Tregeseal stone circle

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Tregeseal, Cornwall, England
Etching by WC Borlase 1872

The stone circle of Tregeseal is located near the village of Tregeseal in the former District Penwith in the county of Cornwall in England . The stone circle , also known as The Stones Dancing , is around 4,000 years old and dates from the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age .

location

The stone setting is located in south west Cornwall east of the road from Morvah to St Just in Penwith and is one kilometer east of the village of Tregeseal. It can be reached from there via Truthwall Lane and Kenython Lane. There are other megalithic sites in the area :

construction

Close up of the menhirs

The stone circle consists of 19 granite blocks with a height between 1.0 and 1.4 m, which approximately describe a circle with a diameter of about 21 m. Probably two stones are missing as the circle used to consist of 21 menhirs . Over the centuries, the setting of the stone has been subject to considerable renovation and restoration work, so that today only the stones in the eastern half of the district are likely to be in their original position. The stone circle was part of a larger ritual area that, like the area around the Merry Maidens, consisted of three stone circles in an east-west orientation. The other two stone circles were to the west of the remaining stone setting. The westernmost of the three districts was destroyed in 1967 and can only be detected today through aerial photographs. Of the middle stone circle, which originally had the largest diameter and contained ten stones in 1885, only one standing menhir can be found today.

history

Etching by William Cotton 1827

Contrary to popular belief, stone circles like that of Tregeseal were not erected by the Celts , but much earlier in the late Neolithic or in the early Bronze Age by representatives of a megalithic culture. The stone circle was first mentioned in modern times in the work Antiquities, historical and monumental, of the County of Cornwall by William Borlase , which reports 17 standing menhirs. An early pictorial representation was provided by William Cotton in his work Illustrations of Stone Circles, Cromlehs and other remains of the Aboriginal Britons in the West of Cornwall in 1827 . At that time there were apparently still some menhirs in the other two stone circles. William Copeland Borlase found 16 stones in the late 18th century and gave the exact location of the stones in his work Naenia Cornubiae from 1872, which deals with the prehistoric monuments of Cornwall.

literature

  • John Barnatt: Prehistoric Cornwall. The Ceremonial Monuments . Turnstone Press Limited, Wellingborough 1982, ISBN 0855001291 .
  • Aubrey Burl: The stone circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany . Yale University Press 2000, ISBN 0300083475 .
  • Ian McNeil Cooke: Standing Stones of the Land's End . Men-an-Tol Studio, Cornwall 1998, ISBN 0951237195 .
  • Robin Payne: The Romance of the Stones . Alexander Associates, Fowey 1999, ISBN 1899526218 .
  • Homer Sykes: Mysterious Britain - Fact and Folklore . Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1993, ISBN 0297831968 , p. 19.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ myweb.tiscali.co.uk/celynog/Cornwall/tregeseal.htm ( Memento from October 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ a b http://www.historic-cornwall.org.uk/a2m/bronze_age/stone_circle/tregeseal/tregeseal.htm

Web links

Commons : Tregeseal Stone Circle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 50 ° 8 ′ 1.4 ″  N , 5 ° 39 ′ 30.7 ″  W.