MysteryHidden
The Barber Stone
Mind your head when felling giants.
See it clearly
- What's there
- Re-erected sarsen in the henge
- Legend from
- 1938 excavation
- Tone
- Grim
He came to bring the stones down. One of them brought him down instead.
In 1938 Alexander Keiller's team, re-erecting the great stones at Avebury, found a man's skeleton beneath one of them. With him lay coins of the early fourteenth century, a pair of scissors and a lancet, the tools of a barber-surgeon. The stone has been called the Barber Stone ever since. The usual reading is that he died in an accident while medieval villagers were toppling and burying the stones. Keiller's reports were cut short by the Second World War, so much of the story stayed untold for decades.
One sourceOnly one written account of this legend has been found so far.