The Rudston Monolith
OS grid reference:- TA 097 677
The Rudston Monolith is the tallest standing stone in Britain, measures over 7.6 metres (25 feet) high, nearly 2 metres wide, a metre thick, and an estimated weight of around 40 tons. The megalith is situated in the churchyard in the village of Rudston in East Yorkshire.
The nearest source of Moor Grit Conglomerate stone of the type the standing stone is composed of is found at Cayton Bay about 10 miles to the north or the Cleveland Hills. The stone was erected in the late Neolithic or Bronze Age.
A smaller stone, of the same type, also stands in the churchyard, it is said to have been once situated near the large stone. There is also the remains of a double cist that was removed from a nearby barrow on Rudston Beacon by the antiquarian Canon Greenwell in the late nineteenth century.
The Norman church of All Saints was almost certainly intentionally built on a site which was already considered sacred. The name of Rudston is thought to derive from the Anglo-Saxon "Rood-stane", meaning "cross-stone", implying that a stone already venerated was adapted for Christian purposes.
In 1861 during levelling of the churchyard some 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) of the monolith was buried beneath ground. Sir William Strickland is reported to have conducted an experiment in the late eighteenth century determining that there was as much of the stone below ground as is visible above. He found many skulls during his dig and suggested they might have been sacrificial.
The fossilised dinosaur footprints on one side of the stone may have contributed to its importance to those who erected it. The flat face of the stone faces the midwinter sunrise in the south-east.
Prehistoric and Roman Sites of Yorkshire