The purpose of such rings is unknown, although archaeologists speculate that the stones represented supernatural entities for the circle's builders.

The Nine Stones circle is positioned at the national grid reference 36100904,[1] on the western edge of the village of Winterbourne Abbas in Dorset, South West England .

[4] The archaeologist Aubrey Burl noted that while "this petite ring should be a delight to see", it was instead a "frustration" as a result of its restricted location.

[6] By 3,000 BCE, the long barrows, causewayed enclosures, and cursuses which had predominated in the Early Neolithic had ceased being built, and were instead replaced by circular monuments of various kinds.

[10] This suggests that they were not sites used for rituals that left archaeologically visible evidence, and may have been deliberately created to serve as what the historian Ronald Hutton describes as "silent and empty monuments".

[11] The archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson suggested that in Neolithic Britain, stone was associated with the dead and wood with the living.

[11] Burl described modern Dorset as having a "thin scatter" of stone circles,[13] with nine possible examples known within the county's boundaries.

[14] The archaeologist John Gale described these as "a small but significant group" of such monuments,[14] and all are located within five miles of the sea.

[20] The archaeologists Stuart and Cecily Piggott believed that the circles of Dorset were probably of Bronze Age origin,[21] a view endorsed by Burl, who noted that their distribution did not match that of any known Neolithic sites.

[5] The largest of the stones weighs approximately 7.3 tonnes (8 tons) and would have required the efforts of many people to move and erect it.

[34] The monument was protected from passing cars by several bollards which were later removed by the highways authority, prompting statements of concern that the stone was unprotected in 2008.

[29] In the nineteenth century the site was visited by the antiquarian Charles Warne, who wrote about it in his 1872 book Ancient Dorset.

He claimed that he could discern the existence of a tenth stone, although on visiting the site in 1936, the Piggotts noted that they could find no evidence of this.

[45] Examining such place-names, the folklorist Jeremy Harte argued that they did not develop during the Christianisation of England in the early Middle Ages, but rather they were applied to such sites in later centuries, often supplanting the name of an earlier folkloric or legendary figure.

[51] This folk motif of humans turned to stone for revelling on a Sunday had been attached to a range of prehistoric monuments across southwestern Britain by the early eighteenth century, although it had been first recorded in Cornwall in 1602.

[54] He also related a story that on 23 January 1985, a breakdown van was towing a car past the Nine Stones when, at 9:15pm, its engine cut out and the lights on both vehicles failed.

Press coverage speculated that the event was linked to both a ley line passing through the site and to unidentified flying objects that have been reported above the nearby Eggardon Hill.

[1] The circle is considered a place of religious importance to a modern Druidic group called the Dolmen Grove Druids.

[56] In October 2007, the sides of the stones facing the road were daubed in white paint with the slogans "Read family court hell" and "F4J".