A D AY I N T H E L I F E
THE MYSTERIES OF
THE STONE CIRCLE Visitor survey and explainer volunteer Joanna Dancer updates us on a very busy year at Castlerigg Stone Circle.
R
ecent lockdowns and restrictions have led to unprecedented numbers of visitors travelling to enjoy the Lake District. Many found their way for the first time to Castlerigg Stone Circle, just outside of Keswick in the North Lakes. This free-to-enter site is jointly managed by English Heritage and the National Trust, with a team of four English Heritage explainer volunteers on hand to help with information for the visitors. The circle The stone circle is one of the oldest in the country, and thought to be about 4,500 years old – older than Stonehenge. It shares many features with the stone circles in Ireland and others in Cumbria, with minimal
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origins and purpose. It is dated as late earthworks and a simple slightly Neolithic or early Bronze Age, and was elliptical outline of upright unfinished natural stones taken from the local one of the very first listed monuments landscape, albeit brought here as in 1883. It was described by Keats eskers from nearby Borrowdale by the as merely ‘a dismal cirque of Druid glaciers of the last ice age. While stones, upon a forlorn the circle itself is beautiful in its Many visitors moor’ and was the simplicity and virtual entirety subject of a few early feel a spiritual engravings, but very of 39 or 40 stones – depending upon how you count them, connection little was recorded of it before its formal listing. there seemingly is never the to the stones Excavations at that same number twice – it is famed time revealed little of for its magnificent and dramatic its past except some undated charcoalmountain setting on a low rounded type material within the sanctuary summit within a 360-degree panorama section – a stone ‘inner sanctum’ on including Skiddaw, Blencathra and the eastern side of the circle. Helvellyn among others. So why was it built and what was it used for? A meeting place certainly, but A mysterious site there is little to link it with any formal As with many ancient monuments, worship, except perhaps a Langdale there is some mystery surrounding its
