At first glance it looked like nothing more than a rugged boulder jumbled among many others on the floor of a valley in the West Country.
But a smooth, glossy dip in the stone indicated that it was something very special – a vanishingly rare “polissoir”, or polishing stone, used 5,000 years ago by Neolithic people to hone tools such as axes.
Discovered in the Valley of Stones national nature reserve in Dorset, it is only the second polissoir found “earthfast” – stuck firmly into the earth in its original position – in England.
The polissoir was found by chance as volunteers cleared scrub to expose sarsen stones that had been hidden by vegetation over the decades.
Anne Teather and Jim Rylatt, directors of Past Participate CIC a non-profit company that helps people find out more about local heritage, were working in another part of the valley when they decided to stroll over to see how they were getting on.
Rylatt got there first and saw the boulder. “It’s a relatively unprepossessing boulder on one side,” he said. But then he flicked away some leaves and found the shiny, polished area. “It’s safe to say I was surprised. The only other one found in situ in England was found in the 1960s at Fyfield Down [in Wiltshire].”
Rylatt said he enjoyed thinking of the work that had gone on there so long ago. “There are more imposing stones here but this one ticked the boxes for them. They must have spent many hundreds, thousands of hours polishing here.”
It may be that this was a work area rather than a living one. “There may have been people doing other things here, processing animal skins perhaps, cutting up meat to make dinner.”
Teather said the polissoir was close to an ancient routeway. “You can imagine people coming to the stone to polish axes. This was not necessarily a place of settlement but a place people came to and moved through.”
She had been joking that if anyone found a polissoir she would buy them a bottle of whisky. “I maintain that Jim got to the spot because he has longer legs than me.” She has bought him a Scottish single malt to celebrate the find.
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Stone axes were used by the early farming people of the Neolithic to clear woodland and build houses and monuments. The axes were made of various raw materials such as flint, volcanic tuff and granite.
There is evidence that many stone axes were moved around widely in prehistoric times, possibly traded as part of exchange systems or carried by their owners from distant sources where the stone was quarried.
After the discovery of the polissoir, the area around the stone has been subject to excavation and specialist analysis to see if any traces of the makers of the stone axes are still present.
Sasha Chapman, inspector of ancient monuments at Historic England, said: “This is a hugely exciting and rare discovery in this little understood historic landscape, which is giving us an opportunity to explore the use of the stone, and the communities who were using it.”
Polissoirs can be earthfast or portable with many found in France – hence the name.
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