116: Copplestone

The copplestone is ancient, weathered; the inscriptions long eroded. No one knows what it’s for, why it’s here, what it was built for, or brought here to commemorate. It stands at the centre of the triangular verge marking the intersection of three roads from the neighbouring parishes of Shabberton, Dean’s Garter and Yottford. By some local accounts, the stone – a seven-foot high monolith (too blunt at the tip to be considered an obelisk, but too ornate to be considered a mere boundary stone) – is the remaining central shaft of a saxon cross, erected to mark the spot of the murder of a seventh-century bishop, the masonic recognition of whose martyrdom had had to wait all of two centuries, and whose name, close to a full millennium later has been rubbed to a flatness that slips tracelessly through time. Parish documents from the deanery at Yottford hold an account of the incident, detailing an attack by a band of villagers, apparently mortality belligerent to the evangelical techniques of the nobility-sponsored bishops of the day. The assailants had never been caught, and the diocese had gone bishop-less for over a century, before its subsumption into the episcopate of LLandaff around the start of the tenth century, the time at which local amateur historians place the cross’s construction. By ecclesiastic decree, the cross had been constructed – in a short-lived prototypical departure from single-slab carving – from three sections of stone: a central shaft that had had two deep recesses bored into the upper quarter on each side; and two shorter lengths bearing a protruding peg form that had been chipped out at the end. These segments were plugged into the central shaft, so as to form the lateral extensions of the cross. The short-lived nature of this type of construction was assured by its fragility under the stresses of the winds blustering in from across the moor, which – notwithstanding the addition of leather straps and harnesses – had over time caused the edges of the joints to erode and the arms of the cross to rock gently either towards, or away from the beholder, depending on the direction and strength of the wind. It was thus that the cross was known to “copple”, meaning, in the local dialect, “to rock back and forth”. Into the tenth and eleventh centuries, small communities of [] Christendom would [come to] build settlements around the stone – known in those times as the ‘copple cross’ – and of a windy day you could expect to see a pious gathering of locals and pilgrims alike, scattered around the base of the cross in apprehensive repose, waiting for the fabled “bishop’s wave”: when the spirit of the poor murdered clergyman would reach up through purgatory, and shake the arms of the cross in a gesture of indignant providence. Should the arms both rock forward, toward the east, this would portend, in the summer months, a successful harvest. And when observed in wintertime, a fertile spring. At these equinoxial times of the year, the villagers were far too busy reaping or sowing to sit around watching a rock all day in case it moved, although some of them did send delegates from the unoccupied classes. By the seventeenth century, the cross’s joints had become so weathered that, despite the efforts of the townsfolk to construct a brace of twisted wire coiling around the crest of the cross, the lateral slabs had started to sag by its sides, the whole edifice now resembling an arrow pointing skywards. It was around this time that the pilgrims ceased to appear, and the villagers likewise dwindled in their number. As an attempt by the bishopry to reestablish interest, regular sermons were held at the stone twice weekly, until one particularly wet and blustery Good Friday when the south facing arm slipped free of its linkage and truss and tumbled toe-wardly down to the parson beneath. There is no correct way for a segment of Saxon stone cross to fall on the foot of a clergyman. And likewise, there’s no correct way for a clergyman so suddenly encumbered to react. Although, cursing the Lord on high in every manner of blasphemy, invoking the Devil below to rise and bring the mortal realm to ruin, whilst tearing the cassock from his body and hopping, gnashing and foaming into the thickets, was seen by some of the congregation as a fair reaction, befitting the injury. After this, the attempt to keep the cross a cross was somewhat relaxed, as the regions succumbed to the ravages of the great plague and the centuries of war, poverty and pestilence that followed. By the 19th century, the familiar mongrelised customs of pagan and christian tradition had established secure use of the site in all manner of seasonal rites and celebrations: the gnarly trunk of rock was variously used as a maypole; dressed up in straw garments and burned as a Guy; used as a giant hoopla target in summer fetes; To the present now… A man staggers over to the copplestone and kicks away a pair of pigeons soliciting at its base. Throwing his maracas into the muck, he goes to unzip his fly but it’s already undone and has been for weeks. He proceeds to urinate against the northern flank of the rock, dousing the sexual expletives, chalked at toddler-height over the ancient Saxon inscriptions, into a caked-in patch of sick… forming a bubbling soup of swearing, pissy vomit that will soon gently soak its way down to the forgotten bishops bones. And the bishop’s stone does copple no more — time has yanked those limbs from their sockets and scattered them in wayward parts. One, down a well in an abandoned Yottford farmstead, and the other — somehow, inexplicably — in a museum of pagan curiosities in Baden-Baden, mis-classified as a Wiccan fertility stone. And the remaining shaft stands alone, ancient, weathered; the inscriptions long eroded. No one knows what it’s for, why it’s here, what it was built for, or brought here to commemorate. The Copplestone.