Blowing Stone Hill, where 19th-century antiquarians thought King Alfred the Great's Saxon troops had camped, and that this was how Alfred summoned them for the Battle of Ashdown against the Danes in AD 871. Thomas Hughes' novel "Tom Brown's School Days" refers to it as the "Blawing Stwun" and calls the village "Kingstone Lisle". It is also one of the "sacred stones" mentioned in William Horwood's "Duncton Wood", the first book in his fantasy fiction series about a group of moles. Blowing Stone The Blowing Stone is a perforated sarsen at in Kingston Lisle, Oxfordshire (Berkshire until 1974). The stone is in
Battle of the Abas battle is noteworthy for Pompey's concealment of his infantry behind a screen of cavalry, which would twenty years later be used against him at the Battle of Pharsalus. The near perfect double envelopment Pompey is reported to have here achieved also serves to showcase the high quality of his generalship during the Eastern campaigns. Having defeated Mithridates and Tigranes of Armenia, Pompey then turned to neutralising Mithridates' remaining allies to the north, in Caucasian Albania and Iberia. In December 66 BC, the Albanian king, Oroeses had pre-emptively attacked the Roman forces but been defeated and then forced to submit. In