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
Danes (Germanic tribe) fortified trade settlements, so called longphorts. During the Viking Age, they established many coastal towns including Dublin (Dyflin), Cork, Waterford (Veðrafjǫrðr) and Limerick (Hlymrekr) and Danish settlers followed. There were many small skirmishes and larger battles with the native Irish clans in the following two centuries, with the Danes sometimes siding with allied clans. In 1014 AD, at the Battle of Clontarf, the Vikings were eventually defeated and the remaining Danish settlers gradually assimilated with the Irish population. The first Vikings appeared in Frisia, now part of the Netherlands and Germany, in 800 AD, when Danes plundered coastal settlements and