Nine Ladies Stone Circle
The Nine Ladies Stone Circle on Stanton Moor in the Derbyshire Peak District is a small but evocative Bronze Age monument of approximately 3,500 years ago, a ring of nine slender millstone grit standing stones each less than a metre high set on the high moorland of the moor in an open landscape of heather and bilberry that has preserved the circle's setting with unusual completeness. The circle is one of numerous prehistoric monuments on Stanton Moor, a flat-topped sandstone plateau that served as an important ceremonial landscape during the Bronze Age and whose concentration of burial cairns, standing stones and the circle itself makes it the most significant prehistoric site in the Peak District. The name Nine Ladies derives from the Christian-era legend that the stones are women turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath, a tradition common across Britain that was applied to many prehistoric stone circles as an explanatory myth for monuments whose original purpose was no longer understood. A single outlying stone, the King Stone, stands a short distance from the circle and represents the musician whose playing caused the women's transgression, completing the narrative. The circle sits within a heather moorland managed for grouse that provides a characteristic upland Derbyshire setting, the views from the moor extending across the Derwent Valley below to the White Peak limestone country beyond. The walk to the circle from the car park at Birchover is straightforward and takes approximately twenty minutes through pleasant moorland scenery. The wider Stanton Moor landscape, with its more than seventy recorded Bronze Age monuments concentrated in a relatively small area, represents one of the most intensively used ceremonial landscapes of the period in the British Isles and rewards extended exploration beyond the circle itself.