Mystery

This is the 'Hawk Stone', a few km SE of Chipping Norton, high on a south-facing slope, with lovely views towards the river Evenlode. A great spot for a neolithic ceremony. Maybe it looks like a hawk - we saw lots of shapes and faces in it, but not a hawk. Or maybe it's a corruption of 'hoar stone' - like the one in Birmingham called the 'Warstone'. All the web sites agree that 'hoar' just means ancient. Actually, it means a bit more than that; it means something old and venerable, especially with white hair or beard. That's why there is such a thing as a 'hoar frost', that puts a white beard on everything. Does the stone catch the wind on snowy or frosty mornings? 

Standing stones are almost always associated with very little reliable knowledge about what they were really for, and lots of local lore about their significance. This one, being soft, local limestone is highly eroded, pock-marked, channeled and grooved. A smooth indentation near the top (above head-height, on the other side) is said to be down to people's hands touching it for luck. A deeper cleft in the top is reputed to have been worn by the chains of witches, tethered there for burning (unlikely - very few such executions happened in Oxfordshire - but who knows if there might have been fire ceremonies) 

The stone now stands in a field margin that has been seeded with a wildflower mix - targeted at pollinators, I think - hence the profusion of flowers. The pretty pink flower is sainfoin (Onobrychis vicifolia), a rich source of nectar, and perennial for several years, so a good choice. Sainfoin is also grown as a crop - cut for hay or silage. The name is old French for 'healthy hay'. Its attributes make it sound like the perfect choice for a livestock farmer: a deep-rooted, nitrogen-fixing legume that needs little fertilizer and leaves fertile soil for subsequent crops; it contains substances that help control intestinal worms; it contains tannins that bind to the proteins in which the plant is rich, protecting them from breakdown in the rumen before they are digested in the lower gut; the tannins also protect livestock from the potentially fatal condition of 'bloat' and reduce the quantity of greenhouse gas produced by the animals; it is highly drought tolerant and loves alkali soils like those of N Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds

The old French obviously knew what they were talking about. What puzzles me is why this is only the second or third time I have ever seen it in a field