There is one fact that is important never to forget about the Soulbury stone, according to Victor Wright, chair of the parish council of the small Buckinghamshire village in which it is situated: “The Soulbury stone never loses.”



It is a lesson that has been learned the hard way, he says, by generations of young men returning from the Boot, the village pub, who attempt to hurdle it and “do their undercarriage some damage”. Older village residents, it’s said, can remember when two army tanks were defeated after they tried to dislodge it during the war.

And on some indeterminate day in the recent past, an unknown motorist learned the lesson the hard way, when the rear bumper of their car had an overly close encounter with the stone, from which it did not come away the victor.

This week, Buckinghamshire county council became the latest to realise that one tangles with the low, unprepossessing boulder, somewhat eccentrically situated in the middle of the tarmacked surface of Chapel Hill, at one’s peril.

The aforementioned motorist – there are rumours in the village of an eyewitness, and of a woman in a red 4x4 attempting a reverse turn – submitted a claim for £1,800 compensation to Buckinghamshire county council following her collision with the stone. Contractors hastily surrounded it with no fewer than six traffic cones, while the council’s transport team wrote to Wright declaring the monument an “obstruction” under the Highways Act 1980. It would have to be moved, wrote an official, to the village green a few hundred metres away.

His reaction? “Panic mode.” The local Leighton Buzzard Observer was made aware, and put Soulbury’s struggle on its front page – not, according to villagers, a frequent occurrence (“the largest issues here are usually high-speed broadband and the bus service”). Within hours the story had attracted national press attention, and Wright had roused a local solicitor to the cause, and submitted an application to declare the stone a scheduled ancient monument.

Locals have suggested that reinstating a lamp-post that used to be sited next to the stone may help motorists avoid it. Photograph: SWNS.com

He also retrieved a chain from his garage and posed with it looped between his body and the stone, claiming “at least seven” others had vowed to do the same if any attempt was made to move it. (He will laughingly admit that it wouldn’t have been a very effective deterrent, since the round boulder, no more than three feet high, is not ideally shaped for such a protest.)

By Thursday, once the stone had featured on national TV and radio, this particular immovable object had, true to form, overcome the council’s highly resistible force. “We completely understand the significance of the stone to villagers,” said Mark Shaw, the council’s cabinet member for transportation, “and will do all that we can to make any appropriate safety changes to the area around the stone, but not move the stone itself. Clearly the stone is the true heart and soul of Soulbury.”

Why such a fight for this small boulder? Soulbury’s stone (never “rock”, notes Wright’s wife, June, who made that mistake – once – while taking the parish council minutes) does not even have any archaeological value. It was placed at the junction of Chapel Hill and High Road, notes Mike Palmer, keeper of natural history at Bucks County Museum, not by neolithic humans marking a burial spot or a significant ford, but by an ice age glacier, which transported the chunk of 300-million-year-old carboniferous limestone from much further north – probably the Peak District – some 450,000 years ago.

Even local people can’t quite put a finger on why they value it so highly. Debbie Olié, who lives at the bottom of Chapel Hill, appreciates that it’s a handy way to direct people looking for her turnoff. Jacqui Butler, who lives in the large, early-18th century house in front of the stone, says her teenage son likes to stand on it every Thursday evening waiting for the fish and chip van. Janet Joosten, who lives a few doors along the main road and is a member of a druid society, believes the stone has “particular energies”.

Some people think it was a mounting block for horses. There is a legend that Oliver Cromwell stood on top of it while his troops were ransacking the village church (though villagers are happy to admit the sourcing on that may be sketchy). Some cite a legend that the stone rolls down the low hill every night at midnight only to reappear each morning, though sceptics scoff at such superstition and say it only happens every Halloween.

‘The Soulbury stone never loses’ … Victor Wright, chair of the parish council, stands on the stone in Chapel Hill. Photograph: Felix Clay/The Guardian

What is unquestionable, however, is that the stone has been in Soulbury for much longer than Soulbury, and its location just off the main thoroughfare, in what is an extremely wide entrance for a modest cul-de-sac, suggests it has been accruing meaning for people in the area for much longer than anyone can remember.

“When I first saw it, I was amazed it was still there,” says Palmer. “These things did tend to get moved out of the way.” Either it extends much further underground than is visible, he says (villagers believe only one-eighth is above ground), or it has been significant locally for many centuries.

“I think people did read the landscape and the features within it much more than we do today: standing stones and ancient trees, all these things seemed to register on the consciousness of people then. We just don’t notice them now.”

Nearby Princes Risborough, he says, has its own glacial erratic, a puddingstone boulder that, a small plaque informs passersby, is thought to have been used by neolithic people as a marker stone, and now sits on a heavily landscaped site next to the Horns Lane roundabout.

All over the country, towns and villages have made accommodations with the ancient stones in their midst, some of which remain lovingly venerated by locals, while others have suffered more ignominious fates.

Darlington has the Bulmer stone, a hefty chunk of glacial Shap granite, which (according to a plaque) once marked the northernmost extent of the town, and was used by weavers to beat their flax against it. It now sits, almost forgotten, over a void behind iron railings. In the small County Antrim village of Ballylumford, best known for its power station, a large dolmen or portal tomb incorporating four standing megaliths and a large capstone has been happily incorporated in a domestic driveway.

The Ballylumford dolmen in County Antrim has been happily incorporated into a domestic driveway. Photograph: Alamy

Clackmannan, in central Scotland, was named after its own ancient stone, a small whinstone boulder that is said to have been sacred to the pre-Christian god Mannan for millenia. In the 19th century for reasons unknown it was placed on a high menhir, giving it the appearance of a penis. An attempt by the local council in 2005 to move it by 5m was no more successful than Buckinghamshire county council’s effort this week. (“All the ladies at the meeting decided that we would learn how to sing We Shall Not Be Moved and sit around the stone if it came to that,” Davina Armstrong, 74, told the Times.)

Such questions about how to reach reconciliation between modern life and ancient heritage are grappled with on a daily basis in the small and densely populated island of Great Britain, notes Paul Chadwick, an archaeologist and planning consultant.

Of the thousands of proposed planning developments that his own firm, CgMs, deals with every year, he says, perhaps 40% hint at enough historical or archaeological interest to merit a geophysical survey of the landscape; perhaps half of those will require excavation or trial trenches by archaeologists. It is “pretty exceptional” for something to be found of such significance that it will derail a project altogether, he says, “but having said that, there are plenty of instances where, like this site in Bucks, something has been almost venerated for generations. Clearly the road has gone round it and people have got very attached to it.”

He cites an example from his own work on a Viking burial mound that has been incorporated into a housing estate on the Isle of Man (“that works quite well”). A housing site in Northampton was hastily altered when a Roman villa was found, he adds. The houses were moved to sit on what was going to be open space, while the site of the villa, safely grassed over, “is now the kickabout space for the estate that was built around it”.

As for Soulbury’s stone, Wright is due to meet with highways officials next week to discuss the next step, but suggestions from locals include restoring an old gas lamp-post that used to sit next to it, or perhaps extending the pavement from one side of the wide entrance to wrap around it.

That suggestion would have the advantage of offering a little more roadside protection to the visitors that Wright is confident will now come in increasing numbers to see the famous landmark (and on a sleepy weekday afternoon there are several, including a man named Ian, who has brought his teenage sons from nearby Aylesbury and declares: “If this was in Devon there would be a teahouse and this would be called Old Ma Soulbury’s Wishing Stone”).

Does Wright really expect it to attract the crowds? “You’d be surprised,” he says. “The Bucks way runs just past here. There are people who stop here, take a photo, tick a box. Soulbury stone, done.” Who knows, people may have been doing something similar for a very long time indeed.