The Story of the Stone Balls

When I was about 13 or 14 years old, a friend told me about the stone ball. It was about 50m away from my parents' garden in a small gully that drained the gardens and ran into a stream. His grandfather told him about the ball. Of course I wasn't too interested in it, just a little rounded top peeking out, especially when it was dry and no water was flowing through the glen.

Well, I mentioned it to a neighbor who was one of the early pioneers of cottage farming in the village. And cottage gardening includes a rock garden. As you can guess, the ball ended up in his rock garden. I was quite upset about that. I thought it was a betrayal at the time. If I'd known, I wouldn't have revealed its existence. As I later found out, about ¼ of the ball was broken off, missing. We have a high wooded hill in the village where the castle used to stand. So it was suggested that there might be more stone balls like this in the area. I've been wanting to find one for years. The castle was conquered, destroyed and all the stonework was dismantled and taken away. All that's left of the castle are the rough terrain and a deep moat. The castle was shelled from a siege camp 500 metres away. (distance measured on maps.cz) The fired stone ball landed on the edge of the break of the hill behind the castle and from there it rolled down the steep hillside to the foot of the hill about another 100m, measured as the crow flies. It therefore travelled at least 600 m from the point of impact. You will read later how much such a ball weighs.

The slingshot, the trebuchet, couldn't have been a rattle. About nine years ago it was considered to completely cut down the trees on the hill where the castle stood. As boys we often went there to play Indians or guerrillas, and I know it as well as few. So I took my camera and went up there to take a picture as a souvenir. I walked the whole hill and took dozens of pictures. Each one reminded me of a piece of my carefree childhood. On the way back, I crossed a sluice on a creek that runs along the bottom of the hill. With my peripheral vision, I saw something that didn't belong down below the sluice, almost behind me. I turned around and thought, what if? So I stepped off the bank into the water, my confidence growing the closer I got. Those were feelings I'll never forget. After brushing away the green moss, I saw the indentations left by the tools that had been used to work the sphere into an almost perfect shape.

Originally, this found sphere was part of a creek bank. As the stream flowed through the sluice, a counter-current formed underneath it from the edge of the sluice, slowly scouring the bank until it broke free and rolled into the water. My son and I took a wheelbarrow and went to retrieve the ball within an hour of its discovery. I used the pressure washer to rinse off the moss and debris. The ball came out clean as a freshly chiseled rock. I just had a strange feeling when I washed it, wondering if it had hit someone on its journey. The found photo was, including the trees on the hill, and when my computer crashed, I lost all the photos. She's got a spot in the flower bed under the balcony at the house so it doesn't rain on her. I enjoy the sight of it whenever I pass by. I have only just considered it now, to complete the parameters on the LP. The one I found weighs 85 kg and measures 145 cm in circumference. It's not a perfect shape, but it's close. Another one of my friends, after seeing it, also wished very much to find one like it. About three years ago he got one too. And also on the bank of that creek, 525 yards from the tee.

It took a slightly different direction after the shot and ended up to the right of the castle. In the fall, we attended a lecture together, where a museum staff member talked about the extinct castles in the area. It wasn't until his lecture that we first heard about the shelling of the castle from the siege camp. Later, in a book from the castle museum, I also read about the use of slingshots from this camp. Until then, I don't know that it was published anywhere. Well, I knew it for almost fifty years. Impressed by the lecture, he offered it to a museum worker to take away. Because of my good experience with the staff of the Hradec Museum, I am thinking about it too. But I still want to enjoy it for a while. We'll work it out somehow. Three weeks after the ball was removed from the creek in 2011, heavy equipment moved into the sluice area to remove the banks. Workers from the contractor then used granite to reinforce the banks. They did a nice job, but the ball would have 100% ended up in a landfill somewhere.

Mildes