Devil's Quoits Circle henge View all content for Devil's Quoits

Visited on 17th April 2011 We'd been thinking about visiting this site for a while, so it being a gloriously sunny day we thought it'd be nice to take a trip down to Oxfordshire. Nice and easy to find, just headed for Stanton Harcourt and followed the signs for the landfill site. Parked off at the first available layby (fortunately no problems were encountered from officious men in hi-vis jackets) and trekked off around the lake looking for the stones. Well you can't really miss them as you get near, a huge embanked henge dotted with twenty-eight satisfyingly chunky large stones. The henge has the classic entranceway leading into and out of the circle, and it looked like there was an outlying stone to the south. The stones themselves are of a strange type of local conglomerate rock, which looked as if it was about to come apart at any moment, most of them are modern replacements, the older stones seemingly identifyable by their darker more weathered colour. The monument itself originated as a henge, with evidence of postholes having once been in the centre, before the final phase of the erection of the stones around 2,500 BCE. We had a picnic in the circle, the only sounds the cries of birds and the honking of the geese in the nearby lake, and the ground around us scattered in bones scavenged from the tip by the ever present birds. It certainly has a different atmosphere here, with the landfill site looming incongruously in front of you, somehow you can just tell it's a reconstruction and not an 'authentic' site, even if no-one had told you so, but it is nice that someone has bothered to reconstruct the circle after all it has suffered in the past, and don't let it put you off visiting, for it is an impressive place.

Posted by Ravenfeather 10th August 2011ce

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