เครื่องรางหินรู (แฮกสโตน)HagstoneGlain Neidr

The oldest account is Roman and second-hand. In Natural History book XXIX, Pliny the Elder reports what the Druids of the Gallic provinces told about the anguinum: snakes twist together in summer, the slime and foam they secrete hardens into an egg, and their hissing throws it into the air, where a man must catch it in a cloak before it touches the ground and then flee on horseback until a river is between him and the snakes. They said it could be tested by setting it in gold and seeing whether it floats upstream. Pliny says he has seen one — round, about the size of a moderate apple, its shell cartilaginous, covered in cup-like marks. He also says what it was carried for, and how that ended: "The possession of it is marvellously vaunted as ensuring success in law-suits, and a favourable reception with princes", and a Roman of equestrian rank from the territory of the Vocontii was put to death by Tiberius for having one in his bosom during a trial.

The English record is about sleep. English folklore collectors record the same use of a holed stone hung over a person or a horse against nightmares, attested from at least the fifteenth century. Reginald Scot printed the cure in The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584: hang over the bed "a stone, which stone hath naturallie such a hole in it, as wherein a string may be put through it, and so be hanged over the diseased or bewitched partie; be it man, woman, or horsse." Thomas Blundeville had already written it into a 1565 book on horsemanship, citing an older English writer, with a verse to be written on paper and hung up with the stone.

The practice did not stop. Edward Lovett, collecting folklore in Surrey and Sussex, reported in 1928 that the favourite objects for warding off nightmares were horseshoes and natural perforated stones, common on the beach at Brighton, and that the stones were usually on a loop of red ribbon or string, "or are occasionally simply hooked on to one of the knobs of the bedstead." A woman in Essex told researchers in 1984: "I still keep stones with holes in them on my window-sill for luck. I used to pick them up as a child from the beach in South Shields, and all my family still pick them up--because we think they're lucky."

The same stone does other work elsewhere. In Welsh folklore the Glain Neidr are made by a congress of snakes in spring, most auspiciously on May Eve. In Russian folklore the holed stones housed spirits called Kurinyi Bog, the chicken gods, who guarded hens and were set in farmyards against the Kikimora.

Found, not made. Picked off a beach or out of a ploughed field, strung on string or red ribbon, and hung: over a bed, over a horse, on a door, on a windowsill. Several sources say the stone works best used together with a spoken or written charm about Saint George. Nothing is done to charge it and nothing is recorded about retiring it; a hagstone is kept.

Still picked up and kept, and sold online and in shops that sell crystals and folk charms. The Hastings legend attached to it is live enough to name: the town is said to be under Crowley's Curse, which compels anyone who has lived there to return, and which can only be broken by taking a stone with a hole through it from Hastings beach.