DISCOVER Stanton Drew
There are world famous stone circles, and there are stone circles the world seems to have forgotten. Both speak of the timeless power of a walk and a wonder.
PLANS RARELY SEEM to come to pass at Stanton Drew. But today, after 18 months of trying, it seems I will finally manage to complete the walk I set out to do. I’m climbing steadily away from the stone circle, where I started for the very first time two winters ago, as a late afternoon moon rose over skeletal fields. My home lies just half an hour away, within the city bounds of Bristol, but I feel like a wide-eyed traveller, flushed with adventure, having crossed many strange borders.
On that first visit a year and a half ago I approached the stones with an attitude of curious disinterest. I wanted to understand and feel something of the spirit of this ancient, mostly overlooked place, veiled as it is behind the trappings of a working dairy farm, but I didn’t want to be told anything about it. After all, aren’t stone circles, by their very nature, mysterious and essentially unknowable? I wanted to walk among the stones and come to my own conclusions.
Studiously avoiding any of the weathered information boards, I stepped into the field and found a confusion of enormous boulders, some roughly shaped into oblongs, some squat and square, others fiercely triangular. All of them, without exception, jagged and serrated, like fossilised icebergs. If you were to pull an open weave blanket over them, it would be torn to shreds in seconds. I couldn’t detect any kind of pattern in their ancient arrangement, and I didn’t feel much at all. A herd of cattle grazed freely among the stones, and a few of them stopped to look at me, half interested, half amused. They’d seen it all before.
A bit disheartened, I turned my back on the stones and the cows, looked up, and discovered I was standing not just within an ancient stone circle but also within a hollow in the Somerset landscape, surrounded by low, hillocky hills. The sharp winter sun etched the hills into the sky with crystal-edged precision, and the grass seemed greener than anything I’d seen in a long time. Maybe it’s because I was actively looking for something a bit otherwordly, or maybe it had something to do with the sun and the moon shining at the same time, but either way, there was a luminosity and stillness – a thick silence, as if the air was woven with soft wool – I haven’t felt there since. Perhaps this is what the circle is for, I thought: a space simply for looking, and feeling, and wondering.
Later, the mystery becoming a bit too much for me, I decided I did want to know something of the stones after all. Not that it clarified things muc
