Posted on 8th October 2014

I’ve never heard of a philanthropist who wasn’t at least a little bit eccentric. William Danby was very eccentric. In the nineteenth century he exhibited one of the earliest examples of job creation when he paid unemployed people in the Ilton area a shilling a day to build miniature versions of well known monuments in the heart of a forest which stood on his land, most famously, a replica of Stonehenge which still stands today, 143 miles into the route of my journey.

Some have even claimed that Danby went much further in his eccentricity and offered food and an annuity to anyone who could live as a hermit in his tiny henge for seven long years! Apparently many did try and one of them even kept at it for a number of years before he ran off into the woods, screaming.