Qualla: The Hurlers (stone circles)

The Hurlers (stone circles): Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0. The men were hurling. It was Sunday. According to the Cornish legend that gave these three stone circles their name, that was enough: God turned the players into granite where they stood, and two musicians who had been piping nearby suffered the same petrification a few yards to the west. They have been standing on the eastern flank of Bodmin Moor for somewhere between three and four thousand years, and the legend, told and retold around hearths in Minions, was a way of explaining the unexplainable - why anyone, in the deep past, had bothered to drag these stones into precise rings on a windswept upland half a mile from anywhere.

Image: Olaf Tausch | CC BY 3.0

The Hurlers (stone circles): Three Rings in a Line

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dave Napier, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Hurlers lie south-southwest to north-northeast in a deliberate alignment that suggests their builders cared about how the three monuments related to each other. The middle circle is the largest, 42 metres across and slightly elliptical, flanked by two true circles measuring 3...

Image: Dave Napier | CC BY-SA 2.0

The Hurlers (stone circles): The Antiquaries Arrive

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Waterborough, Public domain. The historian John Norden was the first scholar known to have walked among the Hurlers, around 1584, sketching them and trying to make sense of what he saw. William Camden mentioned them in his *Britannia* of 1586, and from then on the Hurlers entered the slow stream of antiquari...

Image: Waterborough | Public domain

The Hurlers (stone circles): Vega, Arcturus, and the Borderline Case

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Simkins, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1967 the Scottish engineer Alexander Thom, who had spent decades arguing that Britain's stone circles were calibrated astronomical instruments, turned his theodolite on the Hurlers. He proposed two solar alignments and four stellar alignments involving the bright stars Vega an...

Image: Alan Simkins | CC BY-SA 2.0

The Hurlers (stone circles): Countless Stones

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Foodista, CC BY 2.0. Another Cornish belief insists that the stones of the Hurlers cannot be counted. Try, and you will arrive at a different total each time, or so generations of moorland walkers have claimed. The legend belongs to a wider British tradition - Stonehenge and Avebury share variants - ...

Image: Foodista | CC BY 2.0

The Hurlers (stone circles): The Heritage Trust Years

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rarb, CC BY 3.0. In 1999, members of a pressure group called the Revived Cornish Stannary Parliament removed English Heritage signs from the Hurlers and several other Cornish monuments, in a protest against what they saw as English cultural overreach. The episode ended with the trio bound over by...

Image: Rarb | CC BY 3.0