Stone circles in the British Isles and Brittany

Sparser groupings can also be found in Caithness, the Outer Hebrides, the Peak District, the Wicklow Mountains, Wales and Wessex.

During the Early Neolithic in Brittany and the British Isles, the megalithic tradition of building chambered tombs for the dead had waxed and waned.

[5][6] The length of this tradition led prehistorian Mike Parker Pearson to note that it was "a relatively short-lived fashion in archaeological terms.

"[5] In southern England, 84% of chambered tombs were built somewhere between a north-east to a south-east orientation with western directions almost entirely neglected.

[7] In some parts of the British Isles, architectural changes were made to the style of chambered tomb, which may have been a forerunner of the later circular design of the stone rings.

It has been suggested that they were camps, markets, cattle kraals or occasional settlements, or perhaps ritual centres for the celebration of seasonal festivals or cemeteries.

[10] By that date, the long barrows, causewayed enclosures, and cursuses which had predominated in the Early Neolithic had ceased to be built.

"[14] Archaeological pollen analysis has shown that it was a period when scrub and weeds were spreading over what had formerly been cultivated fields, and forests that had previously been cleared began to grow back.

[15] Various archaeologists have suggested that this was a period of particular turmoil within the British Isles, perhaps caused by an overuse of land, the failure of crops, famine, plague, climatic change, or an increase in population that was not supported by the food supply.

Ideologically, there is no evidence for a change in Brittany and the British Isles at this time, with communities continuing to construct megalithic stone circles.

Harding noted that across western Europe, the Bronze Age was "closely and logically connected" with the Late Neolithic which preceded it, and that the marker that is applied between the two by contemporary archaeologists is "arbitrary".

[16] The historian Ronald Hutton noted that, along with the chambered long barrows of the Early Neolithic, stone circles are one of the most prominent forms of monument produced in prehistoric Britain.

[18] The stone circles are not always found in isolation from other forms of monument and often intersect with timber and earth structures.

[20] In some examples, timber posts were replaced with stone ones, perhaps with the intention of making the monument more durable and protecting it from decay.

[25] Aaron Watson has argued that various circles were located in a particular position to give the appearance of occupying the centre of the world, representing a microcosm of the surrounding area.

[24] These had been eased over a large pit and supported on stone trestles, after which wooden rollers and a sled were likely positioned underneath, allowing the megalith to be moved.

The archetypal ‘stone circles’ of the mid-to-late Neolithic are far rarer than commonly assumed, appearing mostly in Cumbria, Cornwall, Wiltshire, and Western Scotland.

[3] Aubrey Burl (counting tentative examples and burial mounds) noted that archaeologists assumed that for every stone circle that survived to the late 20th century, there would have been two lost.

From the 1300 surviving examples, Burl calculated that there might have originally been around 4000 stone circles across Britain, Ireland and Brittany.

[30] The archaeologist Alexander Thom proposed that the stone circles were built using a unit of measurement which he called the "megalithic yard",[24] about 2.72 feet (0.83 m).

[32] Parker Pearson stated that "the idea of a standard unit of measurement is very plausible" but perhaps not as regular as Thom and others have argued.

These stone circles typically show very little evidence of human visitation during the period immediately following their creation.

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

[51] The archaeologists Stuart and Cecily Piggott believed that the circles of Dorset were probably of Bronze Age origin,[52] a view endorsed by Burl, who noted that their distribution did not match that of any known Neolithic sites.

[54] It is also possible that the stone circles were linked to a number of earthen henges erected in Dorset around the same period.

Several large megalithic rings were constructed here, such as Castlerigg stone circle, Swinside, and Long Meg and Her Daughters.

Stone circles exist throughout Scotland, from Ninestane Rig in the far south to more famous examples in the far north and particularly in the islands (where several form part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site).

[55] By the Late Middle Ages, references to prehistoric monuments in the British Isles were rare, and were usually only to note down practical matters, such as that a judicial court would be held near to one or that a farmer's land lay near to one.

[56] A rare exception is found in the fictionalised History of the Kings of Britain (c.1136), in which the chronicle's author Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed that Stonehenge had once been the Giants' Ring, and that it had originally been located on Mount Killaraus in Ireland, until the wizard Merlin moved it to Salisbury Plain.

"[32] In the Mediaeval and Early Modern period onward, much folklore developed around the subject of the stone circles.