Hunt called the circle ‘the Nine Maids or Virgin Sisters’ and also calls them nine ‘Moor Stones’. He has a dry sense of humour: “From one person only I heard the old story of the stones having been metamorphosed maidens. Other groups of stone might be named, as Rosemedery, Tregaseal, Boskednan, Botallack, Tredinek, and Crowlas, in the west, to which the same story extends, and many others in the eastern parts of the county; but it cannot be necessary.”
(’Hals’, as mentioned by Stubob below, is W Hal’s ‘Compleat History of Cornwal, general and parochial’ (1702).)