Mare and Foal

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Mon, 07/10/2024 - 00:00

On a hilltop close by Hadrian’s wall at Caw Gap is the remains of ancient stone circle called the Mare and Foal Standing Stones. Remarkably, Hadrian’s legionaries would have inspected it much as we do, wondering at its age and purpose. When they appeared, it was already perhaps a couple of thousand years old; they would have been well within their rights to have designated it an ancient monument. Now, the new wall they built appears as ancient to us as those stones appeared to them.

An aside: I was amused to hear recently some young fool refer to the 1990s as ‘the late 1900s’. Technically, they are quite correct, but because I lived through them, the association of my youthful days with the period of Queen Victoria’s death, Hitler’s tyranny and the Cold War made me feel old. What for me was but a few years ago, was for him an historical era.

The stones are given their name for quite obvious reasons, though eighteenth century maps refer to a third, since fallen or removed to another place. In the event that the Lord Jesus delays His return for another few centuries (which is unlikely in my opinion), people will look back at our ‘modern times’ and think them wonderfully quaint and old fashioned. Only heaven, and the new heavens and earth cannot, and will not, date. There, we shall meet people who breathed at the time of those stones’ erection and the Wall’s completion, yet we shall all be the same age, as we gather around the throne of the Ancient of Days.