Mysterious Trail

Professor Ernest A. Rudge of West Ham Municipal College was on a picnic with his wife near Holyfield, twelve miles northeast of London, when he first noticed the odd, pear-shaped stone. Made of pebbles embedded in sandstone (conglomerate), it looked like a pudding full of raisins. To Archeologist Rudge the stone seemed out of place in that area; there is no native conglomerate within five miles.

Their scientific curiosity aroused, Professor & Mrs. Rudge began scouting the area, soon came across another pudding stone. After questioning villagers and gamekeepers of Epping Forest, they found three more. All five of the stones were in a line, which made it unlikely that they had been left by a glacier or other accident of nature. Here was a mystery to delight any scientist.

Weekend after weekend for three years the Rudges searched for pudding stones. By last week they had found more than 130, leading cross-country through East Anglia toward the northeast. Some marked ancient rights of way that are still in use. Others marked a still-used ford in the Little Ouse river. Many were built into foundations of old Saxon churches.

Grey Lady. The Rudges soon discovered that the country people held pudding stones in a kind of veneration, calling them "growing stones" or "motherstones." Superstitions had gathered around them. In Oxfordshire they were shunned after dark; a weird lady was supposed to sit on them at midnight to comb her grey hair. One stone built into a church carried a strange local legend. A farmer told Mrs. Rudge that the people who built the church brought the pudding stone down from a hill, and three times the devil carried the stone back to its lone hilltop. So the church was built on the hill, and the stone stayed with it.

Inspired by these tales, Dr. & Mrs. Rudge dug into church history. They found that Pope Gregory the Great, in a letter to his missionaries in 601 A.D., told them not to destroy such stones when they found them in pagan Britain. Instead, he said, they should build their churches upon them, so that the centers of new Christianity might enjoy the prestige of a more ancient faith.

Gregory's priests and their successors seem to have followed the Pope's advice. In Chesham, towards the west in Buckinghamshire, the Rudges found an old church built on 19 pudding stones set in a circle, a sort of primitive Stonehenge (TIME, June 2), and probably much more ancient.

The Evil Place. The Rudges still did not know who set out the mysterious stones, but they doggedly followed the pudding stone trail across eastern England. At last it took them to Grime's Graves in Norfolk, a dark, fir-grown hollow where Stone Age man from earliest times dug flint with staghorn picks. Norfolk country people shun the spot, and call it "the evil place." But for the Rudges, it was the payoff.

Grime's Graves was a center of industry of the Tardenoisian people--a shadowy race who inhabited England some 6,000 years ago. The Rudges believe that the ancient Tardenoisians laid out the pudding stone trail to guide them to their flint mines. The center of their culture may have been the ring of pudding stones now in the foundation of the Chesham church.

The southwestern end of the trail has not yet been found. The known section ends near the Thames at Pangbourne, Berkshire, and it points southwest toward Salisbury Plain and the great ancient ruin of Stonehenge. Perhaps the Stonehenge people built their megalithic temple, like Pope Gregory built his churches, on a still more ancient circle of hallowed pudding stones.

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