Long Meg

We were up in Cumbria a couple of years ago and I visited an ancient stone circle called Long Meg and her Daughters.

It was constructed in the Bronze Age, more than 5,000 years ago and is in what is now an empty and remote landscape. Those millennia ago it may have been very different, there may have been many communities in the area; now everything in Britain seems based around London and the south-east of the island, but it wasn’t always like that. The seas around the north of the British isles would have been swarming with small craft, travellers and traders around the coast and visiting the mainland of Europe. The nearest town now is Penrith.

We visited on a blustery cold day in early spring, the skies were dark and lowering but the views were amazing. The stones too are amazing; it is the sixth-biggest stone circle in the British Isles,and there are fifty-one stones although only twenty-seven of them are still standing.It is more of an oval shape actually, not a circle, and measures 350 feet in diameter. There may have been more  stones originally, maybe as many as seventy.

Long Meg herself is the tall imposing red sandstone monolith, standing nearly twelve foot tall; her daughters are the rhyolite boulders surrounding her. She was probably erected about 1500 BC and is carved, and you may be able to just make out a ring marks, a cup and a spiral which are still visible having withstood the onslaught of thousand of years of blustery hill-top weather. She was carefully positioned so her four corners face the compass points.

The Monument

by William Wordsworth

Commonly called Long Meg and her daughters, near the River Eden.

A weight of awe, not easy to be borne,
Fell suddenly upon my spirit,—cast
From the dread bosom of the unknown past,
When first I saw that family forlorn.
Speak thou, whose massy strength and stature scorn
The power of years,—pre-eminent, and placed
Apart, to overlook the circle vast,—
Speak, giant-mother! tell it to the Morn
While she dispels the cumbrous shades of night;
Let the Moon hear, emerging from a cloud;
At whose behest uprose on British ground
That sisterhood, in hieroglyphic round
Forth-shadowing, some have deemed, the infinite,
The inviolable God, that tames the proud!

http://loiselden.com/2013/03/13/standing-stones/