Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/361

Rh the nearest village (Cherrington) gave one as follows:—"Once there lived a tailor who worked on Sundays. One Sunday he met a strange man, who asked him to make a suit of clothes, and the tailor whipped out his tape to measure. "Do you know who I am?" asked the stranger. "Yes, you're the Devil!" said the tailor; and then he was frightened and ran home. When he met his wife he fell down dead. They buried him at the Devil's Churchyard, and the stones were tombstones." The other version was told to my informant, a woman about 60, by her mother, a farmer's wife, as a warning against breaking the Sabbath:—"There was once a man who used to go nutting on Sundays. As he was going down Half-Mile Lane, that leads to the Devil's Churchyard, he stretched out his hand to a fine bunch of nuts, saying,—"Here goes one!" Then to another, saying,—"Here goes two!" And a black hand was stretched out from the other side of the hedge, and it grabbed the man, with "Here goes three!" in a terrible voice. So he died, and was buried at the Devil's Churchyard, for the black hand belonged to the Devil." The Devil's Churchyard is held to be a most uncanny spot; you are supposed to see men without heads there, (so one of my jobbing gardeners confessed), and dogs, and unknown horrors. A man who works on the roads told me that once he and a friend were poaching round there after midnight, and were terribly scared by "a noise like bagpipes."

Menhirs.—Two menhirs, "Cob Stone" and "Picked Stone," were destroyed on or near Minchinhampton Common, about seventy years ago.

Still standing is the curious "Ragged Jonathan" or "Holey Stone," about 5 ft. high, pitted all over with small regular cup-like depressions. It has been used at some time as a milestone; but one old inhabitant says he thinks it came from the Devil's Churchyard, while another says that children used to be lifted over it to cure whooping-cough. I have also been told that the holes in the stone were made by Oliver Cromwell's guns.

Much more famous than "Ragged Jonathan" is a perforated menhir about a mile to the east of Minchinhampton. It was formerly surrounded by the Common arable fields, to one of which it gave the name of "Longstone Field." Once, when they were