From Clas Merdin: Tales from the Enchanted Island
"London Stone has been described as an outlier to a stone circle that once stood on Ludgate Hill, a sacred place from ancient times. Tradition claims a pagan temple on the site was destroyed around 597 AD to make way for the first Christian church to be built there in 604 AD, the precursor to St Paul's Cathedral. Is it possible that a prehistoric standing stone has survived in the heart of the modern city?
Book the Third: The London Stone
London Stone, a Grade II listed ancient monument, once a much larger block of limestone but now about eighteen inches square, is today imprisoned behind a iron grating within a wall on the north side of Cannon Street opposite the railway station. The Stone has gained near mythical status over the years, it certainly seems to have had an active history and has been repeatedly moved from its original position, wherever that was. And now it seems to be on the move again.
The property company Minerva plan to demolish entire seven-storey office block where London Stone is now housed and propose to relocate it to an office block further down the road at the Walbrook Building, one of the City's newer office blocks. A move considered as preservation by some and desecration by others, the plan includes alterations to the front of the Walbrook Building where a special display case will be built to contain the legendary London Stone.
Only traces of the Stone's early legend has survived and nothing is known of its early history for certain; the Stone is first mentioned in the 10th century were it is recorded as a landmark belonging to Christ's Church in Canterbury. The composition of the stone is Oolitic limestone, a non-local stone, which must have been transported in to London for construction purposes, possibly by the Romans for use as the Milliarium Aureum (Golden Milestone), the suggestion no doubt enhanced by the Stone's close proximity to the Roman road Ermine Street running from the Roman fort at Cripplegate (Londinium) to Eburacum (York) and onto Hadrian's Wall in the north. And yet some claim its origin is even earlier and that Cannon Street is on the line of an ancient, pre-Roman trackway into London, marking an alignment to Tower Hill with London Stone as the omphalos or sacred centre where all roads met.
In the 16th century we find our first descriptions of the Stone. William Camden, author of Britannia, was probably the first to describe the Stone as a Roman ‘milliarium’, the central milestone from which all distances to Londinium were measured in the land Itineraries. Camden’s trusted reputation amongst later antiquarians has guaranteed the survival of this tradition and it certainly remains popular today. However, there is no evidence to support this view and certainly no trace of Roman numerals has ever been found on the stone.
Evidently at some time the Stone has lost much of it's bulk as it was once much larger and stood on the opposite side of the road. However, the reason for the reduction in size seems to have eluded history. A 16th century copperplate map of the City of London shows the Stone as a large rectangular block in the roadway opposite the main door of St Swithin's Church.
The previous size of the Stone is made clear by the Elizabethan historian John Stow who describes it as, ‘a great stone called London Stone, fixed in the ground very deep, fastened with bars of iron’ (Survey of London,1598). John Dee, alchemist of Queen Elizabeth I, is said to have taken pieces of the Stone for occult experiments, perhaps this was common practice and the Stone was chipped away by relic hunters."
Rest of article here:
http://clasmerdin.blogspot.co.uk/2012_06_01_archive.html
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