Qualla: Tregeseal East Stone Circle

Tregeseal East Stone Circle: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Champion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Dans Maen, the Cornish called them. Stones of the Dance. There are nineteen of them now, granite blocks waist-high or shoulder-high, set in a rough ring twenty-one metres across on the heather slopes below Carn Kenidjack. Once there were probably twenty-one stones in this circle and twenty-one stones in another two circles to the west, three rings strung along an east-west line across the hillside like three drumbeats. Two of those circles are essentially gone now, betrayed only by an aerial photograph from 1947 and a single lone stone in the middle position. Only the eastern circle still dances. It has been dancing here since roughly 2500 BC.

Image: Jim Champion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tregeseal East Stone Circle: On the Hillside

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Champion, CC BY-SA 3.0. The circle stands about one kilometre east of the hamlet of Tregeseal, in west Cornwall, on the high ground north of the road between Penzance and St Just in Penwith. Above it rises Carn Kenidjack, the carn whose dark granite tor crowns this stretch of moorland and casts a long a...

Image: Jim Champion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tregeseal East Stone Circle: Nineteen Stones, Heavily Restored

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Atkin, CC BY-SA 2.0. The 19 granite blocks that make up the surviving circle stand between roughly 1 and 1.5 metres tall, set in an approximate circle some 21 metres in diameter. Two stones are probably missing - older accounts describe 21. Like most surviving prehistoric monuments in Britain, the ci...

Image: Tony Atkin | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tregeseal East Stone Circle: A Line of Three

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jowaninpensans, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Tregeseal East circle is the easternmost survivor of what was once a row of three circles aligned generally east-to-west, similar to the more famous arrangement around The Merry Maidens in west Penwith. The middle circle, recorded in 1885 as having the largest diameter and te...

Image: Jowaninpensans | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tregeseal East Stone Circle: Antiquarians and Their Drawings

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Northmetpit, CC BY-SA 4.0. Tregeseal first enters the modern written record in 1754, in William Borlase's Antiquities, Historical and Monumental, of the County of Cornwall - the great Cornish antiquary's pioneering survey of the duchy's prehistoric monuments. Borlase, born at Pendeen Manor only a few miles...

Image: Northmetpit | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tregeseal East Stone Circle: Dance of the Maidens

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jowaninpensans, CC BY-SA 4.0. Across west Cornwall, prehistoric stone circles carry the same folk-name: the Merry Maidens, the Hurlers, the Nine Maidens of Boskednan, the Dancing Stones at Tregeseal. The story is variations on a theme. Young women - sometimes with their pipers, fiddlers, or husbands - were da...

Image: Jowaninpensans | CC BY-SA 4.0