# Hurlers Stone Circles

group of three stone circles in Cornwall, England, UK

St Cleer, United Kingdom

Monument

## Story

• Three granite circles stand on the south-eastern side of Bodmin Moor near Minions, with the Pipers to the west, in a grouping of three large regular rings that is unique in England.
• They are Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. The central stones were hammered smooth, and quartz left in the ring has been read both as a ritual deposit and as dressing chips.
• A granite pavement between the northern and central circles was found in the 1930s, covered again, and opened once more in 2013.
• Courtenay Arthur Ralegh Radford excavated and partly restored the northern and central circles in 1935 and 1936. The southern circle was left undug.
• In September 2016 a search for a fourth circle found a fallen standing stone about 100 metres to the north and the tip of a late Neolithic flint arrowhead.
• Legend says the stones were men turned to stone for playing hurling on a Sunday, and that the Pipers were musicians who met the same fate.

## Visiting

Entry is free, and the circles are open any reasonable time during daylight hours. Smoking, vaping, barbecues, and naked flames are not allowed. Dogs are welcome on leads and are not allowed to run free where sheep and ponies graze.

## History

The Hurlers are three granite stone circles on the south-eastern side of Bodmin Moor, west of Minions, with a pair of outliers called the Pipers to the west. They are Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, and a group of three large regular circles is unique in England. The parish is given both as Saint Cleer and as Linkinhorne.

The northern circle is a true ring about 34.7 metres across, with fifteen original stones still visible and an original total put at thirty. The central circle is the largest, about 43.4 by 41.7 metres, bulging slightly to the east, with fourteen original stones and a reconstructed total of twenty-nine. The southern circle, about 32.8 metres across, was not excavated in the 1930s and has nine stones left, two of them upright. Other accounts give diameters of about 35, 42, and 33 metres, and they do not agree on how many stones still stand.

A strip of granite paving about 1.8 metres wide, also described as about six feet wide, lay between the northern and central circles. It was found in 1938, covered over, and uncovered again in 2013. Quartz crystals in the central circle have been read as a ritual deposit and as chippings from hammer-dressing. A survey in 1879 had seen no artificial shaping.

The axis through the northern circles points to the Rillaton barrow, about 460 metres away on the skyline. A tilt in the line brings the southern pair toward a round cairn. Farther to the west-north-west stand a separate circle, an embanked avenue, and a stone row. Those monuments are not further rings of the Hurlers.

Tin pits of the Prosper Lode were dug between and inside the circles from the sixteenth century, and a miners' leat was levelled where it crossed the central ring during the work of 1935 and 1936. Courtenay Arthur Ralegh Radford excavated and partly restored the northern and central circles in those years, for the Office of Works, and he set marker stones in empty sockets. He hoped to examine the Rillaton barrow in 1939. The gold cup from that barrow was already in the British Museum.

John Norden mentioned and drew the stones in 1584 and compared them to men hurling, while another account dates his words to 1650, after the year given for his death. Richard Carew and William Camden set down the Sunday legend and the rival ideas of a battle trophy or boundary stones. William Borlase published a detailed account before 1754, and a survey read in 1879 showed that the three centres are not on one straight line.

In September 2016 a five-day excavation looked for a fourth circle first suspected in the early 1990s and did not find one. It found a fallen standing stone about 100 metres to the north, a stone that people had carried to the spot, and the tip of a late Neolithic flint arrowhead. The circles were designated on 9 October 1981, and the designation was amended on 7 February 1994, when the protected ground was extended to include the Pipers.

## Photographs

- [The Hurlers, drei Steinkreise aus der frühen Bronzezeit in Cornwall, England — Olaf Tausch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Hurlers_04.jpg)
- [The Hurlers (stone circles). — Alan Simkins](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Hurlers.jpg)
- [The Hurlers, drei Steinkreise aus der frühen Bronzezeit in Cornwall, England — Olaf Tausch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Hurlers_01.jpg)
- [The Hurlers, drei Steinkreise aus der frühen Bronzezeit in Cornwall, England — Olaf Tausch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Hurlers_02.jpg)
- [The Hurlers, drei Steinkreise aus der frühen Bronzezeit in Cornwall, England — Olaf Tausch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Hurlers_03.jpg)
- [The Hurlers, drei Steinkreise aus der frühen Bronzezeit in Cornwall, England — Olaf Tausch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Hurlers_05.jpg)
- [The Hurlers, drei Steinkreise aus der frühen Bronzezeit in Cornwall, England — Olaf Tausch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Hurlers_06.jpg)
- [The Hurlers, drei Steinkreise aus der frühen Bronzezeit in Cornwall, England — Olaf Tausch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Hurlers_07.jpg)
- [The Hurlers, drei Steinkreise aus der frühen Bronzezeit in Cornwall, England — Olaf Tausch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Hurlers_08.jpg)
- [The Hurlers, three stone circles from the early Bronze Age on the southern edge of Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, England — Olaf Tausch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Hurlers_09.jpg)

## Sources

- [The Hurlers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hurlers) — Wikipedia
- [History of The Hurlers Stone Circles](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hurlers-stone-circles/history/) — English Heritage
- [Hurlers Stone Circles](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hurlers-stone-circles/) — English Heritage
- [The Hurlers: three stone circles with paired outlying stones](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1008117) — Historic England
- [The Hurlers scheduled monument details](https://ancientmonuments.uk/106332-the-hurlers-three-stone-circles-with-paired-outlying-stones-linkinhorne) — Ancient Monuments
- [The Hurlers](https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/dymond_hurlers/pages/main.html) — C W Dymond
- [Restoration of the Hurlers, Cornwall](https://doi.org/10.1038/142324b0) — Nature
- [Investigating Archaeology and Astronomy at The Hurlers, Cornwall 2013–2019](https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JSA/article/view/18192) — Journal of Skyscape Archaeology
- [Discovery at ancient site](https://www.cornish-times.co.uk/news/discovery-at-ancient-site-127094) — Cornish Times
- [Reading the Hurlers: archaeology](https://readingthehurlers.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html) — Reading the Hurlers
- [Alexander Thom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Thom) — Wikipedia
- [John Norden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Norden) — Wikipedia
- [Ralegh Radford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralegh_Radford) — Wikipedia
- [Cornwall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornwall) — Wikipedia
- [Cornwall in the English Civil War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornwall_in_the_English_Civil_War) — Wikipedia
- [Bodmin Moor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodmin_Moor) — Wikipedia
- [Cornish Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language) — Wikipedia
- [Almendres Cromlech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almendres_Cromlech) — Wikipedia
- [Hurlers 04.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurlers_04.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hurlers.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurlers.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hurlers 01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurlers_01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hurlers 02.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurlers_02.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hurlers 03.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurlers_03.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hurlers 05.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurlers_05.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hurlers 06.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurlers_06.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hurlers 07.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurlers_07.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hurlers 08.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurlers_08.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hurlers 09.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurlers_09.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

The Hurlers are three prehistoric stone circles on the eastern side of Craddock Moor, on the south-eastern part of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. A close pair of outlying upright stones, the Pipers, stands to their west. The circles lie on a gentle south-facing slope in a broad, shallow basin between Caradon Hill, Rillaton Moor, and the main plateau of Craddock Moor. They run for 162 metres on a north-north-east to south-south-west line, and that line tilts slightly as it passes through the central circle. One account places the group half a mile, or 0.8 kilometres, west of the village of Minions, and about four miles, or 6 kilometres, north of Liskeard. Another account, written in 1817, places the same monument three miles north of Liskeard. A mapped point for the circles is near 50 degrees 31 minutes north and 4 degrees 27 minutes west. Recorded grid references include SX 25784 71374 and SX 257713, with further points at SX 2581 7133, SX 2582 7139, and SX 2584 7146.

The parish is not given in only one way. The circles are placed in the civil parish of Saint Cleer, and also in Linkinhorne. A survey read in 1879 says they stand partly on the common of Carnedon Prior, in Linkinhorne, and partly in the adjoining parish of Saint Cleer, with the greater part in Linkinhorne. An earlier account uses the spelling Saint Clare. The Cornish name of the circles is An Hurlysi.

Bodmin Moor is the granite upland around them. Its Cornish Standard Written Form name is Goon Brenn. The moor covers 208 square kilometres, or 80 square miles, in north-eastern Cornwall, and the granite dates from the Permian period. It is one of five granite plutons in Cornwall that belong to the Cornubian batholith. The intrusion dates from the Cisuralian epoch, the earliest part of the Permian, and outcrops across about 190 square kilometres, or 73 square miles. Around its edges, where it met Devonian slates, the country rock has been hornfelsed. Peat on the moor is Holocene. Blockfields of granite boulders are a periglacial feature of the Pleistocene. The name Bodmin Moor is relatively recent. An early printed mention is in the Royal Cornwall Gazette of 28 November 1812. Before that, the upland was known as Fowey Moor, after the River Fowey, which rises on it.

Brown Willy, at 417 metres, or 1,368 feet, is the highest point in Cornwall. Rough Tor reaches 400 metres, or 1,300 feet. Kilmar Tor and Caradon Hill are the prominent hills to the south-east. Much of the moor is poorly drained marsh, which can dry in a hot summer, and the rest is mostly rough pasture, heather, and other low plants. The moor holds about 500 holdings, with around 10,000 beef cattle, 55,000 breeding ewes, and 1,000 horses and ponies. Most of it is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, Bodmin Moor, North, and it lies in the Cornwall National Landscape. It has been identified as an Important Bird Area because it supports about 260 breeding pairs of European stonechats and a wintering population of about 10,000 Eurasian golden plovers. Rivers that rise here include the Fowey, at about 290 metres or 950 feet, the Tiddy, the Inny, and the Camel. The Camel runs for about 40 kilometres, or 25 miles, to the sea at Padstow. People have lived on the moor since at least the Neolithic, when early farmers began clearing trees. They left megalithic monuments, hut circles, and cairns. The Bronze Age culture that followed left further cairns, and more stone circles and stone rows. By medieval and modern times nearly all the forest was gone, and livestock rearing predominated.

About 150 prehistoric stone circles are known in England, and 16 of them are on Bodmin Moor, the largest of the Cornish granite uplands. Where circles of this class have been excavated, they have been found to date from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age, about 2400 to 1000 BC. The Hurlers themselves are described as Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. A close grouping of three circles is extremely rare in England. A grouping of three such large regular circles is unique. The slabs are granite, the local rock. Many have flat inner faces, and several have flattened tops.

The northern circle is a true circle 34.7 metres in diameter. Fifteen original stones are still visible. Excavation in 1935 and 1936 found the buried holes of ten more, now marked on the surface by small stones set in those holes during the reconstruction. Regular spacing implies five further stones that were not located, which gives an original total of 30. The spacing is regular except at the north-west, where a small surface outcrop cuts into the circuit. The surviving stones are upright or leaning slabs, 1.07 to 1.55 metres long, which is also their vertical height, and the tallest stand in the south-south-east sector. Another published set of diameters, given from north to south, is 114 feet, 140 feet, and 108 feet, with heights from 2 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 10 inches. A public account gives the three diameters as 35 metres or 115 feet, 42 metres or 138 feet, and 33 metres or 108 feet. A field note gives the northern circle as 34.7 metres, with 11 upright stones and 4 fallen ones, and says that many missing monoliths survive only as stumps 0.2 to 0.4 metres high.

The central circle is the largest and the best preserved. It is near-circular, bulging slightly to the east, and measures 43.4 metres east to west by 41.7 metres north to south. Fourteen original stones survive, with fourteen markers for holes of missing stones found in 1935 and 1936. Regular spacing implies one further stone, never located, at the south-south-west, where a later tin pit disturbed the ground, giving an original total of 29. The surviving original stones are 1.4 to 1.74 metres long, graded so that the largest stand toward the south, except in the south-east, where a later break has reduced one stone. A field note instead gives this circle a diameter of 42.5 metres, with 15 upright stones and 1 fallen stone. An older notice of the same excavation says the centre originally held 28 stones, that the sockets of the missing ones had survived, and that on the side nearest the southern circle there was a double space, with a larger pit containing rough paving where an upright might have stood. The public account says 14 stones survive out of 28, and calls the middle ring slightly elliptical, while the two outer rings are circular. A note of 1938 says that four stones of the northern circle, beyond twelve already known, were found under modern tip heaps. The man who recorded thirteen northern stones in 1879 is also credited with a count of thirteen in a survey of 1877. Those figures do not all match the later total of fifteen visible northern stones, or the reconstructed total of thirty.

The southern circle was not excavated or restored in 1935 and 1936, and it is the least well preserved. It stands 25.3 metres from the central circle. Nine original stones remain, two upright and seven fallen. Four shallow hollows on the circuit are taken to mark missing stones, but most of the missing positions are still unknown. The stones and hollows follow a true circle 32.8 metres across. Regular spacing in the eastern and south-western sectors, projected around the full circuit, gives an original total of 29. The surviving stones are 1.1 to 2.35 metres long, and there is no evidence that they were graded by height. A field note gives an approximate diameter of 32.0 metres, with 2 upright stones and 6, or possibly 7, fallen stones. In 1862 the southern circle was said to have only two stones standing, the middle circle ten, and the northern circle six, with a guess that the outer circles might once have had about twenty-four stones each and the middle one about thirty or thirty-one.

The Pipers are two erect granite pillars, 118 metres south-west of the centre of the central circle. They stand 2 metres apart on a west-south-west to east-north-east axis. Each is roughly squared, up to 0.55 metres wide and 0.45 metres thick, and 1.9 metres high, with a blunt tip. Another account places the pair 100 metres, or 330 feet, south-west of the middle circle, and allows that they may be entrance stones. A survey of 1879 found that a line through the two stones, if extended, is approximately a tangent to the middle circle. Both stones are nearly the same shape, and both lean the same way, to nearly the same degree. The legend says they were two men who played tunes on a Sunday and were turned to stone for it. The circles themselves are said to be men who were playing hurling on a Sunday and were transformed as a punishment. One early wording says they were playing at ball on a Sunday. Another says the countrymen believed the stones had once been balls, changed into stone because the Lord's day had been profaned. A further legend says the stones cannot be counted accurately, because a second count never matches the first.

In the gap of 27.4 metres between the northern and central circles, the 1935 and 1936 excavation found a strip of granite paving 1.8 metres wide, running north-north-east to south-south-west. A note of 1938 calls the same pavement about six feet wide, laid along the common axis, and says it does not reach both circles. That note treats a ceremonial use as a suggestion still to be tested. The pavement was covered again after it was found, and excavation in 2013 uncovered it once more. The same 1938 season found a floor of granite fragments over most of the interior of the northern circle. That floor was thinner than a floor found in the central circle in 1935. The note suggests the difference might mean the northern floor stayed in use longer. It also says the flint tools of 1938 were more numerous than those of 1935, and that they included types of the early metal age together with some of an earlier period.

Inside the central circle the 1935 and 1936 dig found a layer of quartz crystals. It was considered a ritual deposit, but it was also derived from hammer-dressing the stones. The chippings had been left nearby. All the stones of the central circle had been hammered smooth. A public account says the stones of the circles show clear traces of that hammering. This sits against a careful look in 1879, which found no sign that the stones had been artificially shaped, and which put their regular faces down to the natural planes on which the moor granite splits into rhomboidal blocks. The same excavation found a small slab 6 metres south of the centre and set it up again. An earlier note of that dig says a prostrate stone was found near the centre, and that it was not known whether it had ever stood upright.

Stone robbing has damaged every circle to some extent. Cattle put onto the moor have knocked stones over: cows use them as scratching posts, wear the ground away, and undermine them. The 1879 survey blamed sheep, which shelter on the lee side, wear hollows that fill with water, soften the soil, and leave badly founded stones without support. Since a visit in 1870, one northern stone had been blasted, so that only its eastern corner stayed where it had been, and a large piece had been broken off a stone of the middle circle and taken away. Fences and cottages nearby had long offered a use for loose granite. In 1802 a visitor thought some stones had been carried off for gate-posts. He also thought he was looking at two circles, one inside the other, of moor stones about five or six feet high, and he read the pits in the interiors as places where the earth had sunk over large graves. The 1879 survey found no rifled barrows on the site, and read those pits as mining holes. Two pits almost on the rim of the middle circle may have begun as the hollows of removed stones and then been enlarged.

From the sixteenth century, tinners followed the west-north-west to east-south-east lodes by digging rows of small pits, called lode-back pits. A double row, the pits about 2 to 3 metres across and 5 to 8 metres apart, each with its spoil heap, worked the Prosper Lode. Early air photographs show that row passing between the central and southern circles. Further pits were dug to either side, prospecting for the edges of the lode. Two such pits lie in the south-south-west sector of the central circle, and at least seven are scattered north-north-east to south-south-west across the southern circle. Several pits inside and west of the monument were filled and levelled in the 1935 and 1936 reconstruction. A nineteenth-century miners' leat was levelled in those same years where it crossed the northern sector of the central circle on a west-north-west to east-south-east line. It remains faintly visible on some aerial photographs. A slight bank crossing the central circle is also put down to post-medieval tin mining. Shallow hollows along one edge of the north-western outcrop come from an early post-medieval attempt to split that slab.

Peat was stacked on the moor before it was carried off. The stack places show as small sub-rectangular platforms, each with a shallow ditch and an outer bank. Two of them lie within the monument, 5 metres and 40 metres west of the southern circle. An 1879 survey also describes a slight bank and shallow ditch, like the boundaries used to mark the limits of common rights, crossing the middle circle and running on in both directions.

The circles share lines with other monuments of broadly the same age on Craddock Moor and Caradon Hill. This is one of several ritual foci on Bodmin Moor. The axis through the centres of the two northern circles points directly at the Rillaton barrow, 460 metres north-north-east of the northern circle and on the skyline when seen from that circle. The tilt through the central circle brings the southern pair into line with a prehistoric round cairn 215 metres south-south-west of the southern circle, on the opposite slope of the basin. The circles also line up with the Craddock Moor stone circle, 1.038 kilometres to the west-north-west. That circle is a separate monument, not a fourth ring of the Hurlers. Further along the same alignment, 525 metres west-north-west of the Craddock Moor circle, is a prehistoric embanked avenue, whose rubble banks share the alignment back toward the Hurlers. A prehistoric stone row, 295 metres west-north-west of that avenue, has its axis at right angles to the line through the avenue and the circles. One account of the same landscape says that a line at right angles to the main axis, taken through the central circle, takes in another stone circle, an embanked avenue, and a stone row. The numerous alignments have prompted the suggestion that the Hurlers may have belonged to a Bronze Age processional route. The uses of stone circles are not fully known. Circles of this class had considerable ritual importance. Excavation at many sites has shown a focus for burials and for the rites that went with them. Some circles seem to have marked the year, by the alignment of stones on sunrise or sunset at midsummer or midwinter. The spacing of separate circles across a landscape has also been read as a sign that each served a particular group. None of those class-wide readings is a burial found inside these three rings.

In 1967 Alexander Thom treated the Hurlers as a borderline case for astronomical alignment. He proposed two solar alignments, each of four stones with distant uprights. He proposed two alignments from stones to the site involving the stars Vega and Arcturus, and two further alignments from this site to other sites involving Arcturus. For each stellar alignment he tabulated a declination at a date somewhere between 2100 and 1500 BC. That range is his suggested date for the sight-lines, not a date from a sample dug out of a socket. Alexander Thom, born at Carradale on 26 March 1894 and dead on 7 November 1985, was a Scottish engineer. He argued for a megalithic yard as a standard prehistoric measure, first set out in 1955, and he sorted stone circles into types: true circles, ovals, flattened circles, and egg shapes. He measured more than five hundred megalithic sites, often with a theodolite, and he thought some complexes were built to predict eclipses on a nineteen-year cycle. His work on solar and stellar alignments became a foundation for archaeoastronomy. He also thought prehistoric people in Britain kept a solar calendar. Nothing in the account of the Hurlers says that these three rings were laid out in his megalithic yard. A surveyor in 1879 had already doubted that circles of this kind were set out to an astronomical or numerical plan, except perhaps for the numbers 9 and 19 in rings of a convenient size. He did note a likeness, not an identity, with the three circles at Stanton Drew: a broken line of centres, a larger middle ring, and a pair of detached stones, with the relative heights and diameters of the outer rings reversed between the two places. Stanton Drew is not the Hurlers.

A study of work at the circles from 2013 to 2019, by Jacqueline Nowakowski, Carolyn Kennett, James Gossip, and Brian Sheen, describes significant alignments between monuments and both near and distant landmarks, and further astronomical links connected with the material of the pavement between the circles. The study does not replace Thom's star names with a different published list of targets. Jacqueline Nowakowski is also the Jacky Nowakowski who, with John Gould, went back over the unpublished archives of the 1930s dig. In 2009 she, John Gould, James Gossip, and others assessed the site and reported that there might be a fourth circle and two stone rows. Between 1975 and 1985, aerial survey and mapping by teams from Cambridge, University College London, and the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, coordinated by the Cornwall Archaeological Unit, had already been used to plot the surrounding features. A geophysical survey was made in 2004.

The suspected fourth circle had been noticed in the early 1990s. It was thought to be about 21 to 23 metres across, about 105 metres north of the northern circle. It had been surveyed, not dug. From 13 to 18 September 2016 a five-day excavation, the Reading the Hurlers project, tested it. About fifty volunteers worked with the Cornwall Archaeological Society, people from the district, Truro College, University College London, and amateur geologists from the Caradon Amateur Geology Group and the Saltash group of the University of the Third Age. The stones were not a fourth circle. At the foot of a large recumbent stone the dig found a stone-lined socket, so the stone had once stood. It is also described as a solitary fallen stone, once upright, about 100 metres north of the complex. The two distances belong to that same search. The stone may have marked a ceremonial entrance, or stood at the head of a processional approach. Some of the excavated stones are more than two metres long. Geological work led by Calum Beeson found that one of the larger stones did not come from the immediate ground and did not appear to have arrived by a natural process, so people had carried it. The same trench produced the tip of a late Neolithic flint arrowhead. It was probably knapped from a local beach pebble, it had been broken soon after it was used, and it showed little wear. Emma Stockley, the project coordinator, described the standing stone as a new part of the landscape around the circles. A newspaper report of 24 September 2016 gives the same result: not a fourth circle, but a recumbent stone brought from elsewhere and perhaps set as a ceremonial entrance.

In 2013 the linked project Mapping the Sun, during the Caradon Hill Area Heritage Project, opened the pavement between the northern and central circles again. The finds from that season are given as two worked flints of Mesolithic date, a flint arrowhead, a small flint knife, and two flint scrapers. The project suggested that the stones of the northern and central circles had been chosen from different places in the local and wider landscape, and that the three circles were built by different but linked communities in the Early Bronze Age, about 2500 to 1700 BC. The Mesolithic flints were taken to show people on the moor at least two thousand years earlier, about 6000 to 4000 BC, before the circles were built. That is a reading of the finds, not a foundation date cut from a stone-hole. A fuller write-up of the 1930s excavation, under the title of reclaiming the Hurlers, was still in preparation when the 2013 to 2019 study was published.

The circles were not the first human use of the ground, and they were not the last. Cornwall, in Cornish Kernow, is the ceremonial county and the homeland of the Cornish people, bordered by the Atlantic, Devon, and the English Channel. It covers 1,375 square miles, or 3,562 square kilometres, with an estimated population of 585,655 in 2024. The name joins a Celtic word for a horn or headland with an Old English word for a Brittonic speaker. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 891 the name appears as On Corn walum. The county was later called West Wales, to distinguish it from what is now Wales. Humans were here in the Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic, and occupation continued through the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. In the Late Bronze Age the peninsula took part in a maritime culture that researchers call the Atlantic Bronze Age, reaching across Ireland, England, Wales, France, Spain, and Portugal. Tin, needed to make bronze, was scarce, which is why Devon and Cornwall drew interest. A first-century BC writer, said to be following a fourth-century BC voyage, describes the people of Belerion, or Land's End, preparing tin and selling it to merchants who carried it through Gaul to the mouth of the Rhône. That trade is not evidence that the merchants built these circles, which belong to an earlier or overlapping prehistoric age, and the writer does not say that Phoenician sailors came to Cornwall. Isotopic work has suggested that tin ingots found off Haifa may have come from Cornwall.

In the British Iron Age the people were Britons, speaking Common Brittonic, with close ties to Brittany. Roman presence in Cornwall was thin. The nearest major Roman centre was Isca Dumnoniorum, now Exeter. A road system did reach the peninsula. A fort at Tregear near Nanstallon was found in the early 1970s. Two more sites were found at Restormel Castle, Lostwithiel, in 2007, and a fort near Calstock was found early in 2007. A Roman-style villa was found at Magor Farm, Illogan, in 1935. After 410 the region is understood to have passed to Romano-Celtic rulers of the Cornovii, inside the Brittonic kingdom of Dumnonia, which also took in Devon and the Isles of Scilly. Tintagel was a significant base in the early sixth century. The Battle of Deorham in 577 is linked to the separation of Dumnonia, and therefore Cornwall, from Wales. From the seventh century the Britons of the south-west were in conflict with the expanding kingdom of Wessex, and they were pushed west of the Tamar. King Athelstan set that boundary in 936. By the Norman Conquest, Cornwall was administered as part of England and kept its own culture. It became a duchy in 1337. Tin and then copper boomed and declined in the industrial age, china clay became a major industry, and railways fed a tourist trade in the twentieth century. None of those later towns, forts, or the duchy is the stone circles. They are the political and economic history of the county in which the rings already stood.

The Cornish Language, Kernewek or Kernowek, is the Brittonic language of that country, alongside Welsh and Breton, all from Common Brittonic. It was the main language of Cornwall for much of the medieval period, then was pushed west by English. It remained a community language in parts of the county until the middle of the eighteenth century, with some evidence of traditional speakers into the nineteenth. As a living community language it had gone by the end of the eighteenth century, though knowledge stayed in some families. A revival began in the early twentieth century. In 2010 the language was reclassified as critically endangered, and an earlier classification of it as extinct was no longer treated as accurate. It is recognised under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. It is taught in schools, appears on street nameplates, and a first Cornish-language day care opened in 2010. A plan exists to establish a bilingual school by 2036 at the latest. The circles' own Cornish name belongs to that revived naming of the landscape, not to a sentence carved on the stones.

The Almendres Cromlech is not this monument and not in Cornwall. It is a megalithic complex 4.5 kilometres by road west-south-west of Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe, in the municipality of Évora, in the Portuguese Alentejo, and it is the largest existing group of structured menhirs in the Iberian Peninsula. Its building is placed in the sixth millennium BC. It was rediscovered in 1966 by Henrique Leonor Pina during work on geological maps. Excavation distinguished an early phase about 6000 BC, a middle phase about 5000 BC, and a late phase about 4000 BC, running from the Neolithic into the Chalcolithic. About ninety-five granite monoliths stand in groups. The older ones form two or three concentric circles of smaller stones on the west. The middle phase has two irregular concentric ellipses and large menhirs. In the late phase the place was altered for social or religious rites. Ninety-two of the menhirs form two grounds oriented on the equinox. The complex covers about 70 by 40 metres, on a north-west to south-east axis. Many stones were re-erected by Mario Varela Gomes. It has been read as a ceremonial place or as a rough astronomical observatory. Its latitude has been compared with a maximum lunar standstill, and a similar comparison has been made at a different latitude for Stonehenge. Those Portuguese phases are much earlier than the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age date given for the Hurlers, and no account makes the two sites one design.

The earliest topographical notices of Cornwall, the itineraries of William of Worcester in the time of Edward IV and of John Leland in the time of Henry VIII, do not mention the Hurlers. The first written account is probably that of John Norden, a cartographer and antiquary born in Somerset in 1548, or about 1547, and dead in 1625. He was educated at Hart Hall, Oxford. He planned a series of county maps and histories, the Speculum Britanniae, of which the Middlesex part appeared in 1593 and the Hertfordshire part in 1598. His account of Cornwall was finished in 1610 and published in 1728. In 1605 he became surveyor of the Duchy of Cornwall, and in 1612 surveyor of the royal castles in the south-western counties, among others. He is said to have visited the circles around 1584, and the scheduled account says he both mentioned and drew them in 1584. His drawing, of about thirty stones of nearly equal size in an artistic scatter, was later judged imaginary and of no use as a plan. His words put the stones at about six feet high and two feet square, some bigger and some smaller, set in a straggling way like countrymen performing the pastime of hurling. He thought the monument seemed to preserve the memory of something done in that exercise, though time had worn out the manner. A later heritage account dates a description by him, comparing the stones to men performing that pastime, to 1650. That year is after the death date of 1625, and it is also distinct from the Cornwall text finished in 1610 and printed in 1728. The visit, the drawing, the finished manuscript, the printed book, and the date 1650 cannot all be one moment.

Richard Carew's Survey of Cornwall is cited both as written before 1586 and as a detailed description of 1602. He placed the stones not far from Doniert's Stone, in an open plain, somewhat squared, set about a foot into the ground, with some six or eight standing upright at even intervals. He gave the name The Hurlers. He said that a repeated count never agreed with the first, as at Stonehenge. He gave the country people's report that the stones had been men, metamorphosed for hurling on the Sabbath, and he compared that story with one he thought he had read, of people in Germany who danced for a whole year after a priest's curse for a similar profanation. William Camden's Britannia of about 1586, whose sixth edition of 1607 names Carew as his chief guide through Cornwall, follows that picture: seven or eight squarish stones at equal distances, called Hurlers from a pious belief that they were men transformed for playing at ball on a Sunday. Camden also records two other ideas then current, that the stones were a trophy of a battle, or that they were boundary marks of the kind old writers on bounds describe. A translator, in an edition of 1695, rejected both the trophy and the landmark, called the stones oblong, rude, and unhewn, set on end in three circles whose centres lay in a straight line, the middle circle the greatest, and argued that they were burial places of the ancient Britons because the Other Half Stone nearby was a sepulchral inscription and the Long Stone, about half a mile away, above two and a half yards high and carrying a cross on both sides, was a funeral monument. The 1879 survey answered that nearby graves of a plainly later date are not evidence for burials in the circles.

A Latin account published at Amsterdam in 1661 calls the stones Hurletii and says the inhabitants believed they had once been balls, changed into stone because the common people had profaned the Lord's day. About 1685 William Hals described moorstones, some squared, about three feet high, with eight of them much taller, and repeated the old wives' tale of a Sunday hurling match. He did not believe the transformation. He guessed, against his grandmother's story, that the stones had been set up as funeral monuments. A parish history of Linkinhorne written in 1727 and published in 1876 counts about twenty-two great stones, compares the legend with Lot's wife, and then says the truth is that the place was a burial ground of the Britons, the tale invented to stop people digging up ancestral bones. The editor's added measurements were later found wrong in almost every figure.

William Borlase, writing before 1754, gave the first detailed published description. He put the monument in the parish of Saint Clare, said it consisted of three circles with their centres in a line, and said many stones had been carried off. The vulgar belief, in his words, was that the stones had been men, punished for hurling on the Lord's day. His perspective view shows sixteen stones in the northern circle, nine erect and seven fallen; seventeen in the middle, eight erect and nine fallen; and twelve in the southern circle, three erect and nine fallen. The 1879 survey accepts that the totals may be nearly right but not the drawing, because the middle circle shows fewer standing stones than were still rooted in their holes. It allows that perhaps three or four stones had gone from the northern and middle circles since Borlase's visit, and one from the southern circle. C S Gilbert in 1817 still has three circles in Saint Cleer, stones from three to five feet high, centres in a line, the middle circle larger and the outer two of similar size, and he calls the place a site of worship whose centre stone or altar no longer appears. The centres are not, in fact, on one straight line. The 1879 plan puts the centre of the southern circle 24 feet east of the line through the other two, and the centre of the northern circle 24 feet 6 inches east of the line through the middle and southern centres. That broken line matches the later description of an axis that tilts as it passes through the central circle.

On the stones still visible in 1879, excluding scattered blocks that could not be tied to the monument, the count was thirty-nine: in the northern circle six erect and seven fallen; in the middle, ten erect and three fallen; in the southern, two erect and nine fallen; and the two outliers erect. The northern circle stood on the highest part of a flat saddle, the southern circle on the lowest, and the outliers nearly on the southern level. Intervals in the northern circle fell at about twelve and a half feet or a multiple of that distance. If that spacing had run unbroken round the ring, which the analogy of other circles did not support, the full number would be twenty-nine, at an average of 12 feet 4 inches. The middle circle averaged 15 feet 2 inches, again a theoretical twenty-nine stones, with actual gaps from 14 to 15 and a half feet. The southern circle, much ruined, averaged 12 feet 7 inches, which would give twenty-seven stones if every gap had been equal. Those theoretical totals sit beside the later excavated totals of thirty, twenty-nine, and a projected twenty-nine. A glossary then current offered two origins for the name: a compound of words for fire and a hearth, or the likeness of the scattered stones to men playing the Cornish game. The second was the one a surveyor would choose.

Cornwall in the English Civil War is a later history of this county, not a battle at the circles. No account of the rings places the fighting on the moor among the stones. The war is still the political crisis of the peninsula in the century after Norden and Carew and before Hals. It ran from the battle of Edgehill, in Warwickshire, on Sunday 23 October 1642, to the battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651. Cornwall was a Royalist enclave in a generally Parliamentarian south-west. In October 1642 about 10,000 men rose under the local Royalist gentry and drove a small Parliamentarian force out of Launceston. Sir Ralph Hopton formed the Cornish Royalist army that year. Its first invasion of Devon, in November and December 1642, failed, but it secured the Cornish side of Plymouth Sound. At Braddock Down, near Boconnoc, on 19 January 1643, Hopton defeated Colonel Ruthin's Parliamentarian troops. The siege of Plymouth was resumed. At Stratton, on 15 May 1643, Hopton's men, with five Old Cornish regiments, repelled the Earl of Stamford after a day's fighting. Three hundred men were killed and 1,700 captured, and the Parliamentarians retreated to Bideford. The Cornish army then took Taunton and Bridgwater. Sir Bevil Grenville was killed at the moment of victory at Lansdown in Somerset, and Hopton was seriously wounded. Bristol fell to the Royalist troops, and then Exeter. On 13 December the Royalists bombarded the northern defences of Plymouth with little effect. Sir Richard Grenville, who had declared for Parliament, invited his troops into the king's service, and Parliament proclaimed him a traitor.

In March 1644 Grenville kept a blockade of Plymouth that became a stalemate, because the town could still be supplied. Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, brought a Roundhead army of 8,000 and forced Grenville back across the Tamar. In June 1644 Essex took 9,500 men into the south-west and ended the Royalist sieges at Lyme and Plymouth without firing a shot. He entered Cornwall on 26 July, believing local support would let him break Royalist control. On the same day King Charles reached Exeter to hunt that army down. The king's force grew to 19,000 by joining Prince Maurice and Richard Grenville. Essex was trapped on the peninsula, with the sea as the only way out. He moved to Lostwithiel, about nine kilometres north of Fowey. By 13 August the king had reached Lostwithiel, and eight days later the Royalists took the high ground to the north and east. On 31 August Essex sent his cavalry across the River Fowey toward Plymouth, and they got away. He then tried to retreat to Fowey with the infantry. The king had been forewarned. The circles on the moor do not enter that campaign.

The man who dug the circles was Courtenay Arthur Ralegh Radford, born on 7 November 1900 at the Cedar House, Hillingdon, and dead on 27 December 1998. He was the only son of the antiquary Arthur Lock Radford and Ada Minnie Hemyng Bruton. He took his degree at Exeter College, Oxford, in modern history. In the early 1920s he worked at the excavations at Whitby Abbey. In 1929 he was appointed Inspector of Ancient Monuments for Wales and Monmouthshire. In the 1930s he excavated the Hurlers and partly restored them. In 1935 he also excavated the Roman villa at Ditchley in Oxfordshire. He held scholarships at the British School at Athens and the British School at Rome, and he was appointed director of the British School at Rome in 1936. A note of the moorland work calls him director of the British School of Archaeology at Rome. The circles had been in the guardianship of the Office of Works, and owned by it, since 1935, when the first investigation and restoration of the central circle was done. Guardianship agreements that year covered both the Hurlers and the Pipers. Over four weeks in 1938, still for the Office of Works, he turned to the northern circle. Four buried stones were to go back into their original sockets. Missing stones were to be shown, as in the central circle, by low stumps. Mining test-holes and digging inside the northern circle were to be filled and levelled. He hoped the work would continue in 1939 and that the monument could be restored, as far as possible, to its original appearance. He also intended to explore the neighbouring barrow in which the Rillaton gold cup, by then in the British Museum, had been found. As of that 1938 note, the barrow had never been explored scientifically. The cup and the barrow are not finds from inside the circles.

Radford's later career was mostly early medieval. He was awarded the OBE in 1947. He was secretary of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and Monmouthshire from 1946 to 1948. At Tintagel in the 1930s, influenced by Henry Jenner, he argued for a Celtic monastery rather than an Arthurian court. Those excavations have been criticised because the records were slight by later standards, and erosion after a fire in the mid-1980s showed more building foundations than he had recorded. He dug at Glastonbury in the 1960s. In 1972 he received the gold medal of the Society of Antiquaries. He was at different times president of the Prehistoric Society, the Royal Archaeological Institute, the Society for Medieval Archaeology, and, in 1947, the Devonshire Association. He was elected a bard of the Gorsedd of Cornwall in 1937. A festschrift marked his ninetieth birthday in 1990. He left his library and papers to the University of Exeter. His book Arthurian Sites in the West appeared in 1975. Whitby, Ditchley, Tintagel, and Glastonbury are other sites in that career. They are not the three rings at Minions. His account of the Hurlers themselves appeared in 1939.

The monument was designated on 9 October 1981, and the designation was amended on 7 February 1994. In 1994 the protected area was extended to include the Pipers. The circles have survived well, with only minor disturbance from a later boundary bank and from the tin pits. The limited dig and the reconstruction left substantial areas intact. In 1999 members of the Revived Cornish Stannary Parliament removed signs that carried the name of the national heritage agency. The case against three of them ended with them being bound over. After that, several smaller sites, including the Hurlers, Dupath Well, Tregiffian Burial Chamber, the Saint Breock Downs monolith, King Doniert's Stone, Trethevy Quoit, and Carn Euny, passed into the management of the Cornwall Heritage Trust. The trust manages the circles on behalf of the state heritage agency, which owns them. Trethevy Quoit, a Neolithic entrance grave also called the Trethevy Stone, stands in the same district and is not one of the circles. Doniert's Stone, the inscribed monument from which Carew took his bearings, is not one of them either. A song of 2008 by Seth Lakeman takes the circles as its subject. That is a modern use of the name, not a new reading of the sockets.

What the circles changed can be stated only as far as the ground and the later arguments allow. They gathered three large regular rings, a paved link between the northern pair, hammer-dressed granite, and a pair of outliers into one ceremonial group on a moor already marked by cairns, rows, and another circle. They fixed a line of sight from the northern rings to the Rillaton barrow and, by the tilt of the axis, from the southern pair to a round cairn. Later tinners cut pits and a leat through them and did not remove the group. Early modern writers could not agree whether they were a game frozen in stone, a battle trophy, boundary marks, or graves, and the only digging so far has produced dressing chips, paving, flints, a reset central slab, and no cemetery in the rings. The 2016 season removed a fourth circle from the map and put a carried standing stone, and a late Neolithic arrowhead, in its place.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/hurlers-stone-circles