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 that utilised here by Pompey to conceal a force of infantry behind a screen of cavalry would later be used against him by Julius Caesar at the Battle of Pharsalus, at which Pompey would be defeated. Battle of the Abas The Battle of the Abas was fought in 65 BC between the forces of the Roman Republic under Pompey Magnus and those of the Albanian King Oroeses during the course of the Third Mithridatic War. The battle took place on a flat plain by the River Abas (likely the modern Alazani), after the Roman forces had only recently crossed over