Covid -19 Stone

This is an unusual, particularly personal news article for the Soulton website, about our relationship with our landscape and community as a family and aspects of the challenges of 2020 which we have all shared to different extents. 

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A new standing stone has been added to the Soutlon Landscape. 

The stone is on the axis of the setting sun on Midwinter's day, which brings sunlight into the second chamber of the new barrow at the end of the shortest day every year. 

The purpose of the stone, and the event arranged to inaugurate it, is to acknowledge the challenges we have all been through in 2020.

But most especially, the purpose of the stone is to put an arm of support and friendship around those families which suffered the most immediate and personal losses during this period, and yet were not able to arrange the rituals they might otherwise have wanted to plan and from which they would ordinarily have expected to draw comfort, and who were then, for public health reasons, required to be physically distanced from their friends and families at a time of national and global uncertainty combined with personal anguish.

An example of the strain this represented for those families is movingly set out in this BBC Breakfast video. 

Representatives of the families that have suffered loss during this time of challenge, along with diverse faiths from the Shropshire inter-faith group, local office holders, the masons who have been building the monument here, and the family that farms at Soulton came together to inaugurate the stone.

The videos within this article give a number of perspectives on the event and what it meant to the people who were participating. They also provide some moving accounts of what has been happening in families and in the ministry of faith leaders and celebrants, largely unreported and unrecorded.

We hope this is a gentle focus locally, for all that our culture and community has been through, and a tribute to those individuals and families that have in particular have had to experience loss under these unique circumstances, as well as a memorial to the individuals we are mourning and missing, and lastly a witness of the burden that has fallen on so many to respond under pressure, and in danger. 

Establishing this stone was a natural thing to do in part of the Soulton landscape, which has developed a monumental character north of Soulton Hall over the last five years in which other standing stones have been added and only the second long barrow in 5,500 years has been built.  

As far as we are aware the Covid-19 stone here is the first monument that has been established in the UK. 

Representatives for humanism, and nine faiths participated in the event.

Ceremony

The ceremony was simple and in the open fields.  A video of it may be found below. 

Legacy

Standing stones might, we like to think, be part of the way other communities decide to support others and mark what has happened. We would be very pleased to see it happen in other places, and we are aware that office holders in two other counties are considering doing this.