SACRILEGE AT THE STONES

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SACRILEGE!

The Rollright Stones have been where they are for 3,500 years.
It has fallen to our generation to plaster them with yellow oil paint.

Every one of the 70 Kings Men in the Stone Circle has been splattered back and front. Someone has dipped a stick in a can of paint and whipped it across each stone face two or three times. The whole operation during the night of April 1st must have taken at least an hour or more. It is enough to make you cry. The paint has sunk into the pitted limestone and filled the small holes. It has been streaked across the colonies of precious lichen - some of which are 900 years old. They were there growing when Magna Carta was signed. The experts are still debating how to tackle the situation. What's for sure is that it will take months of painstaking work to clean this lot up - and cost thousands. Don Prout - the curator - is devastated. On a cold wet Saturday morning one lady with bare feet was wandering round the carnage - eyes totally empty. I asked her what she made of it. "They will get what they deserve" she replied." The power of the stones will have its revenge". I shuddered slightly - it is an eerie place at the best of times. But my more prosaic mind turned to the Thames Valley Police from whom most of us will be expecting some fast action and retribution. They have apparently taken paint samples - but (Dohn has been told) they must now have a "management committee" meeting to decide whether resources will stretch to the costs of an analysis of it. If this is true, its beyond belief. Most observers reckon that the type (non-drip oil) and colour (vibrant golden yellow) of the paint are very distinctive and must offer at least a chance of tracing where it was bought. The Police will surely face an outcry from the public about all this once the enormity of what has happened sinks in. And not just from North Oxfordshire. This is something which - as a society - we simply must not condone. We need to catch the vandals that did this.

If the power of magic and the power of prayer works the people who have done this should start to feel very uncomfortable ......says Karin Attwood of The Pagan Federation. They are obviously not totally confident about spriritual intervention though because they have also offered a reward of 1,000 for information leading to the arrest of the person or persons responsible.

GEORGE HUMMER WENT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE STONES.......

Desecration rather than vandalism is the right word for what some crackbrained idiot has done to the Rollright Stones. Sometime between seven pm on Wednesday, March 31, and nine forty-five on the morning of April 1, one person or possibly more used yellow paint to daub meaningless, moronic, yellow splatters on all sides of the Stones. Pending more information from the police investigation, it has the hallmarks of a mindless attack by vandals. Who would do such a thing is at the heart of the inquiries going on, but the equally important question is Why Is our society so debased that this was conceived of as a clever thing to do

Custodian Dohn Prout has sent two samples of the paint to laboratories for analysis. It is likely that yellow enamel paint was used, since there is evidence of a paint skin having been broken and then daubed on the Stones along with liquid paint. If the tin was discarded after the attack, it has not been found so far. The daubing was done inexpertly using a stick or other piece of wood, also undiscovered, and a good quantity of paint was splashed on the grass around the Stones, indicating that there probably are signs of yellow paint on the trousers as well as shoes of the person responsible.

There are no discernible slogans or symbols to be seen. This makes it unlikely that the vandals were motivated by politics or antagonism. It definitely is out of the question that it is something to do with witchcraft the Pagan Federation has condemned the attack, along with many other individuals and organisations. The attackers were evidently not concerned to do their work quickly, since it would have taken quite a while to do both the front and back of all the Stones. Not one of them was left untouched. The Whispering Knights and the King Stone, respectively across a field and the other side of the road, were however left alone.

It is particularly sad that this happened just as the Rollright Stones Trust succeeded in acquiring the land needed to gain access to the circle along the ancient ceremonial pathway. Fencing has just been completed around this land, as well as around the Whispering Knights. The King Stone has both a new gate and fence around it, and a mud-proof track to reach it. English Heritage has already put in motion a plan for removal of the paint. This will be a long, difficult job, taking two skilled restoration experts an estimated twenty-five weeks to complete. The job has to be painstaking because the Stones are hosts to lichens that give previously undisturbed clues to patterns of weather and air quality, right back to about the year 2500 BC. In order to preserve some of the rarest lichens, some small splodges of paint will have to stay. This means that generations of people living after us will be able to find evidence of our time and its values by looking at what we contributed to this ancient monument. It will be a sad commentary on us through the ages to come