cultivation of wilderness. Instead they settled and farmed the most agriculturally productive areas of the island: Orkney, eastern Scotland, Anglesey, the upper Thames, Wessex, Essex, Yorkshire and the river valleys of The Wash. Late Neolithic Britons also appeared to have changed their religious beliefs, ceasing to construct the large chambered tombs that archeologists widely think were connected with ancestor veneration. Instead, they began the construction of large wooden or stone circles, with many hundreds being built across Britain and Ireland over a period of a thousand years. Construction The Rollright Stones are three separate megalithic monuments, constructed close to one another during the later prehistoric ages of the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Their current names – the King's Men, the King Stone, and the Whispering Knights – descend from folklore that has surrounded the site since the Early Modern period. These local terms have since been adopted by archaeologists and heritage managers. Fragments of stone used in the construction of the monument underwent a petrological examination at the British Museum in London, where it was established that they were a form of oolithic limestone that was local to the area around the Rollrights. Archaeologist George Lambrick argued that the stones had been discovered by prehistoric peoples as naturally occurring surface boulders, rather than having been quarried. He noted they had certain weathering patterns which were consistent with those found on surface boulders. He said that the most likely place that such surface boulders would have been found in the late prehistoric was "on the sides of the ridge at or near the level of the strong spring line between the Inferior Oolithic and the Lias clay." If this had been the place where the megalith builders had found the boulders, the huge stones would have had to be transported up hill. The gradient averages about 1 in 15 on the shortest routes, for either 250 metres (for the Whispering Knights), or 450 metres (for the King Stone and King's Men). Basing his ideas upon experimental archaeological investigations performed at Stonehenge, Lambrick suggested that the prehistoric workers who hauled the stones uphill would have made use of wooden sledges. They may have used timber rollers beneath the sledges, in order to reduce the manpower needed to drag the sledge. Lambrick calculated the estimated work force and labour that would have been required to produce the Rollright Stone monuments. In comparison to