The Lost Stone of Chat…

“There is a stone which would be worth visiting. It is in Baslow which is on our way to the Symposium so we could stop off there, grab some lunch, check out the stone and then head off to our meeting.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“If I can remember where it is.”

“I thought you knew where it was; why else tell me about it otherwise.”

“I do, sort of, only we will be coming at it the other way, the last time I visited I came down off the moor but we won’t have time to do it that way.”

“How long ago was this?” says Wen becoming somewhat suspicious.

“About ten years. It’s a huge stone. You can’t miss it and I know the general direction of its whereabouts.”

“How big is the stone?”

“It’s massive. It’s the largest free-standing monolith I’ve ever come across and we found it quite by accident.”

“Bigger than the stones at Avebury?”

“Not bigger, but taller than the stones at Avebury.”

“By accident you say?”

“Look, there’s nothing mysterious about it, I’d taken Al and Sal to see the Park-Gate stone circle and then we walked back over the moor, which is another necropolis by the way, to Baslow and lunch. There was some sort of monument giving a rather splendid view of the area and just after that we came down off the moor and found the stone.”

“A necropolis you say? It is not marked on the map,” says Wen with some conviction.

“Well, not all of them are.”

“The big ones though, they usually are, surely?”

“I didn’t imagine it. We even took a photograph. Al and I were laughing because of the, shall we say, somewhat rude reputation of such stones, so we got Sal to stand next to it and Al took a photograph on his phone.”

“Okay, if it’s as big as you say we should be able to find it again quite easily.”…

The Aetheling Thing

***

Amazon UK and Amazon.com for Book One of the Doomsday Triad:

Doomsday:

The Ætheling Thing

Stuart France & Sue Vincent

“Who was this Arviragus bloke anyway?”

Don studies the light as it plays through his beer, casting prisms on the table. How is it possible to hide such a story… the hidden history of Christianity in Britain? Oh, there are legends of course… old tales… Yet what if there was truth in them? What was it that gave these blessed isles such a special place in the minds of our forefathers? There are some things you are not taught in Sunday School. From the stone circles of the north to the Isle of Avalon, Don and Wen follow the breadcrumbs of history and forgotten lore to uncover a secret veiled in plain sight.

***

Wen is checking something in the Dictionary, “Get this… ‘ætheling from O.E. .Æpling, ‘son of a king, man of royal blood, nobleman, chief, prince, king, Christ, God-Man, Hero, Saint…’
“Wait a minute… wait a minute… give me that last bit again.”
“…Christ, God-Man, Hero, Saint…”
“Didn’t we call our Arthur, Aeth in, ‘The Heart of Albion’?”
“We did.”
“And didn’t we set his story in Mercia?”
“We did.”
“And didn’t Mercia grow to become the largest and most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Albion at one point in its history?”
“It did indeed.”
“Well that’s it then…The Anglo Saxon kings were claiming divine descent.”
“…Along with most other European kings at that time no doubt.”
“That’s true, but the Anglo-Saxon kings’ descent wasn’t from God it was from Christ.”
“And how did they get there?”
“They got there from their very own High One who also hung from a tree with a spear in his side… screaming.”
“Odin!”
“They evidently regarded Christ as an avatar of Odin.”
“Blimey, you’ll not read that in any history book!”
“Just as well we’re not writing a history then isn’t it?”

Full colour illustrated

Also available in Paperback.