This was perhaps my favourite place, though words like that cease to have so much meaning in an area as beautiful as this one. We came up through the woods
We knew we were close to where we wanted to be, but we weren’t on the path we were supposed to be on, so looking for the nine ladies stone circle we found this instead:
No one quite knows what these are apparently, this one sits along the ‘Duke’s Drive’, possibly part of an effort to transform the moor into somewhere to visit and enjoy following Parliament’s Act of Enclosure in 1819.
Enclosure breaks my heart, but stone circles are a joy. The nine ladies (and a tenth stone face down was found after a drought some years back) are lovely — but quite small. It makes for a very different effect from the standing stones I know, or a circle like Stanton Drew or Stonehenge.
Stanton Moor in its an entirety is a beautiful Bronze Age ceremonial landscape, covered both with monuments but also somewhere archaeologists now believe people to have lived and worked the land. From the conservation document detailing what is here to be preserved from the sandstone quarries that still encroach upon the moor:
The prehistoric monuments which survive on the moor include an unusually tight cluster of ceremonial sites comprising three embanked stone circles, a standing stone, and at least one (possibly two) ring cairns. A fourth circle, Doll Tor, lies to the west, just 250m outside the limit of the modern moorland. Close to these monuments lie more than 120 cairns, many of which appear to be primarily funerary (Figures C5 and C6). Again, the survival of a cairnfield with a very high proportion of funerary cairns is rare in the region, where only two or three other (much smaller) sites have been recognised (3.4.3.2). In addition, early 20th century excavation on the south-western fringe of the moor (2.5.1.4) revealed a large number of funerary urns and cremated remains in what may have been a fl at cemetery (Storrs Fox 1927).
It is an extraordinary place, made even more beautiful by August’s purple heather and the green hills beyond.
One of the beautiful and larger mounds, with evidence of the stone cist that used to sit in the centre, containing the mixed bones of ancestors
We followed the sandy path along the curve of the hillside
Sat for a while here, to rest and look out over the landscape
A standing stone — the Cork Stone — towers over us, behind it an old quarry. Going up one side are metal staples and footholds dug into the rock. We didn’t climb it.
Here it is looking back
The edge of the quarry, picturesque now covered in golden grass and heather
Coming up to Stanton Peak’s trig point
Then back down the far side of the moor, back down into trees past old walls and lined pits
Across fields
To what must have been another burial cairn
A sheep with the hair of a greek statue
And into Alport, lovely but we thought there was a pub, badly needed a pub, and there was no pub. Not until we walked up another very big hill into Youlgreave.
But it did have scenery and chickens
Youlgreave was lovely, but we were too tired to explore it properly…