A short thread on this evening’s visit to a rare sight in Surrey: a large standing stone, some 3-4m high.

But it’s not quite what it seems from this angle - and it's only been here just over 100 years.

Though, as we'll see, it’s not without prehistoric relevance…

Here’s the context - it’s the memorial to Henry Morton Stanley (d.1904) in Pirbright churchyard. So why does a man whose epitaph is simply ‘Africa’ have a monolith of Dartmoor granite on his grave in Surrey?

His wife Dorothy (an artist who studied at the Slade) explains it in Stanley’s (auto)biography... Perhaps Dartmoor was the place to look for something 'fashioned by the ages' because its archaeology was being investigated at the time by the Dartmoor Exploration Committee?

But what of the stone itself, which was discovered recumbent, forming part of a fence on the roadside? ( @dartmoorlander has put up this picture of it being prepared for transport) What was it doing there? Could it possibly once have been a standing stone…?

Dorothy's account makes some telling comparisons between the unknown history of Dartmoor and the bigger, darker wilderness of Stanley’s Africa. A fitting memorial to a modern chieftain, perhaps, but also an implied analogy between ancient Britons and contemporary Africans...?

So an interesting, predictably problematic intersection of colonial history and prehistoric archaeology, showing how the archaeological past could get entangled with imperial narratives... Doctor Standingstone, I presume?