I interrupt my flow of posts from our trip to the Faroe Islands to show you some snowy scenes from the Welsh Marcheson the eve of Epiphany. I visited Mitchell’s Fold, which is a Bronze Age stone circle in Shropshire, just at the Welsh border. We are around an hour’s car drive from Lynch Court, where I live.
The stone circle is from around 3,500 years ago. I have described several such stone circles from Dartmoor and the Lake District in earlier posts. Originally it consisted of around 30 stones, but only half of them are clearly visible now, and in the snow they were even more difficult to discern. It was a beautiful day and the walk on Mitchell’s Fold and Shapeley Hill couldn’t have been better. But it was cold, a lot colder than Jennifer and I experienced on the Faroes, although the sun was shining and I had very little wind blowing. The stone circle is at around 350 metres altitude and the walk brought me up at around 400 metres.
Mitchell is a wicked witch from local folklore. Mitchell was turned to stone and imprisoned in the stone circle as punishment for trying to milk a magical cow that was endlessly producing milk for the benefit of the local population. Mitchell frightened the magical cow, which unfortunately fled. So I suppose it is Mitchell that I photographed above with the sun just touching the witch.
To return from legend to facts, the stones were mined nearby at Shapely Hill (where I walked before this photo) and are like a lot of stones here in the Marches of volcanic origin. And Wikipedia has another theory behind the name “Mitchell”. They say that the name may derive from “Old English “micel” or “mycel”, Old English for “big”. But I prefer to believe I have just photographed a petrified witch being touched by the sun!
