ENGLAND — Jennifer Alexander, a professor of architectural history at Warwick University, rejected mystical interpretations of daisy wheel carvings on historic English buildings in 2025. Alexander stated, "There's absolutely no evidence they were ever used like that." She asserted that these carvings are marks created by stonemasons.

Alexander explained that the daisy wheel pattern is a fundamental exercise. "Do you remember at school when you were first given a pair of compasses and you made a daisy wheel? It's that," she said. She noted the existence of hundreds of these marks, stating, "There are hundreds of such marks and they tend to be [of] varying degrees of skill." Alexander suggested they were likely used to train apprentices, saying, "It's much more the sort of thing you'd use to train apprentices with, giving them skills in using tools on intractable surfaces like stone."

Alexander described daisy wheels as practices for drawing on stone and for learning geometry using compasses and straight edges. She indicated that anything resembling a design on a stone building is now often mistakenly identified as these types of marks, stating, "Anything on a stone building that looks like a design gets picked up as these damn things now."

Symbols previously identified as witches' marks have been located on the stonework of a 14th-century barn at Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire. Alexander stated that these markings suggest the barn functioned either as a schoolroom or a mason's training shop when it was not being used for farm produce. She also said that marks resembling a capital W or an M are mason ciphers.

Why It Matters

Jennifer Alexander's book, "Stonemasons’ Marks," published by Routledge, presents this perspective ahead of the International Medieval Congress in Leeds. The work redirects focus from supernatural explanations to practical construction and apprenticeship practices.