The Elf-enchanted Hanging Stone

The following is for all those who love the Cheviot Hills.

The College Burn. Photo by A Curtis (2014).

Then, let our pilgrim footsteps seek
Old Cheviot's pathless mossy peak;
For there the Mountain Spirit still
Lingers around the lonely hill,
To guard his wizard grottoes hoar
Where Cimbrian sages dwelt of yore;
Or, shrouded in his robes of mist,
Ascends the mountain's shaggy breast,
To seize his fearful seat—upon
The elf-enchanted Hanging-Stone,
And count the kindred streams that stray
Through the broad regions of his sway:--
Fair sister streams, that wend afar
By rushy mead or rocky scaur,
Now hidden by the clustering brake,
Now lost amid the mountain lake,
Now clasping, with protective sweep,
Some mouldering castle's moated steep;
Till, issuing from the uplands brown,
Fair rolls each flood by tower and town;
The hills recede, and on the sight
Swell the bold rivers broad and bright.

Part of the poem, The Autumnal Excursion by Thomas Pringle (1836).

He was a Scottish writer (born at Blakelaw near Kelso), poet and abolitionist (who became secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society). He is known as the father of South African poetry having emigrated there with the help of Sir Walter Scott in 1820. He was the first successful English language poet and author to describe South Africa's scenery, native peoples, and living conditions.

In his notes to the poem, he describes the Hanging Stone as:

'... a lofty cliff near the western summit of Cheviot, so called from its impending position over a huge rocky chasm or recess, in the bosom of the mountain, known by the name of Hell's Hole. Out of this grim recess flows the pretty Northumbrian stream of College Water, which is here divided by only a narrow neck of ground from the sources of the river Beaumont. The Hanging Stone is surmounted by an ancient cairn; and, either from the shadowy remains of olden legends, or from the savage aspect of the scenery around it, is still regarded by the neighbouring peasantry with a certain degree of superstitious dread'.

The Hanging Stone below Cairn Hill, Cheviot. Photo A Curtis (2012).

The Hanging Stone, though, is some distance from the Hen Hole to which he refers, and perhaps he has the location confused with one of its closer and equally rocky neighbours (see below).

Hanging Stone below Cairn Hill, Cheviot. Photo by A Curtis (2012).

Hanging Stone from below. Photo by A Curtis (2012).

The Hanging Stone was used as a boundary marker between the East and Middle Marches, divisions of the Anglo-Scottish Border, often an area of dispute and lawlessness. The crag used to lie directly on the Border Line and is mentioned in several of the early surveys. It now lies well in English territory, some 150m to the south of the Border, the Pennine Way and the de facto Border defined by the modern fence.

The name is said to derive from the tale of a packman who was strangled when his pack of cloth slipped over the edge, tightening the rope around his neck. The same thing is said to have happened to a robber who was carrying off a stolen sheep, both man and sheep being hanged (The Denham Tracts: a collection of folklore, 1892)

Geologically, the rock is a hornfels, a metamorphic rock altered by the action of intrusive Cheviot granite on a sedimentary rock, especially shale.

James Logan Mack considered that the story regarding the naming of the outcrop was unlikely as it had been named since medieval times (as Hanging Shaw or Hanging Brae). Similar names from around the country usually arise from the nature of the outcrop, in this case, the central mass of fractured rock appearing to hang over the solid outcrop at the lower end.

Geoff Holland describes the Hanging Stone as 'a waterfall of grey stone' and one of his special places. 

Logan Mack in The Border Line (1926) illustrates (Fig.76) a very similar, although smaller, outcrop somewhere nearby which he dubs 'The False Hanging Stone'. He says of this,

"... the one which does not possess the title more readily resembles a Hanging Stone, than the one to which the appellation is usually given".

Logan Mack says his party was misled on their first visit by the actual Hanging Stone not being marked on the map he was using and by a misleading illustration in the frontispiece of a 'well-known work dealing with the Borders' (see below).

He doesn't provide an exact location for this feature, but one candidate was an outcrop south of Auchope Cairn. This is 700m further north and the possible location of the feature described by Pringle. I made a visit in July 2015, and comparison of my photo with that in Logan Mack's book shows it to be the same location, although with some changes over the intervening 90 years.

'The False Hanging Stone' in The Border Line by Logan Mack (1926).

'The False Hanging Stone'. Photo by A Curtis (2015).

Some catastrophic events over the 90 years since Logan Mack's visit show that movement of the rock at the 'False Hanging Stone' continues and is gradually reducing that feature to a pile of slabs.

'The Hanging Stone' (Frontispiece) in Howard Pease The Lord Wardens of the Marches of England & Scotland (1912). Almost certainly 'The False Hanging Stone' and probably the illustration referred to by Logan Mack.