Folk Rite & Fertility · Rudston, East Riding of Yorkshire
Rudston Monolith
Britain's tallest megalith — over 25 feet of gritstone hauled ten miles and raised, most likely, as a late-Neolithic cult focus; the church was later planted beside it, folding the old fertility landscape into the new faith. Phallic readings are antiquarian tradition, flagged as such.
Sources
Nearby on the map
Stoker holidayed beneath the ruined abbey in 1890 and set his Count's landfall here — the black hound leaping ashore, Lucy sleepwalking to the churchyard bench for the novel's most transgressively erotic scenes. Whitby has embraced its gothic seduction ever since.
Fact & fictionHot spotQueer HeritageHoly Trinity Church, Goodramgate ('birthplace of lesbian marriage')York, North Yorkshire · EnglandWhere Anne Lister and Ann Walker took the sacrament together to seal their union — commemorated by a blue plaque as the site of Britain's first lesbian marriage.
Documented historyLiterary PassionRenishaw Hall (model for Wragby Hall)Renishaw, Derbyshire · EnglandThe Sitwells' Derbyshire seat is widely credited as the model for Wragby Hall in D.H. Lawrence's once-banned 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', the century's most notorious tale of a lady and her gamekeeper
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