that required for many other monuments, he concluded that the time and labour investment would have been "trivial", and would not have stretched local resources in terms of manpower. The Whispering Knights Believed to be the earliest of the Rollright Stones, the Whispering Knights are the remains of the burial chamber of an Early or Middle Neolithic portal dolmen, lying 400 metres east of the King's Men. Four standing stones survive, forming a chamber about two square metres in area around a fifth recumbent stone, probably the collapsed roof capstone. Although archaeologists and antiquarians had been speculating and debating the nature of the Whispering Knights for centuries, more about the monument was revealed only following the excavations carried out around the stones by George Lambrick and his team during the 1980s. They found that the portal dolmen had never been a part of a longer cairn, as had been suggested by some earlier investigators. In addition, they uncovered a few pieces of Neolithic pottery around the monument. Writing in 1743, the antiquarian William Stukeley described the Whispering Knights as sitting upon a round barrow, something which Lambrick accepted as being "reasonable in the context of a portal dolmen". But, he cautioned against accepting such an explanation too readily. He suggested that a "mound-like effect" could have been created at the base of the monument if ploughing in later centuries had led to the accumulation of soil around the dolmen's uphill side and the removal of it on the downhill side. Excavation failed to provide evidence to prove either suggestion, leaving the issue "ambiguous". Lambrick noted there was a possibility that some of the stratigraphic layers "may represent the base of some sort of cairn" around the Whispering Knights. Lambrick believed that raising the capstone on the Whispering Knights would have been the hardest task of the Rollrights' construction. He said it was "analogous" to the raising of the lintels on Stonehenge. He suggested that the builders had constructed a ramp out of "collected stones", which was "placed against the back of the chamber". The capstone was then "hauled up on rollers, probably running on logs embedded longitudinally in the ramp", in order to get it into position. The King's Men The King's Men is a stone circle in diameter, currently composed of seventy-seven closely spaced stones. It was constructed during the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. After undertaking limited