Chanctonbury Ring
From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project
Chanctonbury Ring is a small Iron Age hill-fort, whose chalk slopes were once bare, is locally famous for the ring of beech trees that crown the hill, which were planted in 1760 by Charles Goring, although the October hurricane of 1987 greatly decimated the trees. Neolithic flintwork has been excavated from this site, along with some Bronze Age pottery, and archaeological finds have dated the building of the ditch & rampart hill-fort to the early Iron Age, between the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Some believe that the Iron Age camp on this hill was unlikely to have been for military use due to the discovery of a lone votive pit & little else in the way of Iron Age material, notably no post-holes or evidence of wooden defences have been found. The later use of the hill for ritual purposes by the Romans is considered by some to indicate that this site was used for ritual rather than defensive uses.
Within the ring are Roman buildings, which lay just a few inches beneath the soil, and these are similar in design to the temples at Lancing Ring; they are thought to have been in use between the 1st to the 4th centuries AD. The temple faces to the east, which interestingly is the direction of one of the two entrances to the Iron Age hill-fort, and this has suggested to some that the temple was dedicated to Apollo as the rising Sun. Of the buildings about the temple, the most interesting is one to the south-west, which has the same construction as the temple but is of a polyagonal design with a mosaic floored rectangular entrance chamber pointing to the east; this building is thought to be of Romano British origin.
Like its neighbour, Cissbury Ring, Chanctonbury has plenty of folklore attached to it. Like Cissbury it was said to have been formed of a clod of earth that flew off the Devil's shovel when he was digging Devil's Dyke. Arthur Beckett in his book Spirit of the Downs says "if on a moonless night you walk seven times round the ring without stopping, the Devil will come out of the wood and offer you a bowl of soup", other versions state that this must be a widdershins action. If it is circled only three times a Lady on a white horse will appear. This type of Devil summoning through circumambulation recalls the practice of circling an object so as to summon its attendant spirit, and also the use of circling to open an entrance to the Otherworld, through which we might meet the Fair Folk, Devils, and so forth. Some folklorists have suggested the bowl of soup, or sometimes milk, is a remembrance of an old Celtic Cauldron buried in the hill, whereas others have suggested it might be a folk memory of an initiation ritual at what some consider to be a temple of Mithras.
The Ring has its fair share of fairies, which as on other similar sites can be seen dancing at Midsummer. It also has its fair share of witches, and a tree-trunk altar surrounded by flints placed in the shape of a pentagram was found here in March 1979, between each point were pieces of parchment with black candle-wax, and about the whole was a 9 foot circle demarked in flint pieces; a similar altar was found at the nearby Devil's Dyke. Doreen Valiente mentions Chanctonbury a few times in her published works, specifically as a place where a pre-modern coven once met, which was led by a woman and worshipped an earth mother & sky father, but without the modern paraphernalia. Aleister Crowley declared the Ring a place of power, as did his disciple Victor Neuberg (who lived in Steyning), who wrote a few poems about the Ring, one about a youth being sacrificed there by Druids.
Various Gods have been associated with Chanctonbury Ring, amongst them are Mithras, Venus, Diana, Flora, and Jupiter. In more recent times it has been associated with whispers of animal sacrifice, black magic, and so forth, although such seems more likely to be the result of teenagers engaging in high-jinks than any serious witchcraft practice.
