Tag Archives: megaliths

Stone circles of Derbyshire (and failing again with Papyrus P52)

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Buxton, I am in you, attending Novacon which is just as much fun as I hoped.

But yesterday I hired a car and did a tour of three ancient sites in northern Derbyshire. Derbyshire as a whole has more ancient stone circles than the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg combined (they have none). I reckoned I could take in a few of them and still return the rental car in time for the Novacon opening ceremony.

There is a great website, named Pecsaetan for some reason, dedicated to the ancient sites in and around Derbyshire. It covers a lot more than stone circles, so there is plenty left to look at on future visits. The Peak District seems to have retained a lot of its heritage. I suspect that it is very beautiful as well, but unfortunately the weather yesterday was too foggy to tell.

Arbor Low (and Gib Hill)

I started with probably the best of them, also conveniently the closest to Buxton: the henge and stone circle of Arbor Low, 16 km southeast of the town along the A515. You are supposed to pay a pound into the honesty box for the farmer whose land it sits on. It is described by local enthusiasts as ‘the Stonehenge of the North’; I was a little sceptical, as the photographs that I had seen showed most of the stones as lying horizontal.

But before you even get to the stones, you encounter the vast ramparts of the henge which encloses the stone circle. In ancient times it must have been three metres high and the ditch must have been about the same depth. It would have looked amazing.

And though the stones are now recumbent, they are big, most of them two metres long. They are limestone which apparently explains why they have fallen, due to erosion. Within the circle is a central set of three or four stones which could have been an altar of some kind. Other visitors had left offerings of nuts and acorns on the largest of them.

But the amazing thing about yesterday was the mist sitting over this ancient site. There was a real Barrow-Downs feel about it.

Nearby is a much smaller barrow-mound called Gib Hill. You cannot see much anyway, and you can see even less in the mist, but it is a Stone Age tomb, with a Bronze Age tomb on top, built a thousand years later, but still many thousands of years ago.

Doll Tor (and the Andle Stone)

This was the most difficult to find of the three sites. It is about 11 km due east of Arbor Low, on Stanton Moor, accessible from a lay-by on a small road perhaps 2 km south of Stanton-in-Peak and 1 km north of Birchover. I should note that Stanton-in-Peak appeared to be infested with pheasants. That’s pheasants with a ‘h’.

Luckily Pecsaetan gives explicit and good directions to Doll Tor, which worked even in thick fog when you cannot see to the end of the field you are in. When you get to the Doll Tor circle in a wooded glade, it’s a delightful surprise, almost faery-like. None of the stones is more than a metre in height, but the shape of the circle is clear, and there is a cairn attached to the northern side of the circle.

Again, other visitors have left offerings at the site, including a lot of coins on a flat stone at the edge of the circle.


The fact that it sits in a valley meant that the fog was not as heavy as with the more elevated sites, but it still felt isolated – I think it was the one most distant from other human activity of the three. Magical, but a very different kind of magic from Arbor Low.

On the way across the fields to Doll Tor is the Andle Stone, thought to be a natural boulder (and a big one) but augmented by human activity.

There is an inscription on the other side of it commemorating the Duke of Wellington and local boy William Thornhill.

There are several more stone circles and other monuments nearby on Stanton Moor, and you could easily spend a half day just exploring them. But the fog was a bit treacherous and it seemed better to press on.

I should note that Doll Tor and the Andle Stone are on private land, and there is no public right of access to them.

Barbrook 1 and 2

About 20 km north of Doll Tor and Stanton Moor are the monuments known as Barbrook 1 and 2, on Big Moor. The road takes you past the very well signposted Chatsworth House, home of the Dukes of Devonshire. This site is the easiest to find of the three, though perhaps for that reason it was less atmospheric – lots of dogwalkers, and the audible roar of traffic.

You park at a layby on the A621, four or five km north of where it starts, and there is a clear path to Barbrook 1 and a less clear path to Barbrook 2. Barbrook 1, 500 metres from the road, is a straightforward stone circle with one big stone about a metre high and a small bank around it.

Barbrook 2, 200 metres away, is different. It is a ring cairn, which has been reconstructed to give a best guess at its original appearance. It looks like a sheepfold except that it is sunk into the ground. It’s quite different from any other monument in Derbyshire.

There are many smaller ancient cairns on Big Moor, and you pass maybe ten or twelve on this route.

There is also a Barbrook 3, but it is apparently difficult to locate and not that impressive when you do find it. And lunch at The Grouse Inn in Longshaw was calling.

This would have been fantastic in better weather, but even in yesterday’s fog the Arbor Low and Doll Tor circles were pretty amazing to visit. And there are still plenty more Derbyshire stone circles to explore.

The Papyrus and the Pet Shop Boys

It is a little known fact that the oldest surviving fragment of the New Testament, a papyrus dating from the mid second century, is held by the John Rylands Library in Manchester. When I first visited in 2021, it was in storage, so I anxiously called ahead this time to make sure that I could see it after I landed on Thursday. The person who answered the phone a week ago assured me that it would be on display, but either they were wrong or plans changed, because when I pitched up on Thursday afternoon, P52 was in storage again. You can get a fridge magnet of it though.

However, there was also a temporary display on LGBTQ+ culture, which delightfully had the original manuscript of the Pet Shop Boys’ hit West End Girls and the original typescript of It’s A Sin.

You never know what you are going to find. The John Rylands Library is free to visit, and even without P52, there is plenty there.

(Incidentally, WordPress refuses to publish the lovely Gothic P used by New Testament scholars to designate papyri. Every time I tried to include it in an update to this entry, it refused to upload.)

The Hunebedden of Drenthe – megalithic Netherlands

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I am up North this weekend, in the Dutch province of Drenthe, feeding my interest in matters megalithic by inspecting the hunebedden, the huge 5000-year-old stone structures which are dotted around the province. In fact, Drenthe has no less than 52 of them, and there are another two in Groningen; in the whole of the rest of the Netherlands there is one (1) surviving megalithic structure, a tomb near Maastricht.

Herman Clerinx, in his book Een Palais voor de Doden, tallies twelve dolmens and menhirs in Belgium, and one in Luxembourg. (I have been to all of them.) This means that 76% of all the surviving megalithic monuments in the three Benelux countries are in Drenthe, otherwise one of the least remarkable Dutch provinces.

Even though the hunebedden are not that different from each other (which itself is interesting; compare the variations among the Belgian monoliths, and their contrast with Wéris), they are still pretty spectacular. We looked at six of them today, which is more than 10% of the total number, and unusually for this blog, I’m going to lead with my video reaction to each one, since photographs just don’t capture the majestic structure.

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More Belgian megaliths

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It’s the first sunny and warm Saturday of the year, and the rest of the family all had other plans, and also I discovered that I had missed half a dozen megaliths to the east of us in my previous explorations of Belgium’s prehistoric heritage. So I recruited H, once again my partner in crime, and we spent the day exploring them.

The big news is that over at Wéris, where I have been a couple of times previously, a new alignment of standing stones has been discovered, excavated and re-erected, giving an intensified sense of the sacred landscape of the town. I’m glad to say that it is in the same linear arrangement as most of the known Wéris monuments. This was the fourth of the seven new places (to me) that we visited, so it’s halfway down this page.

Holsteen

    (50.996000N  5.417000E)

    The very first rock that we visited is the Holsteen, in an attractive park in Zonhoven, northeast of Hasselt and northwest of Genk. The setting is lovely, but the stone itself a little disappointing despite its size; it appears to be a natural outcrop, which was however used by Stone Age humans for sharpening their tools.

    The Devil’s Stones of Langerlo

    (50.945160N  5.498960E)

    On the other side of Genk, these are a little more exciting, two of them aligned with a rather ugly flower pot, and a Christian chapel in the background:

    And a third a bit farther off at the other end of the green.

    The Devil’s Dolmen

    (50.601360N  5.666010E)

    Next was a long drive south to Fléron on the outskirts of Liège, for what was frankly the least impressive thing we saw today; some rather small overgrown rocks at the base of a steep slope.

    Someone had shoved a brick inside it, and it had a bit of a Stone’enge vibe, as in Spın̈al Tap.

    The Danthine Alignment (and Wéris)

    (50.325970N  5.516960E)

    On the other hand, the entire day’s trip was justified by the new alignment of standing stones at Wéris. These were discovered a couple of years ago, and re-erected last year; they had been buried in the 16th or 17th century, presumably as part of the fight against superstition. They’re a spectacular addition to the already well-endowed spiritual geography of the location.

    Still photos don’t give a really good sense of the alignment, so here’s a blustery video.

    It was H’s first visit to Wéris, so we had to also visit the two big dolmens, both within easy walking distance of the new alignment with is directly between them. Here’s Wéris I, in photographs taken today and in 2009:

    And the dolmen and nearby menhirs at Wéris II.

    Great Stone of Ellemelle

    (50.464000N  5.432000E)

    The Great Stone of Ellemelle is either a fallen menhir or a dolmen with its legs knocked out. Stark and alone in a field far from anywhere, it’s pretty big but doesn’t have much to say.

    Menhir du Grand Bois (Jehay Castle)

    (50.575688N  5.323281E)

    The second last of today’s stones has been transferred to the formal gardens of Jehay Castle, whose owner, Count Van den Steen, married one of the last heiresses of the Marquesses of Ormond, and left it to the Belgian state on his death in 1999. The building is undergoing refurbishment but is spectacular.

    The menhir itself is regarded as of dubious authenticity by experts, but is nicely presented for what it is.

    There are numerous statues in the grounds, all I think by Count Van den Steen himself. This nymph is particularly striking:

    Time was pressing, so we did not give the castle the attention it deserved, but I’ll definitely go back some time – only 5 euro for entry (and just 2.50 if you are only doing the gardens).

    The Stone of Saint-Gitter

    (50.746175N  5.063662E)

    B lives in the vicinity of the last stone of the trip and joined us for that part of the itinerary, and in fact I realised that I had brought her to the site in 2010 without noticing that there was a menhir there too. The site combines a tumulus with a small museum showing the Merovingian palace of Pepin the Elder, who was Charlemagne’s great-great-great-grandfather and therefore probably an ancestor of yours too, if you are of European descent.

    The Stone of Saint Gitter has been moved to a corner of the museum, and B enjoyed the feel of it against her tummy and also liked watching the shadown of her fingers on the rock surface.

    On the way back, we took her to the Chapel of the Holy Cross, where as usual she enjoyed lighting a candle.

    So, in summary, Wéris remains a key Belgian attraction; Jehay is worth a return visit; and some day I’ll find time to go to the Sint-Gitter museum when it is open. Thanks to H (and B in her own way) for travelling companionship.

    Neglected megaliths of Loughbrickland

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    All of sixteen years ago, I wrote a blog post about visiting three megalithic sites near Loughbrickland: a standing stone (menhir) at Lisnabrague on the Poyntzpass road, the so-called Three Sisters of Greenan on a hill near the lake, and another standing stone beside the northern shore of the lake, in Drumnahare townland.

    Stoned

    They’re all laid out on this map, though the Three Sisters are mysteriously placed a hundred metres to the east of their actual location.

    I returned to visit all three this week, and to be honest I was a bit dismayed. Going west to east, the opposite order to last time, I found that the field containing the Lisnabrague stone is currently planted with maize which is taller than me. The farmer gave me permission to go look for it, commenting that I was the first person he had ever encountered who showed any interest; he added resentfuly that he is not allowed to build within five hundred metres of it, which does seem a bit excessive.

    Using GPS I was able to navigate to the stone through the maize, and found that it sits in a sort of glade among the triffid-like crops.

    But it feels isolated and neglected, compared to when I visited in 2007.

    At least it was accessible. The Three Sisters lie in a hedge beside a lane; the hedge has been allowed to grow thick over them in the last sixteen years, and you can no longer see them from the lane at all. The field in which they lie has been completely fenced off; you can photograph the two upright Sisters through or over the fence, but you cannot reach or even see the third of the three stones, which is completely submerged in the hedge.

    A neighbour told me that the owner had had a lot of hassle with treasure-hunters – not metal-detectorists, but people doing organised guided quests, who had failed to observe the usual etiquette of the countryside. It’s a shame. In 2007 you could go right up to them, and see the recumbent Sister as well.

    The standing stone by the lake remains easy enough to visit, but the Orange Order who own the field have put up a massive flagpole right beside it, which really impacts your experience of the site. (There’s also a flag flying on the crannóg in the middle of the lake, but I carefully positioned the flagpole to block it out.)

    Sixteen years ago I was able to get a lovely shot of the crannóg framed by the cut in the top of the stone, which has mysterious cup-like markings.

    I came away feeling that the relationship between the state and the landowner in respect of ancient monuments seems to be deteriorating. It would be nice to see a new partnership established based on dialogue and mutual respect of each other’s interests. But that would probably require a restoration of devolved government.