A R Cane

The day was bright and having found a place to park up we set off over the wild heathland behind Studland and meandered our way through muddy lanes and low trees. We’d just stumbled on some of the best cep mushrooms we’d ever found when Mrs. C looked up and suddenly exclaimed “Is that it?” pointing through the undergrowth to a monstrous boulder on the horizon. And there it was, looking completely out of place and out of scale with its surroundings, more like Dartmoor than Dorset.

Having lived 3 years of my life in relatively close proximity to this amazing natural feature I was surprised that I’d never heard of it, let alone seen it and I’d been anticipating something much smaller like a gnarled old standing stone. As we got closer we noticed that we weren’t alone. There was a climber there, which slightly annoyed me, and for the first half an hour we had to endure this annoying twat doing the same clumsy climb over and over again. Well I guess that’s what sandwiches were invented for and eventually he got bored and fell off (or did I push him?) and we had the place to ourselves.

It really is awe-inspiring in its size and sheer strangeness and really looks otherworldly, like an organic UFO that’s crashed into a small hill. If you’d lived in this area thousands of years ago how could you not venerate it, there’s nothing like it for miles around and it’s set off with that glorious view over Poole Harbour and Brownsea Island. Even the hillock on which it stands doesn’t seem entirely natural, though to be fair there are other smaller hillocks thereabouts, some of them perhaps man-made.

After the surprisingly wonderful ruined circle at Rempstone I have to say that I was slightly under-whelmed by Kingston Russell, not a feeling that I’m used to when encountering prehistoric sites. Did Burl have the same feeling too? Maybe that’s why it doesn’t appear in his book. It just didn’t seem to have the oomph factor and the views from this setting are kind of so-so rather than wow! (as at Hampton). I think possibly the flatness of it all as well, the anticipation built up by the spotting of two very large stones in the hedgerow (one next to the farm entrance where you can just about park and the other about half way between there and the circle) and the lack of a dramatic sky to set it off probably didn’t help either. The only thing that I thought might redeem it would be to go there at night with a clear sky, some time in the near future, and try some very long exposures. That should do it.

Everyone seems to be in agreement on this one, in that this is quite an enigmatic and peaceful place and I have to agree that we found it be so too. Maybe it’s that romance we have with ruins that does it, as obviously there’s only about half of the original circle remaining, the rest scattered about, moss-covered and (almost) forgotten.

We found it quite easily after parking up almost opposite the site on the road between Corfe and Studland and I was hoping to catch the last rays of sunlight to illuminate the stones. However the fir trees surrounding them were so dense that almost all the light was shut out so I had to resort to long exposures and flash. Having set up we were suddenly surprised by another person marching purposefully through the woods and half expected to be asked to leave (it is apparently private property), but it turned out to be a friendly local pagan who regularly visited the stones and who told us about where and how the circle was originally, before bidding goodbye and disappearing into the now increasingly murky depths of the woods. Having reeled off a few shots we explored the half circle (festooned with coins, well about £3 worth anyway) and decided that it was now too dark to carry on taking photos and that we’d return in the morning.

The following morning, clumping around in the undergrowth and magically finding one stone after another, the better light revealed just how large this circle once was and the relatively large size of the comprising stones. I think if there was a strong candidate for the repositioning and raising of it’s stones then this circle would be right up there. It seems a terrible shame that it should have been so disarranged and neglected and now almost pushed aside by the serried ranks of pines, but in so doing would it not lose it’s enigmatic nature?