7-524: The Blowing Stone is a perforated sarsen at grid reference SU32412 87083 in Kingston Lisle , Oxfordshire , England. The stone is in a garden at the foot of Blowingstone Hill just south of the Icknield Way (B4507), about 4 + 1 ⁄ 2 miles (7 km) west of Wantage and about 1 + 1 ⁄ 2 miles (2.4 km) east of White Horse Hill . Blowingstone Hill is part of
14-815: The Battle of Ashdown against the Danes in 871 CE. Thomas Hughes ' 1857 novel Tom Brown's School Days refers to it as the Blawing Stwun and calls the village Kingstone Lisle . It is also one of the "sacred stones" mentioned in William Horwood's Duncton Wood (1980), the first book in his fantasy fiction series about a group of moles. 51°34′54″N 1°32′01″W / 51.581686°N 1.533622°W / 51.581686; -1.533622 Sarsen Sarsen stones are silicified sandstone blocks found extensively across southern England on
21-805: The Salisbury Plain and the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire; in Kent ; and in smaller quantities in Berkshire , Essex , Oxfordshire , Dorset , and Hampshire . Sarsen stones are the post-glacial remains of a cap of Cenozoic silcrete that once covered much of southern England. This is thought to have formed during Neogene to Quaternary weathering by the silicification of Upper Paleocene Lambeth Group sediments, resulting from acid leaching. There are several potential sources for
28-545: The escarpment of the Berkshire Downs , at the crest of which is The Ridgeway National Trail . The stone is capable of producing a booming sound if someone with the required skill blows into one of the holes the right way. According to legend it could be heard atop White Horse Hill, where 19th-century antiquarians thought King Alfred the Great 's Saxon troops had camped, and that this was how Alfred summoned them for
35-666: The prehistoric vaults of the Chotanagpur plateau of Northern India. The third possibility is that "sarsen" comes from the hybrid Anglo-Saxon "sar-stan" or 'troublesome stone.' "Sar" has the meaning of 'grievous.' The builders of Stonehenge used these stones for the Heel Stone and sarsen circle uprights. Avebury and many other megalithic monuments in southern England are also built with sarsen stones. While sarsen stones are not an ideal building material, fire and in later times explosives were sometimes employed to break
42-468: The stone into pieces of a suitable size for use in construction. William Stukeley wrote that sarsen is "always moist and dewy in winter which proves damp and unwholesome, and rots the furniture". In the case of Avebury, the investors who backed a scheme to recycle the stone were bankrupted when the houses they built proved to be unsaleable and also prone to burning down. However, despite these problems, sarsen remained highly prized for its durability, being
49-597: The word "sarsen." The first is that word "sarsen" is a shortening of "Saracen stone" which arose in the Wiltshire dialect . In the Middle Ages, " Saracen " was a common name for Muslims , and came by extension to be used for anything regarded as non-Christian, whether Muslim or pagan in contrast to Christianity. The second is that "sarsen" is vernacular variation of the Indo-European "sasan," name given to
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