Qualla: Stannon Stone Circle

Stannon Stone Circle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University), Public domain. Stand in the supposed centre of the circle and turn until your shoulder points to a compass bearing between twenty-two and twenty-eight degrees north of east. There, on the skyline, is Rough Tor. Whoever raised these stones some four thousand years ago made sure of that sightline. They flattened the ring on its northern side, as Alexander Thom would later classify it - a Type A flattened circle, like its neighbour at Fernacre - and they set it deliberately on the gentle slope of Dinnever Hill, two streams running past on either side. Two and a half miles south-east of Camelford, on the open western edge of Bodmin Moor, Stannon waits. The only company you are likely to meet are moor ponies and the wind.

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Image: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University) | Public domain

Stannon Stone Circle: Counting the Stones

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University), Public domain. Stannon contains 47 upright stones, 30 recumbent on the ground, and 2 that have shifted out of position - 79 in total, spaced regularly around an oval roughly 42.6 metres by 40.5 metres. Four further stones stand outside the main ring, jagged and isolated. Most are about half a m...

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Image: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University) | Public domain

Stannon Stone Circle: The Settlement Below the Circle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University), Public domain. In the late 1960s, the archaeologist R. J. Mercer dug at Stannon Down, the broader landscape that contains the circle. He uncovered eight round houses from a settlement that probably held more than twenty, each between six and eight metres across, with fields for cultivation and ...

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Image: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University) | Public domain

Stannon Stone Circle: The Quarry on the Hill

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jon Coupland, CC BY-SA 2.0. The view that frames Stannon today is not entirely ancient. To one side, the slope rises to a vast china clay works - white scars and tiered terraces cut into the moor, conveyor belts and settling ponds, the industrial extraction of kaolin that has shaped this part of Cornwall fo...

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Image: Jon Coupland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Stannon Stone Circle: Sunrise on the Horizon

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University), Public domain. What was Stannon for? The honest answer is that nobody knows. But the alignments suggest something. The nineteenth-century researcher Matthew Gregory Lewis noticed that the relationship of these moorland monuments to their surrounding hills indicated deliberate consideration of s...

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Image: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University) | Public domain