint Hill’. So geologists can offer a plausible origin for the Devil’s Stone, but what happened to the other survivors from this former Tertiary cover remains an enigma.

In central southern England, besides the sarsens used at sites like Avebury and Stonehenge and incorporated in some of the barrows, there are clusters such as those found in a dry valley on
Fyfield Down, just north of Pewsey in Wiltshire. Geomorphologists can explain such a cluster by reference to solifluction flow during the very cold periods in the Quaternary when southern England was effectively tundra, lying just to the south of the great ice sheets and the summer thaw delivered sufficient water to move soil and sarsens stones down slope. The river terrace gravels along the Solent also contain many smaller fragments of sarsen stone, brought down by the rivers that drain much of Salisbury Plain. But where are the other sarsen stones from North Devon? On Salisbury Plain it is plausible to speculate that early humans found and moved many of the suitably large stones to incorporate in monuments, but in North Devon, there are no megaliths formed of sarsens. North
Devon’s river gravel terraces, of which there may be at least four or five, have never been exploited so no sarsens have been exposed from these. Perhaps there never were as many sarsens here and most were quite small and thus readily transported or fragmented into yet smaller pieces.

The Devil’s stone at Shebbear 

However, the enigma has another twist. For about 750 metres from the Devil’s Stone is another sarsen, rather larger at an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 kilograms, now on the verge in front of Berry House and one that looks far more like potential megalith material in shape. That two such stones should survive so close to each other yet no others appear to have survived anywhere in North Devon requires explanation. Clearly human agency has to be invoked in the survival and folklore attached, especially to the Devil’s Stone, but archaeology and geology have no real explanation as to why there should be just these two sarsens and no others known in North Devon.  (Note from BJ:  could these stones have been carried from a source area near the coast, by an ice tongue pressing inland from the Fremington - Barnstaple area?)

The Berry House erratic, more than twice the size of the Shebbear stone, and weighing in 

at almost 2 tonnes.........