that they had no corn. "Then what," said the Lord, "is in that sack in the middle of the field ?"  "Sack !" was the reply, "that is no sack but only a stone." At this the sacred countenance became severe and he loudly said, "Then stone shall it be."⁴ Whereupon the sack of corn immediately became petrified and has so remained ever since.
The resemblance to a sack of corn is not now traceable but in years gone by the likeness was unmistakeable⁵.
Many generations passed and still the stone sack stood in the middle of the field until a certain man who farmed High Fonaby, finding the rock an inconvenience in ploughing decided to remove it and accordingly dragged it down the hill, though it was almost immovable and required all his horses to shift it. Within a very short time every possible misfortune visited the farm and all the sacks of corn in the granary were turned to stone. The only remedy seemed to be to return the sack stone and so an old horse, long past active work, was harnessed to it and succeeded with no apparent effort in dragging it up the hill to its former position⁶.
During the Building of Pelham's Pillar, a work which was in progress from 1840-49, one of the masons employed cut a piece of stone from the venerable relic, intending to make a model of the Pillar from it for his fiancee, but very shortly afterwards he fell from the summit of the pillar and was killed⁷.

Notes and variants:
1. Other versions say St Paul or Paulinus.
2. Some accounts say "a man."
3. The field in which the stone stands is very near the junction of the old High Street with its eastern branch going to a point on the Barton Street, and with a third road running north-west to the villages along the western slope of the Wolds from Clixby to Barnetby. Even as late as the latter half of the eighteenth century this last road or track was used in preference to the low road from Caistor to Clixby.
4. "Stone shall it be" or "Stone be it," sounds like part of a mystery play and is akin to many sayings in the Apocryphal Gospels and Acts. The Fonaby story and that of Lot's wife may have a common primitive origin and it is most probable