Here is a prominent object in the landscape, which attracts the eye of the tourist between the Bramcote Hills. It has an eccentric form, rude, rocky, and picturesque; and affording evidence of one of the pleasant freaks of Nature or of time, and thrusting itself upon our notice much as does a man with giantude of height and limb, when he worms along before us in the streets. There is nothing about him very beautiful or interesting, but you look at him in spite of yourself. So with this Hemlock Stone, which is a mass of rock rising upward from the soil to an eminence of thirty feet (as tall as any three giants, to say the most of them), and growing at the summit its one solitary sprig of foliage, the single friend of its bleak and bare bosom, and, as it would appear, not over green in its affections. The cold weather beating of a few more winters, will doubtless wear away and alter the features both of rock and shrub. The material of the Hemlock Stone is of the same material as that of the adjoining hills, and Doctor Stukeley’s opinion is, that it is the remnant of a quarry, the stone of which has been dug or cut from around it. If the doctor is right, our previous interesting conception about time or nature is very handsomely overturned; but it is still not the less a feature of remark in the landscape, in which it preserves its singularity.
The Illustrated London News, London, England, Week Ending August 13, 1842
