I’d seen the name when I’d planned the route… though ‘planned’ may be stretching things a bit far; I had a vague idea and my companion had a map. From Kilpeck to Rhyader, somewhere near which we would find our hotel, there are perfectly good ‘A’ roads and the fifty mile trip should take no more than about an hour. But with a ‘B’ road that passes through something called Golden Valley, and through villages with names like Kingstone and Dorstone before leading you up a track called Arthur’s Stone Lane… well, the ‘A’ roads were never really an option. Especially when I’d seen ‘King Arthur’s Stone’ marked in telltale brown on the map.

Not that we had any idea what King Arthur’s Stone might be. “Probably just an erratic,” and if so, we would probably miss it. Such things are seldom signposted and one odd boulder in a field has little to distinguish it from any other boulder unless you get up close. “It could be miles from the road.” Given the amount of rain we’d had, neither of us fancied getting muddied up to the eyeballs for an erratic… a random stone dumped on the landscape by a long ago glacier. It was probably a wild goose chase… and I was loath to give my companion another reason to expound upon the wandering stones theory.

But we were in luck. A sharp and unexpected turn led us up a narrow lane, following the signs for King Arthur’s Stone, before an even sharper turn onto a broken track, barely wide enough for the car’s wheelbase. A track, moreover, that seemed intent on getting narrower and leading us into the middle of nowhere… which was fine. It is where we generally end up after all. The road surface started to disappear too, but, just when we were convinced we must have missed whatever-it-was… we saw it. Right next to the track and unmissable for all sorts of reasons…

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