In one legend associated with this former stack of rocks that apparently used to be one large boulder shaped like a sack, the seventh-century Roman missionary St Paulinus (or in some variants Jesus, making the legend a sort of reversal of the biblical loaves and fishes narrative) rides through this area and sees a farmer sowing corn. He asks whether he might have some for his ailing ass, but the farmer refuses, saying he has none. The rider inquires what is in his sack, and the farmer says it contains stone, at which point Paulinus utters a curse that turns it to stone and goes on his way. The farmer decides to use horses to move it, and struggles: it takes twenty-two of them to perform the task. Thereafter, he experiences misfortune, so he decides to move them back to where the bitter miracle occurred. He uses an old horse for the task, and the stone is easily returned to its original location.

A slight varition of the above, with photographs and further information, is on the Legends and Folklore website. Maureen James discusses the legend in Lincolnshire Folk Tales (2013), and Polly Howat provides a version in Ghosts and Legends of Lincolnshire and the Fen Country (1992).

In 1901, in the journal Folklore, the local folklorist Mabel Peacock collected two other variants of the tale. In one, a man who was sowing beans cursed when the wind blew the seeds from his sack, and it was turned to stone. In the other, Christ came riding through and asked a farmer for bread, and was given the farmer’s only loaf, upon which he ‘turned the stones lying near into sacks of barley’, one of which lies in the field now’. That version is rarely told, presumably because it makes no sense whatsoever as an explanation for the presence of rocks.

The stone broke in three in the 1910s, and was moved to its present location down the hill. The largest of the fragments is hard to find, and just off a public right of way on the edge of woodland. More visible (and impressive) is Pelham Pillar, a folly a mile to the east at Cabourne, which was completed in 1849. According to legend, a mason working on the Pillar chipped a flake of rock from the Sack Stone with the intention of incorporating it into the structure, and subsequently broke his neck.

Many legends from Lincolnshire, and elsewhere, concern stones that seem to have a will and force of their own – or of whoever or whatever put them there – and express that will by being difficult or easy to move. For example, the tallest stone at the Neolithic Rollright Stones stone circle in Oxfordshire was said to have taken twenty-four horses to drag down the hill, where it was used as a bridge, and to have killed two men in the process, but only to have taken two horses to return to its rightful place. Other allegedly hard- and easy-to-move stones with entries on this website include those found at Anwick (click the ‘stones & boulders’ hashtag to see them all).

Words by RORY WATERMAN