© Copyright Russel Wills and licensed for reuse
under
this Creative Commons Licence.
In the middle of
a farmer’s field a couple of miles to the SW of Chillingham stands the Hurl
Stone, a ten-foot high rough-hewn obelisk of unknown origin yet steeped in myth
and legend. Hard facts are difficult to come by, but who needs ‘em?
First of all
there is its name. Some speculate that it is derived from the ‘Earl’s Stone’ –
though the identity of the gentleman in question is not known. It may have been
an ancient standing stone (or cross) at one point, possibly relocated to its
present spot by someone or other. Everyone’s
favourite theory, though, is that it was literally ‘hurled’ there by the
Devil himself, who, when perched high upon the Cheviot, saw pesky St.Cuthbert
going about his pious wanderings in the distance and threw the stone at him in
anger.
The Hurl Stone is
supposed to be the haunt of fairies, too. An underground passage some sixteen
miles in length is supposed to pass under the stone (linking Cateran Hole in
the east to Henhole in the west), which, when it was once explored in times of
old, revealed evidence of underground fairy-like activity immediately beneath
the stone. The adventurers didn’t hang around long enough to investigate further
and scarpered sharp-ish.
Sorry to
disappoint, but chances are that the Hurl Stone was once a medieval Christian
cross which lost its top and was then recycled as a folly (of sorts) by someone
with nothing better to do. Some attribute the act to a Mr Jobson, a local
farmer, and that a bolt of lightning accounted for the missing couple of foot
or so.
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