included a woodcut of the Lower White Horse Stone in his book on the nearby town of Maidstone. In the mid-1840s, the antiquarian Beale Post discussed the White Horse Stone among other antiquities in the local area in an unpublished manuscript. He provided four possible explanations of the name's derivation: that after the Battle of Aylesford, the White Horse banner of the Saxons fell upon the stone; that when the sun hits in a certain direction it casts a shadow which looks like a horse; that the Iron Age druids sacrificed a white horse on it; and that someone riding a white horse was killed near it. In that same manuscript, Post provided a sketch of the Lower White Horse Stone. In his 1924 publication dealing with Kent, the archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford, then working as the archaeological officer for the Ordnance Survey, listed the Upper White Horse Stone alongside the other Medway Megaliths. William Coles Finch then discussed the site in his 1927 work, In Kentish Pilgrimland, its Ancient Roads and Shrines, including a photograph of it; at this point it was in the open air rather than being found in a patch of woodland. In 1970, the archaeologist R. F. Jessup published an account of the stone alongside another photo, indicating that by this time trees had grown up around it. The folklorists Fran and Geoff Doel suggested that the White Horse Stone might have been the feature referred to as a "Druid Stone" in a nineteenth-century account of a ghost dog. This account was produced by a vicar who stated that while he and a friend were returning to Burham from a visit to Boxley Church, they found themselves being pursued by "a lean grey dog with upstanding ears[… which] appeared as big as a calf." The vicar related that the creature then pursued them to the "Druid Stone". Modern Paganism The White Horse Stone has come to be seen as a sacred site by folkish Heathens that place a focus on an essentialist understanding of race. One folkish Heathen group, the Odinic Rite, was founded in 1973; its co-founder John Yeowell adopted the White Horse Stone as "the birth place of England" and held a blót ceremony there to "reclaim and make holy" the megalith. The group emphasise the idea of English ancestry at the site, regarding it as "the symbolic birthplace of the English