Long Meg and the Eden valley

Long Meg and her Daughters

'Long Meg' is a standing stone with prehistoric carvings on it, while her 'Daughters' form the near-by stone circle. This is the third largest stone circle in Britain (after Avebury and Stanton Drew) and is considered to be Neolithic to Early Bronze Age in date. It forms part of a prehistoric ritual landscape in the Eden Valley of northern Cumbria, with the henges of Mayburgh and King Arthur's Round Table only 9 km away, near Penrith.

There is more to the Stone Circle than is apparent when viewed from the ground. Air photography (both conventional and infra-red) in the 1980's showed that the circle abuts a large enclosure (220m x 190m), which now surrounds the farm buildings, touching the circle on its flattened northern side. It is assumed that this enclosure and the circle are roughly contemporary (this needs to be established by excavation) but it seems clear that the enclosure must predate the circle to some extent (Soffe and Clare, 1988). The air and ground surveys by Soffe and Clare (1988) also identified a number of other enclosures and ditches in the landscape around Long Meg, several of which are probably of prehistoric date. This work, however, failed to relocate a lost smaller stone circle described by William Stukeley in the eighteenth century, which was probably a few hundred meters to the south west of Long Meg.

As part of on-going landscape archaeological survey work of Cumbrian prehistoric sites Tom Clare has produced a new topographical survey of Long Meg. This demonstrates that the circle should no longer be seen as being built on a slope but at the head of a shallow valley (Clare, 2006). Additional new plans of the site can be found in Clare (2007) and a discussion of the relationship between the circle and the enclosure is given in Clare (2009).

 

The Eden Valley

As part a study of the wider prehistoric environment in the Eden Valley Chrissie Stringer is studying peat cores from near the burial mounds and former stone circle site at Sandford for her MPhil. Preliminary pollen work has established that trees are scarce throughout the core. We will be radiocarbon dating samples from the core during 2010.

 

References

Clare, T. (2009) A magical thing: symmetry and inversion; appropriation and evocation. The layout of the Long Meg enclosures. Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society 3rd series vol IX: 21-27.

Clare, T. (2007) Prehistoric monuments of the Lake District. Tempus, Stroud.

Clare, T. (2006) Recent topographical survey of the Long Meg stone circle, Cumbria. PAST 52: 9-10.

Soffe, G. and Clare, T. (1988) New evidence of ritual monuments at Long Meg and her Daughters, Cumbria. Antiquity 62, 552-557. [This paper was republished in 2003 in 'Megaliths from Antiquity' a collection of classic papers from Antiquity; the leading archaeological journal].