Castlerigg stone circle

Castlerigg stone circle stands on a rounded hill east of Keswick, in the parish of St John's Castlerigg and Wythburn, inside the Lake District. The old names are the Keswick Carles, the Carles, the Carsles, and Castle-rig. From inside the ring the near ground drops away, so the eye goes to the far skyline. Accounts of that view name Helvellyn, Skiddaw, Grasmoor, Blencathra, and High Seat.

Helvellyn rises to 950 metres and Skiddaw to 931 metres, and the Lake District also holds England's highest summit, Scafell Pike, at 978 metres. The plateau has been called the raised centre of a natural amphitheatre made by the surrounding fells. The monument is split into two protected pieces of ground: the stone ring, with a smaller enclosure and two very low barrows inside it, and a single outlying stone in a separate patch of ground.

The Lake District is a mountain region and national park in Cumbria. The park was created on 9 May 1951 and covers 2,362 square kilometres. In 2017 the Lake District was designated a World Heritage Site. A heritage inventory for the circle itself lists that same protection beside its status as a scheduled monument.

The region is famous for its lakes and fells and for writers. Beatrix Potter, born Helen Beatrix Potter in 1866 and later Helen Beatrix Heelis, spent holidays in this country, bought Hill Top Farm at Near Sawrey in 1905 with book earnings and an aunt's legacy, and went on buying farms so that the hill landscape would survive. She married the Hawkshead solicitor William Heelis in 1913. Alfred Wainwright, the Blackburn-born fellwalker who lived from 1907 to 1991, first saw the Lakeland summits from Orrest Head above Windermere in 1930 and later drew 214 of them in his Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, issued between 1955 and 1966.

Neither fact makes either of them a builder or a recorded excavator of the circle. It places the stones in a landscape that later centuries prized for walking, farming, and books as well as for prehistoric ritual.

The ring is not a true geometric circle. One measured account gives an oval about 32 metres from north to south and 29 metres from east to west, with 38 large stones, some fallen, some standing as much as 3 metres, and three smaller stones. Another gives a flattened circle 32.6 metres at its widest and 29.5 metres at its narrowest, with the tallest stone about 2.3 metres and the heaviest estimated at about 16 tons. A third account, written for visitors, says 38 standing stones, heights from 1.0 to 2.3 metres, and a diameter that varies between 30 and 33 metres.

A magazine account says almost 100 feet across, with 38 stones from about 3.5 to 7.5 feet. William Stukeley, who came in 1725, called it 100 feet in diameter and counted forty stones. A description published in 1843 also counted about forty stones and called the shape an oval of thirty-five yards by thirty-three. The spread in the count is not only a matter of stones lost.

Erosion by visitors has lowered the soil, and small stones have appeared beside the large ones. Those small stones are likely packing stones that once sat underground to wedge the uprights. Counters who ignore them stay near 38. Counters who include them have gone as high as 42.

A wide gap on the north, about 3.3 metres in one measurement, lies between the two tallest stones and is treated as an original entrance.

The boulders were probably not carried far. At the end of the Ice Age, melting glaciers left large stones scattered over these fields, and the circle sits on glacial till, so the uprights were likely taken from that deposit. Moving the largest, if it really weighs about 16 tons, would still have needed dozens of people. That labour implies a community big enough to gather for a shared work, not a single household.

The builders did not insist on a perfect circle drawn from a centre. The ring was made to look circular to someone standing close to it on the ground.

No excavation since 1882 has produced a scientific date, so the age is argued from the kind of monument and from comparison. One account puts Castlerigg in the late fourth millennium BC, often around 3200 BC, on those typological grounds, and therefore among the earliest stone circles in Britain. Another says it was probably built around 4,500 years ago, in the late Neolithic, and treats the earlier figure as weakly supported. In 1976 the archaeologist Aubrey Burl argued that Britain's earliest farmers raised it about 5,200 years ago.

The evidence offered for that early date is not strong. Many stone circles belong hundreds of years later, between 4,500 and 4,200 years ago, when metal came into common use. Where large irregular circles in England have been excavated, they fall between the Late Neolithic and the Middle Bronze Age, about 2400 to 1000 BC. Castlerigg itself is not one of those dated digs.

A recent survey only hints that the stones may stand on an older monument, a circle of bank and ditch. If that hint is right, the ring had a predecessor on the same hill.

The Neolithic, a word coined by John Lubbock in 1865, is the last part of the Stone Age in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the age when farming and herding spread and settled life replaced a purely hunting life. In Britain the great stone circles belong to its later centuries and to the metal age that followed. The Bronze Age, in the broad sense, is the time when societies smelted copper and alloyed it with tin or arsenic, or traded for bronze, after the Neolithic and before the Iron Age. Bronze Age Britain is dated from about 2500 or 2200 BC until about 800 BC.

It opened with copper and with the Bell Beaker culture, and by 2200 to 2100 BC Britain was using tin-bronze. Large megaliths continued to be built or altered through that age. The two low mounds inside Castlerigg have been compared with burial mounds of the earliest Bronze Age, sometimes called the Copper Age, made about 4,300 years ago. They may therefore be about as old as a late date for the ring, or they may be later additions to an older enclosure.

They have never been excavated. Each is about 3.5 to 3.6 metres across. One survey makes them only about 5 centimetres high, each with a shallow ditch about 0.6 metres wide and 5 centimetres deep, and places them in the north-eastern and north-western quarters. Another places the pair symmetrically just inside the northern entrance and says they were never much higher than they are now, so that anyone coming in between the tall stones would have walked between them.

Nineteenth-century visitors described several low internal mounds, often in the eastern half, and called them cairns or small burial features. Their shape was never firmly recorded. C. W.

Dymond, who planned the circle in 1878 and 1881 and marked one internal cairn, missed two others that Benjamin Williams had noted in 1856, which shows how slight and uncertain those features were. An aerial reading has taken numerous circular marks inside the ring for later Bronze Age burial mounds. A re-examination, published in 2021, of Williams's 1856 description has suggested that one mound may have held a Langdale tuff axe, so at least some activity inside the circle could still belong to the Neolithic rather than to a later burial phase. No human bones are known from the site.

Later Bronze Age stone monuments often hold burials. Castlerigg, on the evidence in hand, does not.

Aubrey Burl, who lived from 1926 to 2020 and taught archaeology at Hull College, became a leading authority on the stone circles of Britain. He was willing to see the sky in these monuments, but he distrusted the stronger claims of archaeoastronomy. He argued that circles and henges were not observatories for a class of astronomer-priests. He thought they were places of ritual tied to death, fertility, and ancestors, used at turning points of the year, in the way other farming societies gathered.

He classed the big open rings of this region as Cumbrian circles, spacious enough for a crowd, a local kind of henge built in stone rather than earth. True examples are uncommon. Five survive in Cumbria: Swinside, Castlerigg, Elva Plain Stone Circle, Long Meg and Her Daughters, and Gamelands. Others stand nearby, among them the Twelve Apostles and the Girdle Stanes, and further north the Hethpool circles.

Elva Plain Stone Circle lies north of Bassenthwaite Lake on the lower slopes of Elva Hill. About fifteen stones remain there, of perhaps thirty originally, many of them small, fallen, or half buried. On the form of the monument it is placed in the mid to late Neolithic, about 3200 to 2500 BC. Like Castlerigg it sits in a natural amphitheatre of hills, with a wide view that includes Grisedale Pike and Skiddaw, and its open interior is read as space for a gathering.

Alexander Thom, a Scottish engineer who lived from 1894 to 1985, took the other side of that argument. He surveyed stone circles across Britain, proposed a standard unit he called the megalithic yard, and treated the builders as able astronomers and mathematicians. His books and Burl's do not study Castlerigg alone. They try to set every British circle in one explanation.

At this hill the precise version is hard to sustain. Several alignments of stones with outliers, and with notches on the eastern skyline, have been proposed, and none has been generally accepted. One account finds the most plausible link to be midwinter sunrise. The tallest stone stands edgeways to the curve, and a second large stone beside it, now fallen, may have been its pair.

For a person standing between the two low mounds, the sun would in theory rise between that pair at the winter solstice, but only on a flat horizon. The mountains make the sun appear further south, and if the circle stood in a clearing with trees around it, the screen would have been thicker still. There is a second problem. Many stones were shifted slightly between about 1790 and 1850, so a line measured now may be a line made by later hands.

Most archaeologists who still see a solar purpose think the builders wanted an approximate sign of midwinter sunrise or sunset, not a surveyor's exact bearing. Another account of the monument says it has no solar alignment that can actually be shown. Both the claim and the denial are on the record, and the dig that might test them has not been done.

The stones went up in a wider Neolithic world around the Irish Sea. Large open circles in the Lake District have been set beside a spread of passage-tomb ideas from Ireland, with an affinity to the great cemeteries of the Boyne, and beside rock art of the middle and later Neolithic at places such as the Langdale boulders and Grasmere. The only rock art named on the circle itself is a single lozenge on stone 13, on the western arc. In 2004 Margarita Díaz-Andreu, then in the archaeology department at Durham, commissioned a laser scan because people claimed a spiral had been found on the stones.

The scan recorded three-dimensional images and found modern graffiti, not the spiral. The lozenge and the missing spiral are separate reports. One names a mark. The other says a different claimed mark was not there.

The Langdale axe industry, on the high screes of Great Langdale around Harrison Stickle and Pike o' Stickle, was a Neolithic place for making stone axes from a fine green volcanic tuff. Archaeologists date that work to about 4000 to 3500 BC. It is said to have supplied around a third of the polished stone axes known from Neolithic Britain, and finished axes travelled far beyond these valleys. For a long time Castlerigg was folded into that trade.

A stone circle, on this view, was where people met to exchange axes, news, and marriage partners, and where an axe had to pass through ceremony before it could pass through a bargain. Nineteenth-century reports of rude stone clubs in the north-western part of the circle, where small mounds lie, were offered as local evidence. A Neolithic axe of blue-green Langdale stone was found near the circle in 1875 by the farmer Wilfrid Crosthwaite of Low Nest Farm, while he was raking twitch, an invasive grass. His land puts the find in the field immediately north of the circle or the field immediately east.

The axe was left flaked rather than ground smooth, and it is now in Keswick Museum. The exact spot is unknown. Recent dating of the quarry at Pike o' Stickle suggests production there had largely ceased by 3300 BC, at least a century before the date often given for the circle. The trading theory is now in doubt for that reason, and also because axes of this kind are not rare on Neolithic ritual sites in the region.

They do not, by themselves, prove that this ring was the market for the axe factories. Polished axes were not only tree-felling tools. Beautiful ones were marks of status, or weapons for ceremony, and scientific study of edges has shown other kinds of work as well.

What the circle was for is still an open question, and the answer may have changed across the centuries. Most archaeologists treat large stone circles as places of ritual or ceremony, with a role like that of a henge. The archaeologist Tom Clare has compared such a monument to a medieval parish church, which was a religious centre and also a place of meeting and exchange. The ecologist David Wilkinson has pointed out that when Castlerigg was built, much of northern Europe was heavily wooded and the valley floors of this district were often standing water or dense swamp.

A low ridge at the meeting of three valleys would have been a dry path for farmers moving stock from high summer pastures down to lower ground for the winter. Raising the stones took effort on a scale that matches a place of real importance. Clare has said that one generation may have added to the work of the generation before, and that giving labour to these communal structures was part of belonging to the society. Seasonal meetings would also have been when scattered farms traded, shared news, and found partners.

Through the north-west of Europe, Neolithic and Bronze Age people watched the rebirth of the year at the winter solstice, when the sun rises at nearly the same point for almost two weeks and then the days lengthen. It is reasonable to picture rites through the longest night, meant to help the sun return. It is not reasonable to pretend the picture has been proved.

Inside the east of the ring, touching the inner faces of three of the circle stones, is a rectangle of ten stones. One survey measures it at about 7.6 by 3.6 metres internally. Another says about 7 by 3 metres. Early writers called it the Sanctuary and thought it was a burial chamber, a holy of holies where rites or judgments happened apart from the crowd, or a grave.

William Stukeley took it for a grave of about ten stones, set at the east point of the circle and inside it. There is still no agreed function, and the only dig inside it did not settle the question.

That dig was the work of W. Kinsey Dover, also recorded as W. K. Dover, and it is the only excavation known at the site.

He opened the ground before a visit, on 5 October 1882, by members of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, and his short report was printed with the account of that outing in 1883. He gave the enclosure as 22 feet east to west and 11 feet north to south. He opened 18 to 19 feet of the length, in a cut 3 feet 3 inches wide, with two cross cuts of about 2 feet. Dark topsoil was 14 inches deep down to yellow undisturbed ground, except at the west end, where black soil mixed with stones continued to 3 feet.

Near the bottom there he found what he thought were a few small pieces of burned wood or charcoal, and some dark unctuous earth, and he took a sample of each. One later summary says no artefacts were unearthed and that deposits a modern excavator would have kept were thrown aside. The two accounts fit if charcoal and dark soil were noted and sampled, while no made object was kept. What became of the samples is unknown.

They are likely lost or too contaminated for a modern date. From the size of Dover's trench, some writers think that if any ancient layers remain in the rectangle, he did not destroy them all, so a sequence between the ring and the inner setting might still be recoverable. Further digging among the stones is unlikely to be allowed. The circle is not threatened by building or by the plough, and the wear from visitors, though real, is managed so that it does not loosen the uprights.

A survey published in 2021 has reopened the date of the rectangle. It has long been treated as prehistoric, and it is clearly later than the ring, but the new reading suggests it may be the footing of a medieval shepherd's cottage or a sheep pen, built by shifting some of the smaller prehistoric stones. If those stones were taken out of the ring, the original circle may have held fifty stones or more. That remains a suggestion.

It replaces an old certainty with a new uncertainty, which is the honest state of the evidence. Stukeley already saw about ten stones in that position in 1725, so if the feature is medieval it was already old, ruined, and misunderstood when the first full description was written.

Stukeley himself was an antiquary, a physician, and a clergyman, born in 1687 and dead in 1765. From 1710 to 1725 he toured every year, looking for old monuments. He became the first secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and he did the fieldwork that put Stonehenge and Avebury into serious study. His note on Castlerigg is short.

It was printed in his Itinerarium Curiosum in 1776, eleven years after he died. He saw the ring a mile before Keswick, on a rise in a great hollow of rough hills, not far from the river he spelled Greata. He counted forty stones, some very large, said not a stone was wanting though some had been shifted a little, and recorded the local name. He also thought he saw a second, larger circle in the next pasture toward the town.

He did not describe it. Nothing of that second circle has been found on the ground or in later surveys. It may have been a natural rise he misread, or a monument that has vanished. His belief that the ring was complete is harder to share now, because large gaps exist, but there is no drawing of the original design, and the circle is still thought to be relatively intact after three centuries of his kind of record.

Earlier antiquaries missed it. John Aubrey and William Camden both came into Cumbria and both wrote about Long Meg and Her Daughters, the great circle north-east of Penrith, and about legends told of those stones. Neither left a word on Keswick's ring. Aubrey was also the first writer to tie Neolithic and Bronze Age megaliths, wrongly, to the Iron Age Druids.

That mistake coloured almost every later description of Castlerigg until archaeology separated the ages. Stukeley called the work Celtic. The Romantic visitors still said Druid.

In the mid-eighteenth century the land around the circle was ploughed for wheat and barley. The ridges of that ploughing can still be read, at least one stone was moved to ease the plough, and cultivation bit a little way into the ring. An engraving from Stukeley's visit shows an outlying stone to one side of the figures. That stone was later taken away so that the plough could pass.

Between about 1794 and 1848, comparison of drawings and paintings shows that thirteen stones were put back up or nudged. The changes included two close pairs on the south-west and a new outlier, and together those moves created a line toward midwinter sunset. At about the same time a stand of larch was planted in the middle, a little grove meant to look like a Druid wood. A separate account says that in the early twentieth century a farmer set up a single outlying stone about 90 metres to the south-west.

It is scarred along the side by repeated blows of a plough, so it had lain buried, which is why he dug it out. Nobody can say whether it once belonged to the circle or was a natural boulder. The legal description of the monument places an outlier 70 metres west-south-west, beside the field boundary, in its own patch of protection. The distances do not match, and the stories may be of more than one stone.

What is certain is that outliers have been removed, buried, and put back, and that some alignments now visible were made by that later handling.

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge walked here in November 1799 with William Wordsworth, he wrote that the people of Keswick had been playing tricks with the stones. Coleridge, who lived from 1772 to 1834, and Wordsworth, who lived from 1770 to 1850, were the poets whose Lyrical Ballads of 1798 opened the Romantic age in English verse. Coleridge was one of the Lake Poets. Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death.

Coleridge's note on the circle says that a mile and a half from Keswick a Druidical circle stands where the mountains rise one behind another, in orderly array, as if called up by and listening to an assembly of white-vested wizards. Ann Radcliffe, the novelist who shaped the Gothic novel and published The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794, had already travelled over the same ground. A description of 1843 quotes her. She thought the situation the most severely grand she had passed.

She found no object that broke the solemn feeling of solitude, greatness, and awful wildness. She saw Castle-Rigg as the centre of three valleys, closed by the mountains of Borrowdale on the west and by the precipices of Skiddaw and Saddleback on the north, dark with heath or rock, at a distance that let their full size remain. She thought such seclusion fitted the mysteries then blamed on the Druids. John Keats, the Romantic poet who lived only from 1795 to 1821, is linked more loosely.

Lines in Hyperion, about scarce images of life lying vast and edgeways like a dismal cirque of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor, have been alleged to remember a visit to these stones, a visit that seems not to have pleased him. The allegation is not the same thing as a diary entry.

The nineteenth century turned the same romance into the first accurate plans and the first small dig. Dymond's surveys of 1878 and 1881 gave the circle its first careful plan. Dover's trench of 1882 gave it the only hole in the ground. Protection followed at once.

The Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882 was introduced by John Lubbock, later Lord Avebury, after several failed bills, and it created a state duty toward ancient monuments. In that year General Pitt Rivers became the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments. The Act carried a schedule of 68 sites in Britain and Ireland. Castlerigg was on it.

The designation is dated 18 August 1882. One narrative says Dover dug a year before the site was scheduled, but the dated records put the designation in August 1882 and the society's visit, after his trench, on 5 October 1882. The following year, 1883, the circle was taken into state care. Under the Act a landowner could sign a deed of guardianship by which the monument, though not the soil it stood on, became state property.

Castlerigg was among the first sites to enter such an agreement, and for that reason it has a small place in the history of archaeological conservation. The legal entry was amended on 13 October 1993. The official description calls it one of the finest large irregular stone circles in England, still free of modern building.

In 1913 Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley was among the people who organised a public subscription to buy the whole field. He then gave the field to the National Trust. Rawnsley, who lived from 1851 to 1920, was Vicar of Crosthwaite, near Keswick, from 1883 for thirty-four years. With his wife Edith he founded the Keswick School of Industrial Art.

In 1893 he joined Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill in founding the National Trust, because protest and law alone could not hold land. The 1913 purchase is the local result of that idea. Care of the stones stayed with the state. Ownership of the grass stayed with the National Trust.

The two still look after the place together.

Modern work has been survey rather than excavation. In 1985 a geophysical survey covered the scheduled ground and the field immediately west of it, in the hope of understanding the circle better and explaining it to visitors. A preliminary report was drawn up in 1986. A full report of that survey has still not been published.

The 2004 laser scan, already mentioned, answered a claim about a spiral and did not rewrite the plan of the ring. The 2021 survey is the one that hinted at an earlier bank and ditch and at a medieval reading of the inner rectangle. A heritage inventory also records an unpublished geophysical survey of the land at the circle, written up in 2026. Its findings are not in print, so they cannot yet change the story.

John Waterhouse, in his study of the stone circles of Cumbria, called this site one of the most visually impressive prehistoric monuments in Britain. Thousands of people come every year, and it is the most visited stone circle in Cumbria. Their feet have stripped soil from around the stones and revealed the packing. The wear is watched, and it is not judged severe enough to threaten the uprights.

At the solstices the circle is still a gathering place, even though no solar line here is agreed. In recent years that use has left damage. Illegal pits, from fires or from cremation deposits, are often visible in the centre.

The official conditions of a visit are simple. Admission is free. The site is open any reasonable time during daylight hours. Dogs are not allowed off a lead, because sheep graze the field.

Naked flames are not allowed. On some summer days, if the weather holds, volunteers stand in the field and give short talks. The ground is often muddy and slippery. None of that explains the Neolithic choice of the hill.

It does explain how a monument scheduled in 1882 is kept open, without a roof and without a ticket, on a working pasture inside a World Heritage landscape.

What led to the circle was a farming society in the late Neolithic of north-west Britain, living among valleys that were wet and wooded, using the dry ridges, and already heir to an older axe-making tradition in the high fells even if that tradition had peaked before the stones went up. What was at stake, if the midwinter reading is right, was the return of the sun and the meeting of scattered households. What the place became is easier to document than what it was. Antiquaries mistook it for a Druid temple and for a grave.

Poets used it as the image of an ancient Britain. A trench in 1882 found charcoal and dark earth and no object that answered the question. The state took the stones in 1883, and a local canon bought the field for the public in 1913. Surveys since then have subtracted false carvings, weakened the axe-market theory, and added the possibility that the inner rectangle is medieval and that an older earthwork lies under the ring.

The stones are still there, on the hill above Keswick, with the fells of the Lake District around them, and with the argument unfinished.