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Longstone standing stone

Dartmoor, 2024 Ten feet of mildly phallic menhir that guards, or points the way, to the north-western Dartmoor monuments, sometimes called the Shoveldown complex. And some even bigger knob has graffitied it. 

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Stone row

Dartmoor, 2024 This is a local speciality, and there are dozens of them on Dartmoor, Parade grounds for somebody, at some point. Possibly connected several of these monuments together. Also used by local cattle as scratching posts. Also used to make terrible ‘Stone Row-ses’ jokes to distract us when our feet hurt and we’d run out of Fanta. There were probably many more, they have been broken up or sunk into the peat. They don’t appear to be lined up astronomically, and most are associated with a cairn or burial. Why? You tell me. 

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Scorhill stone circle

Dartmoor, 2024

Busy setting, near a burbling river and, has a chaotic, familial feel, situated squarely on a natural pathway (it’s a notable feature of stone circles that they often seem to be on the way to somewhere, rather than a destination in themselves). The flatter, softer, topographic megaliths of most Dartmoor circles are here mostly jagged teeth. There were once many more stones. What it is now was is not what it was in the Bronze Age. What was it then? I don’t know. 

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Sittaford stone circle

Dartmoor, 2024

Not far from the Greywethers, this circle was only discovered in 2007. This seems ridiculous. How could you miss one, even recumbent? When you get here, and see the endless sweeps of moorland and the thick grass, ferns and heather that blanket the peat for miles in all directions, you realise why. Apparently found after a moorland fire, this is now recognised as the highest stone circle in southern England, You could lose a lot of things here. It may have been here for 4000 years, but we only find it because of Google Maps, where someone has handily dropped a pin. A single, leaning stone ponts the way: at the moment, we are on sodden, marshy, miserable ground, you literally leap from stone to stone with pools in between. In some settings, the stone has sunk into the ground, leaving an odd, grave-like hole. The stones you can see are grand, flat orthostats, quite similar to the GreyWethers.  It was once something very beautiful, and sited spectacularly, now it is asleep and quiescent. Ozymandias time. The rolling moor stretches far away. 

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GreyWethers double stone circle Dartmoor, 2024

To the west of Fernworthy Forest, you get two for the price of one. The sky is appropriately grey; the colour of slate, threatening. The grass is long and rustles in the wind sweeping off Sittaford Tor just above us. The sheep stare. One circle of 20 stones, one of 29, just a few metres apart. I know it’s just the weather, but the site broods a lot harder that others. The sheer size of the circles is intimidating, and the evenness and obvious care in construction indicates this mattered a great deal. 

The most obvious question is ‘why two?’ Building just one would be a pain in the arse, so somebody must have had a bloody good reason for doing two. One of the finer antiquarian websites pontificates about the GreyWethers like this: “Could the fact that they stand on an almost north-south axis be important, or was it that the two valleys on either side marked an ancient trackway or trade route with each valley belonging to separate family or tribal group? Did they form the separate meeting place for men and women before some kind of wedding ceremony, perhaps on Sittaford Tor, or were they a place where the recently deceased passed from the land of the living in one circle to the realm of the ancestors in the other? This is a site that poses many more questions than it answers.”  Yep.

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EPISTEMOLOGICAL CHAT GOES HERE Few places that have still have such a legacy of permanent habitation in the landscape. Little survives from 4000 years ago apart from the topography and these chunks of rock embedded in the land, which ultimately resist, and will continue to resist, any definitive interpretation, assuming there even is one.

Many thousands of stone circles, cairns, tumuli, barrows, standing stones, dolmen et al across Britain have been destroyed by ploughs and hammers; robbed, turned into walls, or just buried. Stone is re-used, it’s possible the upland structures in places like Dartmoor remain because there were fewer people demanding resources.

Most monuments (including Stonehenge) have been reconfigured multiple times for different, unknown reasons, and many of the ones you can see today (also including Stonehenge) were lying around on the ground in the 19th century and then re-erected by industrious Victorian antiquarians, who didn’t work by modern standards of archaeology – although without their efforts more would undoubtedly have been destroyed. Untangling exactly what they ‘mean’, and the thinking behind them, is diving into a forcefield of variations.

The constant emphasis on the circle may reflect a shared perception of the world; I.e. a cosmology. Circular constructions reflect a perception of space that extends outwards. The form of the monument provides a microcosm of the local landscape.

Many circles appear to focus attention on distinct features in the landscape, and some of the best known, like Castlerigg and the Ring Of Brodgar, appear to capture and crystallise their surroundings in some way, suggesting a strong awareness on the part of their builders of the local environment. They were not cookie-cutter megaliths thrown up to impress the neighbours. They were part of where they were. They encapsulated the nature of the places and reproduced them in architectural form. It’s often though they had astrological significance, although most of the evidence doesn’t support it, and a lot of them seem to have been laid out by eye rather than measurement.

The circles and monuments that are left also add significance to their surroundings. Unlike tombs and passage graves such as Newgrange in Ireland – which is even older than the pyramids – the circles have a porous, communal nature.

You see and feel the desire to make a permanent record, as well as a connection to place and landscape which is often overlooked. The more I go and visit this stuff and read about it, the less I think that these things are driven by some kind of Spinal Tap-esque Druidic or mystical impulses, and more by things which are very, very human. 

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Yellowmead Down quadruple stone circle Dartmoor, 2024 We can only find what there is to be found. While stone survives, sadly wood and bone doesn’t. In the shadow of the slightly boringly named Sheep’s Tor, just above a valley. You get a package deal of not one, but four concentric stone circles, their flat sides all reflecting towards the central space, six metres wide. The less monumental proportions leave a bit more room for people. It appears to be designed to keep something in, to reflect and concentrate. If other circles appear to mirror, in some way, the surrounding landscape and our perception of that landscape, Yellowmead feels like less about timeless or mystical aesthetic considerations and more about the here and now. Something happening that needed all the power the group could muster up. You don’t need to believe in earth energies (and I don’t) to see why doing things here would matter slightly more than elsewhere. 

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Down Tor stone row & cairn circle Dartmoor, 2024 Featuring that most Dartmoor-y of megalithic statements; the stone row, this one a dragon’s tail of 157 stones, leading over a thousand feet west. This one is a single row, more common are the double rows, perhaps six feet wide. There are triples, too. This one leads to a cairn, or maybe a burial circle. It’s a problem of definition. If circles imply a static viewpoint, rows imply movement and procession. If a circle is a place to contemplate, a row is a place to parade, to approach. This is one of the more spectacular rows, with the stones getting bigger leading up to an absolutely beautiful carved megalith, and tipping upwards into the distance. As is usual, it sits in a spot within site of landmarks and higher hills (you tend to find megalithic things on higher ground, but not the highest in the area – they’re not on top of hills). It may have commemorated somebody. It’s quite the statement. Why wouldn’t you. There’s no Druidic dragging of Preselli bluestones hundreds of miles like that nonsense on Salisbury Plain, there’s bloody rocks lying around everywhere. We’re giving him or her the sendoff they deserve. Right here. 

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Avebury Neolithic henge monument Wiltshire, 2019 Antiquarian John Aubrey said this about Avebury : "it does as much exceed in greatness the so renowned Stonehenge as a Cathedral doeth a parish church". It doesn't matter how many times you go. There's always more to gather. A genuine place of magic.

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Swinside stone circle Cumbria, 2024 Also known as Sunkenkirk, this one is much more inaccessible by road and almost devoid of people on a beautiful afternoon, just a few hundred sheep for company. Unless you’ve got a Land Rover, it’s a hike in that would test small children. No signs, no heritage signboards, just a broken gate. You’re left to interpret it, should you need to, in rustling sheepy silence. The fells are not so high, but there is something especially just-so about the setting. The builders appeared to have levelled the ground, and built (perhaps) a formal entranceway. More than functional. More than necessary. It was made for people. It’s one of the most beautiful spots I’ve ever sat in.

Am increasingly thinking there’s less mystery about these things and that their construction and use can be explained by more human and less esoteric and religious impulses. But we don’t know, and we never will. It’s a piece of mark-making that mattered hugely once, and has essentially time-travelled through to today. Megalithic Britain is an indelible reminder of collective effort, of art, of magical thinking, of community. No wonder so many of them have been destroyed.

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Castlerigg stone circle Cumbria, 2024

Castlerigg, this bit of permanent theatre, is nevertheless a bit odd; it’s not a perfect circle and has a curious later addition of a ‘sanctuary’ of stones jutting inwards, unevenly – a feature found in only one other circle in Britain. It jars. Why is it there? Go on. Guess.

It’s also always been a popular tourist destination, easily the most visited stone circle after Stonehenge. You can drive or walk there from Keswick in minutes, and it will delight pretty much anyone. I don’t mind it when these things are busy – whatever they were, they were definitely places where people gathered, and that shouldn’t change in the post-modern era when these things are heritage heirlooms or just something for the ‘gram.

But with all the people and the kids comes noise. That’s OK too, but the invitation here is towards the sublime. The reverent. The quiet. It’s trickier to appreciate what Wordsworth must have when some kid is running past you watching loud videos on his phone. People leave witchy and sentimental tat there and stuff, in a desperate search for meaning. I get it. Completely.

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Castlerigg stone circle Cumbria, 2024

Yeats and Wordsworth loved Castlerigg. Coleridge called it: “…a Druidical circle [where] the mountains stand one behind the other, in orderly array as if evoked by and attentive to the assembly of white-vested wizards”. It was one of the first ever scheduled ancient monuments, when the Victorians finally decided to start protecting this stuff.

Castlerigg must be the only circle in Britain that is actually overshadowed by the surrounding landscape; on a plateau looking up at some of the tallest and most spectacular fells of all. Unlike something monumental and grandiose, like Avebury, it seems to revel in its setting and how it treads upon the scenery. Whoever built it understood aesthetics.

The emphasis on the circle in megalithic monuments *may* reflect a shared perception of the world; I.e. a cosmology, as the circular constructions reflect a perception of space that extends outwards, the form of the monument providing a microcosm of the local landscape.

Both of these monuments, even more than most of these things, are both a part of and a human interpretation of the landscape. When you read about some tosser architect and how they are using local materials and making sure that what they are doing is harmonious with the local environment, you can feel smug in knowing someone was doing exactly the same thing 5000 years ago.

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Nine Stones Close stone circle Derbyshire, 2024 One of the largest stone circles in Derbyshire. Other stones nearby seem likely to have once been part of the circle, but there's only four standing, and indeed, a total of nine stones have never actually been recorded by antiquarians. Just one of those names. Seems to be related to the nearby rock outcrop Robin Hood's Stride, one of several interesting natural features in among a rich seam of standing stones in this stretch of the Peaks.

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Nine Stones Close stone circle Derbyshire, 2024

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Nine Stones Close stone circle Derbyshire, 2024

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Doll Tor very small stone circle Derbyshire, 2024

The closed setting adds a certain romance to the experience, unlike the usual windswept open moorland, and it’s not the first circle I’ve been to where people have left offerings of things; flowers and dried oranges in the centre here, and a variety of shells, trinkets and general junk on a tree next door. It's also been vandalised a few times by people who think they 'know what it means'.

It’s mildly annoying, but I understand it in the desperate search for ritual and meaning, and in the turnover of function which all these places must have experienced – combined of course, with the fact that people are awful.