Stone circles in Dartmoor
The stone circles in Dartmoor in Devon are small in contrast to the stone circles in the rest of England ( Avebury , Stanton Drew ). They lie on gentle slopes, are between 20 and 40 m in diameter and consist of small stones that surround a flat interior. They do not contain any internal structures such as columns or cairns that have some Cornish circles.
The largest in Dartmoor are the circles of Mardon Down South (38.2 m) and Gray Wethers (north 32.2; south 33.6), the smallest are Merrivale (19.0 m) and Shovel Down (17.7 m ).
Scorhill is the stone circle with the largest stones, one of which is over eight feet high. In contrast, the Fernworthy stone circle consists of stones just over 0.5 m high, the largest being 1.1 m high. Fernworthy stones are graded in size with the smallest facing south. Merrivale is made of stones smaller than Fernworthy. The circles of Brisworthy , Gray Wethers and White Moor (Little Hound Tor) have been reconstructed. Langstone, which was badly damaged during World War II, was another restored county. The rest of the Dartmoor counties are fragmentary with rocks that have fallen or lost, as is the case with Buttern Hill, Down Ridge, Mardon, Sherberton, and Shovel Down. The circle of Sourton Tor was made up of 32 stones, six of which remain that have fallen over. The Tottiford district was only discovered in 2009 when there was an unusually low water level in the Tottiford reservoir .
The Gray Wethers are the only example of a pair of stone circles of roughly the same size on Dartmoor, forming almost a north-south axis, with the stones all over 1.0 m high. There are several stone circle groups in Cornwall such as The Hurlers three circles on Bodmin Moor . The existence of groups adds another mystery to the unknown purpose of the stone circles.
It is interesting that eight of these stone circle places form a crescent moon, with the places about two kilometers apart. J. Butler speculates that they represent "a planned configuration".
literature
- Aubrey Burl: The Stone Circles of the British Isles (Yale University Press, 1976)
- Jeremy Butler: Dartmoor Atlas of Antiquities : Vol. 5. - The Second Millennium BC (Devon Books, 1997)
- Homer Sykes: Mysterious Britain - Fact and Folklore George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd. 1993 p. 37