Peak Experience

Nine women and a fiddle player still stand on Stanton Moor where they were turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday.  Or so the legend of Nine Ladies stone circle goes.  They are not alone.  The stone circle is just one of many sites on Stanton Moor where prehistoric people lived and buried their dead over 3,500 years ago.  Burial mounds, field boundaries, ring cairns, more stone circles and the subtle traces of houses crowd the woodlands and lurk beneath heather.

 

A picture of the nine ladies A picture of the nine ladies

You can see the most notable sites from signposted footpaths. Interpretation panels tell the many stories of the moor’s past.  There are good pubs, guest houses and restaurants in neighbouring villages.

 

Imagine Stanton Moor with timber roundhouses scattered among fields.  This is what you would have seen here between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago.  Archaeologists have mapped numerous sites that show where people lived, farmed, buried their dead and performed their ceremonies.  These ancient farmers built roundhouses on circular, level platforms.  They divided their fields with walls, hedges or fences.  When they prepared the ground for farming, they removed stones from the fields and created cairns (heaps of stone) or dumped the stones against the boundaries they had made.  

 

Many sites survive on the moors because the moorland has been relatively undisturbed by later agriculture, unlike much of the surrounding area.  More recent farmers have farmed more productive land.

The ancient communities chose some people for special burials.  After they died, their remains were buried in large funerary mounds.  The communities either buried the dead bodies or cremated them and placed the ashes in pots.

 

Archaeologists believe that not everybody was buried in such a special way.  Even though there are many burial mounds on Stanton Moor, there are not enough for the likely population who lived here over such a long period of time.  Other people may have been buried in unmarked graves or left exposed to the elements.

 

These burial mounds show how important it was to mark the burial places of chosen individuals.  Were these high-status men and women local rulers in life?  Or were they people chosen to become ancestors?  We cannot be sure, but the prominent mounds constantly reminded the living of their dead.  In a time before title deeds and property ownership, this reinforced their connections to the surrounding landscape.  You could justify your right to occupy the land because you had buried your ancestors here.

 

Nine Ladies is one of four circular monuments on the Moor.  Nine stones are set upright in a low bank to create a circle 11 metres across.  A tenth stone was discovered in 1976.  It had fallen some time in the past and remain hidden under the turf until the summer’s drought showed where it lay.  Another standing stone, known as the King Stone, is 40 metres southwest of the circle.

 

 

Families probably held ceremonies in the circles, perhaps at certain times of the year associated with changing seasons and the farming calendar.  Spring, midsummer and harvest would all have been important.  They may have also celebrated important events in people’s lives, such as births, marriages and deaths.

 

As with stone circles, the Nine Ladies name comes from folklore.  The standing stones of the circle are the women and the King Stone is the fiddler.  We don’t know when the name was first used, except that it was probably some time after the arrival of Christianity.  Dancing on Sundays during church services was punishable by excommunication from at least the 1500s, if not earlier.  During the medieval period the Church linked many stone circles to devil worship as a way to wean people away from paganism.  Follow the footsteps of our ancestors with a short 2 mile walk and explore the diverse ways in which the stone beneath us, has and continues to shape the diverse landscapes on Stanton Moor.  The walk is available on the Moors For The Future website as a downloadable MP3 audio trail.  Please click here.

 

Two kilometres to the west of Stanton Moor stands the enigmatic twin-towered outcrop called Robin Hood’s Stride.  The strange rock formation has attracted stories over the centuries, linking it with the Green Man as well as Robin Hood.  The towers also earned it the name Mock Beggars Hall because of their likeness to chimneys. There is a carved cup and ring mark on a flat stone that might be prehistoric rock art.   In Roman times houses were huddled around the base of the rock.

 

Just a few hundred metres away from Robin Hood’s Stride is a stone circle called Nine Stone Close.  We know there were still seven stones standing in the Victorian period.  Now four remain – the largest of any at the Peak District’s stone circles. Its location near to the outcrop is unlikely to be a coincidence.  If you were to stand in the circle at midsummer, you could see the moon rise between the outcrop’s towers.

 

Currently, there is no right of way to Nine Stone Close itself, but you can see it from a nearby footpath.

 

A picture of the nine ladies at sunset

 

Explore the many facets if this accessible moorland inlcuding Nine Ladies stone circle (hosted by Moors for the Future - external link).