|
Hidden East Anglia: Landscape Legends of Norfolk & Suffolk
|
||
|
|
The plague stone
A square, hollowed-out stone in St. Mary's churchyard (TM039752) is said in one tradition to be an ancient font, but the main legend is that it's a 'plague stone', where money was washed during a time of plague, possibly by the lepers themselves. (See also Bury St. Edmunds, Stuston, Feltwell and Thetford).
The Four Hills
Eastlow Hill (TL900617), a scheduled ancient monument, is the only survivor of the Four Hills, a line of Roman burial mounds that stood at the edge of Rougham parish. Three other mounds, long vanished, used to stand in a line to the south-west. They were a group of conical tumuli from the 2nd or 3rd century AD, standing beside Eastlowhill Road, an extension of Peddar's Way. The surviving mound was excavated in the 1840s, revealing the skeleton of a man in a lead coffin, in a brick lined burial chamber. The Four Hills were almost certainly the burial place of the family who lived in a nearby villa, discovered at about the same time - but the tradition is that the mounds mark the graves of those slain in battle.
Source: 'The East Anglian Miscellany' (1909-10), Note 2758.
"There is also a fable of an underground passage between Eastlow Hill barrow and Bury St. Edmunds, as I was informed by someone living opposite Eastlow Hill".
Source: L. V. Grinsell: 'The Ancient Burial-Mounds of England' (Methuen, 1936), pp.52-3. |
|