The Sow and Piglets

I had a chat with Malcolm’s father a couple of days ago, and he told me a few of the old local stories about the circle of standing stones on the Hunker Downs, beyond Burnt Oak Farm.  His grandfather, who told him the tales, always called them The Sow and Piglets.

Mr Mason’s version of the main story goes something like this:
There were rival families in the long abandoned hamlets of Acham and Ockton,  the matriarch of each being known to be Wise Women.
Each of the  two families kept a sow, but only the hamlet of Ockton had an orchard. The Ockton people believed that the Acham family used to sneak their sow into the orchard at apple time each year to  forage for fallen apples. As no-one ever saw or heard them there, this was clearly done by witchcraft and was the source of much suspicion.
Then one year both sows farrowed and each had a large litter, so the youngest child of each family used to walk the pigs up onto the downs to scavenge for roots and berries.
On the fateful day both children brought their animals to the same part of the downs, and the piglets all mixed in together. The child from Acham ran home shouting that the rival family was stealing their piglets. The other child ran to his home with the same tale
When the Wise Woman from Ockton arrived she found her rival standing in the middle of a seething mass of pigs – obviously intending to take both lots of animals away.
Screaming a curse, she threw herself into the melée, and the pigs immediately started to run in circles around the two women.  They ran so fast that the older, fatter sow dropped down dead. Both women were then shouting curses, and the remaining sow and pigs ran ever faster, until after a final curse from the Wise Woman of Ockton, the animals stopped running – all turned to stone!
If you go and look closely you will see that there is a grassy hump in the middle of the circle – that is where the dead sow fell. Of the stones, well the big one is obviously the remaining sow, and the smaller ones that make up the circle are the piglets.
If you look carefully, they say, you can see the difference betwen the piglets from one litter and those from the other.

Malcolm’s father has promised to take me up there one day, and show me how to tell which is which.