Qualla: Castlerigg Stone Circle

Castlerigg Stone Circle: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0. Try to count the stones at Castlerigg. There is a tradition - shared with most other British stone circles - that no two counts ever agree. At Castlerigg this is partly because soil erosion has revealed packing stones that were originally buried, so the answer depends on whether you count them. Most people say forty. Some say thirty-eight. The National Trust sign at the gate commits to forty. Whatever you settle on, the stones have been standing on this raised plateau east of Keswick for around five thousand years - one of the earliest stone circles in Britain, possibly in Europe - and the people who put them there left no explanation.

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Image: Enric | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castlerigg Stone Circle: What a Glacier Left

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gjoseph at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The stones are not quarried. They are glacial erratics, boulders of andesitic lava and volcanic tuff dropped here when the last ice sheets retreated about ten thousand years ago. They belong to the Borrowdale Volcanic Group, the same rock that built Helvellyn and Scafell. Castler...

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Image: Gjoseph at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Castlerigg Stone Circle: The Mountain Amphitheatre

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AdamMIbbotson, CC BY 4.0. Castlerigg sits on a low plateau that forms the centre of a natural amphitheatre of fells. From inside the ring, the eye travels around a 360-degree horizon of mountains: Helvellyn to the south-east, Skiddaw and Blencathra to the north, Grasmoor to the west. The archaeologist Joh...

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Image: AdamMIbbotson | CC BY 4.0

Castlerigg Stone Circle: Druids and Antiquarians

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AdamMIbbotson, CC BY 4.0. The first published description of Castlerigg appeared in 1776, eleven years after its author had died. William Stukeley, an early antiquarian, had visited the site in 1725 and described "another Celtic work, very intire," sitting on "an eminence in the middle of a great concavit...

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Image: AdamMIbbotson | CC BY 4.0

Castlerigg Stone Circle: The Single Excavation

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0. Only one archaeological excavation has ever been carried out at Castlerigg, in October 1882, by a man named W. Kinsey Dover. He dug a narrow trench through the inner rectangular enclosure and found, near the bottom, "a few small pieces of burned wood or charcoal" and "some dark u...

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Image: Enric | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castlerigg Stone Circle: A Field Bought by Public Subscription

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1883, the year after Dover's dig, Castlerigg became one of the first sites scheduled under the new Ancient Monuments Protection Act. In 1913, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley - one of the three founders of the National Trust - organised a public subscription to buy the field the circl...

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Image: Enric | CC BY-SA 4.0