1, 2, 3, 4... 5?

The Minx arrived at seven, this morning, so that we could walk up to the stone circle on the hillside behind Casterton. I went there on my own a couple of years ago and I've wanted to go back ever since. 

Last time, unsure of where I was going, I took a path up behind the fields, counting them off until I reached the fifth one, and then I walked down through that to the bottom corner, where I successfully located the stone circle. The route I took back to the car, loosely following the contour line, was a lot easier as the fields are very steep and uneven. 

The Minx and I took that lower, more direct route, this morning, walking through the fields, me counting them off as we went. In the fourth field we found a number of large mounds of stones, and I wondered if this was where the old settlement was that is referred to online. I can't think of any other reason for there to be so much stone, of the right size, to be found in this field in such piles. (You can get a sense of this from the photo in my Extras.)

There was a tricky wall to get over, which I didn't remember from last time I came here, and then we were in the fifth field. Hooray! Except we couldn't find any evidence of the stone circle. Privately, I wondered whether I'd made a mistake: could I have just found a bunch of random stones, last time? Had I stumbled across some Cumbrian Shangri-La that only appears once every hundred years?

No. I hadn't. Some nifty work by the Minx using Google Maps revealed we were in the wrong field. The triangular shape of the first field meant that taking the lower path, it's virtually non-existent. We walked through a gate at the bottom of that field and it was the field we entered that I counted as "one". 

So we left what was actually the sixth the field by exiting onto a footpath that runs along beneath the fields (and which contains some pieces by Andy Goldsworthy: basically boulders in sheep pens). Once we were back in the correct field, the one with all the piles of stones, we found the circle easily enough. We'd walked past it, no more than twenty yards away, half an hour before!

Pleasingly, it was exactly as you'd want a stone circle to be; stones in a circle for a start! But there were stones at the cardinal points, with the southern one (in the photo) pointing down the Lune valley, and the central area was flat and even. I could easily imagine it being used both ceremonially or as a meeting place for festivities. 

Anyway, having successfully if fleetingly reconsecrated the stone circle, we made our way back to the car, which was a far more straightforward journey!

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-10.9 kgs
Reading: 'How Art Made Pop And Pop Became Art' by Mike Roberts