We had chosen to take a very long route home for one simple reason… there was something we wanted to see that was never going to be on our way to anywhere. So the possible three hour journey took us over ten, and all to see a stone… a single standing stone… but a stone unlike any other in the country: the Rudston Monolith.

It stands in the churchyard of All Saints, Rudston, in the East Riding of Yorkshire and is the tallest megalith in the United Kingdom. It is nearly twenty-six feet tall, and was, until the ground of the churchyard was levelled in 1861, five feet taller, with at least another fifteen feet of stone below ground… and possibly more. William Stukely, who excavated the site, finding many skulls found that there was as much of the stone buried as now stands above ground.

The stone is around…