Nine Ladies
The Nine Ladies is a stone circle located on Stanton Moor in Derbyshire in the English East Midlands. The Nine Ladies is part of a tradition of stone circle construction that spread throughout much of Britain, Ireland, and Brittany during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages, over a period between 3300 and 900 BCE. The purpose of such monuments is unknown, although archaeologists speculate that the stones represented supernatural entities for the circles' builders.
Measuring 10.8 metres in diameter, the stone circle consists of ten millstone grit stones, although for several centuries one of these was buried, providing the impression that there had been nine stones. Whether the tenth was part of the original prehistoric design or a later addition is unknown. The earth rises up around the circle, although it is unclear if this was part of a deliberate earthen bank or the unintended result of other activities. It is possible that either a hollow, a standing stone, or an earthen mound was once located inside the ring. A single monolith, the King Stone, stands to the southwest of the circle; it is unknown if this was placed there in deliberate reference to the Nine Ladies circle or whether their proximity is incidental.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Nine Ladies attracted the attention of antiquarians like Hayman Rooke and Thomas Bateman. Archaeological excavation took place in 2000. A wall was built around the circle in the 19th century but removed in 1985. Since the late 20th century, the Nine Ladies has been regarded as a sacred site by modern Pagan groups who conduct rituals there. From 1999 to 2010 the area around the site was home to the Nine Ladies Anti-Quarry Campaign, which sought to prevent a nearby quarrying operation.
Location
The Nine Ladies stands on the northern end of Stanton Moor, an area of heathland in the Peak District. It is at a height of between 297 and 298 metres OD. The Nine Ladies are located 3 ½ miles south-east of Bakewell. The archaeologist Aubrey Burl described the area of Stanton Moor as "a prehistoric necropolis of cairns, ring-cairns, standing stones and stone circles". It is 300m north/north-east of the Reform Tower, while to the west of the stone circle is a cairn cemetery containing three large Bronze Age ring-cairns.Although the moor is largely heathland, the area near to the Nine Ladies is dominated by fescue grasses. The heather has been cleared from the site and the birch trees have been prevented from encroaching on the stones themselves, improving visibility of the monument.
Context
While the transition from the Early Neolithic to the Late Neolithic in the fourth and third millennia BCE saw much economic and technological continuity, there was a considerable change in the style of monuments erected, particularly in what is now southern and eastern England. By 3000 BCE, the long barrows, causewayed enclosures, and cursuses that had predominated in the Early Neolithic were no longer built, and had been replaced by circular monuments of various kinds. These include earthen henges, timber circles, and stone circles. Stone circles exist in most areas of Britain where stone is available, with the exception of the island's south-eastern corner. They are most densely concentrated in south-western Britain and on the north-eastern horn of Scotland, near Aberdeen. The tradition of their construction may have lasted 2,400 years, from 3300 to 900 BCE, the major phase of building taking place between 3000 and 1300 BCE.These stone circles typically show very little evidence of human visitation during the period immediately following their creation. The historian Ronald Hutton noted that this suggests that they were not sites used for rituals that left archaeologically visible evidence, but may have been deliberately left as "silent and empty monuments". The archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson argues that in Neolithic Britain, stone was associated with the dead, and wood with the living. Other archaeologists have proposed that the stone might not represent ancestors, but rather other supernatural entities, such as deities.
Across eastern Britain—including the East Midlands—stone circles are far less common than in the west of the island, possibly due to the general scarcity of naturally occurring stone here. There is much evidence for timber circles and earthen henges in the east, suggesting that these might have been more common than their stone counterparts. In the area of modern Derbyshire, there are five or six known stone circles although the remains of many ring-cairns, a different style of prehistoric monument, are also common and can look much like the stone rings. Stylistically, those found in this county are similar to those found in Yorkshire. Within the Peak District, nine was frequently favoured as the number of stones used in a circle. The only large stone circles in the Peak are Arbor Low and The Bull Ring, both monuments which combine a stone circle with an earthen henge and which are located on the sandstone layers. There are also a few smaller stone circles, such as Doll Tor and the Nine Stones Close, that are close to the limestone edge.
Design, construction, and use
Archaeologists have attributed the Nine Ladies to a Bronze Age date, with Burl suggesting more specifically that it was probably created in the Early Bronze Age. It is possible that the site underwent multiple phases of construction, for instance being an earthwork structure that only later had stones added to it.The Nine Ladies stone circle measures 10.8m in diameter, and is located on ground which slopes downward towards the east to northeast. A report from 1907 noted that there were nine stones in the circle, all but one of which stood upright. A recumbent tenth was unearthed in 1977, although it is possible that this had been moved into place from elsewhere at a comparatively recent point in the circle's history. The stones are made from a millstone grit sourced locally, a type of medium-grained sandstone. Burl characterised the stones as being "unremarkable." They vary in their shape and size, some being "blocks of squarish cross-section" and others being "oblong slabs with long axis aligned upon the circumference of the circle". The stones are low; the tallest lie on the north-east side and measure 0.9 m in height. Excavation carried out in 2000 indicated that at least one of the orthostats had been packed into its hole with smaller stones.
Several archaeologists commenting on the Nine Ladies believed that, as at several other sites of this type in Derbyshire, a low bank surrounded the stone circle. They described this as having entrances on its north-east and south-west sides, and according to a report published in 1980, it measured 3 m in width and 0.6 m in height. Various suggestions were made regarding the composition of this bank, with some archaeologists commenting that it was made from earth and others suggesting it comprised both earth and stone. However, an excavation on the eastern part of the circle in 2000 found no evidence of any deliberate embankment. Instead the excavators determined that the appearance of a bank was caused by undisturbed subsoil having been left in place around the exterior of the stones while being removed from the interior. This led them to suggest that the site was originally of a "dished" shape, "with soils sculpted away both internally and externally to leave the raised rim". This would have provided an appearance akin to a pond barrow.
Late 18th century records suggest the presence of a feature in the centre of the circle. In his 1780 sketch of the site, the antiquarian Hayman Rooke depicted what looks like a hollow in the middle of the ring; this was then exaggerated in a watercolour painting based on his initial sketch. However, in 1782 he wrote that there was a stone in the centre, which he depicted in an illustration of the Nine Ladies drawn in 1793. These competing claims make it difficult to determine what really existed in the middle of the ring in the late 18th century; it is possible that Rooke imagined that a stone had once stood in the hollow and thus claimed that it still did. An alternative possibility is that there was once a stone in the centre and that it was moved, being the stone discovered in 1977. In the 19th and early 20th century, some commentators believed there was evidence for an earthen mound inside the circle, something which was then included in illustrations of the monument, although other observers simply stated that the ground here was uneven. By the early 21st century, any evidence of an internal mound that had existed was gone. It is possible that this loss was partly caused by people digging into it. Based on allegations of a mound, Burl suggested that within the circle had once stood a tumulus in which human remains had been buried.
40 metres to the west/south-west of the circle is a monolith known as the King Stone. Oblong in shape, Burl described it as being "slab-like". In total, it measures 1.22m in length, 0.60m in width, and varies between 0.29 and 0.38m in thickness; approximately 58 cm of its length is visible above ground level. Like the other stones at Nine Ladies it is of millstone grit. It juts into the ground at an angle, leaning heavily to the south-east. It is possible that this stone was once part of an avenue that connected with the stone circle, although an excavation around it in 2000 found no evidence that any other stones stood in the immediate vicinity. The King Stone may not be a prehistoric feature, and there is no definite evidence that it was ever designed to be linked in any way to the Nine Ladies circle. The King Stone has been scratched with graffiti; it has the name of "Bill Stumps" engraved onto it, alongside a cross and a zero, apparently carved in the 19th century. Bill Stumps is the name of a conman in Charles Dickens' novel The Pickwick Papers, and it is possible that the graffiti deliberately references him. One possible culprit for the graffiti is Edward Simpson, the seller of fake antiquities who often stayed nearby.