A. the King Stone. B. the Archdruids barrow. C. king barrows or round barrows. D. long compton.
When these ancient patriarchal temples in other countries came to be perverted to idolatry, they consecrated many of them to the sun, thinking their round form ought to be referr’d to his disc; and that these pyramidal stones, set in a circle, imitated his rays. Hence call’d Aglibelus, rotundus Deus, as interpreted by Bochart. עגל בעל, ζευς επικυκλιος among the orientals, as Schedius observes. And had the ancient Greek writers seen our temples of Stonehenge, and the rest, they would have concluded them dedicated to the sun.
These temples of ours are always of a round form: and there are innumerable of them, all over the Britannic isles, nevertheless they are to be ranked into three kinds; for tho’ they are all circular, yet there are three manifest diversities which I have observ’d, regarding that threefold figure, by which the ancients, probably even from Adam’s time, express’d in writing, the great idea of the deity. This figure by Kircher is call’d ophio-cyclo-pterygo-morphus. ’Tis a circle with wings, and a snake proceeding from it. A figure excellently well design’d to picture out the intelligence they had, no doubt, by divine communication, of the mysterious nature of the deity. And it was the way of the ancients in their religious buildings, to copy out or analogize the form of the divine being, as they conceiv’d it, in a symbolical manner. By this means they produc’d a most effectual prophylact, as they thought, which could not fail of drawing down the blessings of divine providence upon that place and country, as it were, by sympathy and similitude.
I shall therefore make it the subject of the present volume, to describe one or two of each sort of the temples built upon the plan of these figures: wherein the founders have left an incontestible proof of that knowledge which the ancient world had of the divine nature, by these durable and magnificent monuments. The remainder of these temples (as many as are come to my knowledge) together with the places of the sports and games of the ancient Britons, and the religion of the Druids, I shall publish in the succeeding volume.
Names or words are necessary for the understanding of things; therefore 1. The round temples simply, I call temples; 2. Those with the form of a snake annext, as that of Abury, I call serpentine temples, or Dracontia, by which they were denominated of old; 3. Those with the form of wings annext, I call alate or winged temples. And these are all the kinds of Druid temples that I know of. We may call these figures, the symbols of the patriarchal religion, as the cross is of the christian. Therefore they built their temples according to those figures.
ROWLDRICH.
I shall begin with Rowlright or rather Rowldrich, and as a specimen of what requisites are sought for in these enquiries, I shall draw them up in a kind of order: which may be useful in all researches of this sort.
1. A situation on high ground, open heaths, by heads of rivers.
ROWLDRICH is a temple of the Druids of the first kind, a circular work which has been often taken notice of in print, lying in the north-west part of Oxfordshire: upon high ground, where the counties of Oxford, Warwick, and Glocester meet. ’Tis near the town of Chippin-Norton. Two rivers rise here, that run with quite contrary directions; the Evenlode towards the south part of the kingdom, which joining the Isis below Woodstock, visits the great luminary of Britain, Oxford, and then meets the Thames at Dorchester, the ancient Episcopal see of the Mercian kingdom. At this Dorchester are fine remains both of Saxon church antiquity, of Roman, and of British. The inquisitive that prefer our own country antiquities to the vain tour of foreign, will find much of curious amusement there. The other river Stour runs from Rowldrich directly north, to meet the Avon at Stratford, thence to the Severn sea. So that Rowldrich must needs stand on very high ground, and to those that attentively consider the place itself, it appears to be a large cop’d hill, on the summit of an open down; and the temple together with the Archdruid’s barrow hard by, stand on the very tip of it, having a descent every way thence: and an extensive prospect, especially into Glocestershire and Warwickshire. The country hereabouts was originally an open, barren heath; and underneath, a quarry of a kind of rag stone. At present near here are some inclosures, which have been plough’d up. The major part of our antiquity remains: tho’ many of the stones have been carried away within memory, to make bridges, houses, &c.
2. ’Tis an open temple of a circular form, made of stones set upright in the ground. The stones are rough and unhewn, and were (as I apprehend) taken from the surface of the ground. I saw stones lying in the field north of Norton, not far off, of good bulk, and the same kind as those of our antiquity. There are such in other places hereabouts, whence the Druids took them: tho’ in the main, carry’d off ever since, for building and other uses.