The Hunt for the Landywood Great Stones Part Three

In part two, we learnt that the Landywood Great Stones had been buried beneath Weston Drive, on the Streets Lane estate. There should have been nothing to see up there, but was this strictly true?

Landywood Great Stones: Intriguing Rocky Outcrop in Streets Lane

Weston Drive exists as a horseshoe shaped road, linked at either end by the long Streets Lane. It is on the Cheslyn Hay side of the railway track, but part of the Great Wyrley parish. This is a kind of No-Man's-Land, where all rates, bills and voting render the estate part of Wyrley, but the address states Cheslyn Hay. Just to confuse matters further, the roadsign welcoming visitors to Cheslyn Hay is half a mile up the road.

Until the dawn of the 1980s, this area was given over to coal-mining. A map from 1888 shows it strewn with shafts. It was infamously one of the sites of the Great Wyrley Outrages of 1903, when a pit pony was found slashed, roughly where Chillington Close meets Streets Lane. It is also at this point that an unusual feature can be found today - a scattered pile of large rocks.

Mining debris or more survivors from the Landywood Great Stones?

Local residents say that they've been there for at least as long as the housing estate. They are bigger than they look, as they are partially buried in the ground and covered in the fallen leaves of autumn. These stones are scattered now, but they used to be piled more completely on top of each other. Twenty years ago, children used to climb all over them, so it can only be assumed that the health and safety conscious last decade saw them separated into their present position.

Nobody I spoke with seems to know what they are. Though they are positioned at the head of a ditch, they don't appear to be anything to do with drainage. But if they are more survivors of the Landywood Great Stones, then those were much smaller than has been mooted.

For the moment, a question mark hangs over them, while I do a bit more research.


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Coming up in part four: An historical photograph of the Great Stones emerges.