Rollright Stones
Part of the King's Men stone circle, one of three monuments that make up the Rollright Stones
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 Location within Oxfordshire
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| Coordinates | 51°58′32″N 1°34′15″W / 51.975534°N 1.570814°W |
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| Type | Dolmen, Stone circle and monolith |
Coordinates: 51°58′32″N 1°34′15″W / 51.975534°N 1.570814°W
The Rollright Stones is a complex of three Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monuments near the village of Long Compton, on the borders of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. Constructed from local oolitic limestone, the three monuments now known as the King's Men and the Whispering Knights in Oxfordshire and the King Stone in Warwickshire, are distinct in their design and purpose, and were built at different periods in late prehistory. The stretch of time during which the three monuments were erected bears witness to a continuous tradition of ritual behaviour on sacred ground, from the 4th to the 2nd millennium BCE.
The first to be constructed was the Whispering Knights, a dolmen that dates to the Early or Middle Neolithic period and which was likely to have been used as a place of burial. This was followed by the King's Men, a stone circle which was constructed in the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age; unusually, it has parallels to other circles located further north, in the Lake District, implying a trade-based or ritual connection. The third monument, the King Stone, is a single monolith, and although it is not known when it was constructed, the dominant theory amongst archaeologists is that it was a Bronze Age grave marker.
Andrew Breeze has proposed that the name Rollright is from the Brittonic phrase *rodland rïx 'wheel enclosure groove', where *rïx 'groove' refers to a narrow valley near Great Rollright and *rodland 'wheel enclosure' refers to the King's Men circle. By the Early Modern period, folkloric stories had grown up around the Stones, telling of how they had once been a king and his knights who had been turned to stone by a witch; such stories continued to be taught amongst local people well into the 19th century. Meanwhile, antiquarians such as William Camden, John Aubrey and William Stukeley had begun to take an interest in the monuments, leading to fuller archaeological investigations in the 20th century, culminating in excavations run by George Lambrick in the 1980s.
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