Porlock Stone Circle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 The location of the circle in 2014; the stones are so small that discerning the site is difficult | |
  Shown within Somerset | |
| Location | Porlock |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 51°11′22″N 3°39′14″W / 51.189549°N 3.653994°W |
| Type | Stone circle |
| History | |
| Periods | Neolithic/Bronze Age |
| Official name | Stone circle, Porlock Common |
| Reference no. | 1006189 |
Porlock Stone Circle is a stone circle located on Exmoor, near the village of Porlock in the south-western English county of Somerset. The Porlock ring is part of a tradition of stone circle construction that spread throughout much of Britain, Ireland, and Brittany during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, over a period between 3300 and 900 BCE. The purpose of such monuments is unknown, although archaeologists speculate that the stones represented supernatural entities for the circles' builders.
Although Exmoor witnessed the construction of many monuments during the Bronze Age, only two stone circles survive in this area, the other being Withypool Stone Circle. The Porlock circle is about 24 metres (79 feet) in diameter and contains thirteen green micaceous sandstone rocks; there may originally have been more. Directly to the north-east of the circle is a cairn connected to a linear stone row. No evidence has been found that allows for absolute dating of the monument's construction, although archaeologists have suggested that the cairn dates from the Early Bronze Age, the circle being a Middle Bronze Age addition.
A small lead wheel found inside Porlock Stone Circle suggests that the site was visited during the Romano-British period. The site was rediscovered in the 1920s and since then a variety of stones have been added to it; its current appearance is a composite of prehistoric and modern elements. In 1928 the site was surveyed and excavated by the archaeologist Harold St George Gray. A second excavation took place under the leadership of Mark Gillings in 2013.
The circle is located 4.5 kilometres (2+3⁄4 mi) south-west of the village of Porlock, in the south-western English county of Somerset.[1] It is 1.5 kilometres (1 mi) south of the A39 road and is immediately to the west of the lane headed south to Exford.[1] The ring is at an altitude of almost 415 metres (1,362 feet) above sea level,[2] and is positioned 10 kilometres (6 mi) north of the Withypool Stone Circle.[3]
The land on which the circle is located slopes from the north-east to the south-west.[2] From the circle, a range of different Bronze Age round barrows, or tumuli, are visible at different points in the surrounding landscape.[2] Among the nearest are Alderman's Barrow, Black Barrow, the two Bendels Barrows, the Rowbarrows, and the Kit Barrows.[4] On the east-northeast side of the circle is the Berry Castle earthwork camp, which dates from the Late Iron Age or Romano-British period.[5]
Context
While the transition from the Early Neolithic to the Late Neolithic in the fourth and third millennia BCE saw much economic and technological continuity, there was a considerable change in the style of monuments erected, particularly in what is now southern and eastern England.[6] By 3000 BCE, the long barrows, causewayed enclosures, and cursuses that had predominated in the Early Neolithic were no longer built and had been replaced by circular monuments of various kinds.[6] These include earthen henges, timber circles, and stone circles.[7] Stone circles are found in most areas of Britain where stone is available, except for the island's south-eastern corner.[8] They are most densely concentrated in south-western England and on the north-eastern horn of Scotland, near Aberdeen.[8] The tradition of their construction may have lasted for 2,400 years, from 3300 to 900 BCE, with the major building phase taking place between 3000 and 1,300 BCE.[9]
These stone circles typically show very little evidence of human visitation during the period immediately following their creation.[10] This suggests that they were not sites used for rituals that left archaeologically visible evidence, but may have been deliberately left as "silent and empty monuments".[11] The archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson suggested that in Neolithic Britain, stone was associated with the dead, and wood with the living.[12] Other archaeologists have suggested that the stone might not represent ancestors, but rather other supernatural entities, such as deities.[11]
Stone circles in Exmoor
There are only two known prehistoric stone circles on Exmoor: Porlock and Withypool Stone Circle.[13] The archaeologist Leslie Grinsell suggested that the circular stone monument on Almsworthy Common was "probably" the remains of a stone circle,[14] although more recent assessments regard it as one of the stone settings, a different type of monument more common across Exmoor.
Archaeologists have dated these circles to the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age,[15] and have noted that they are comparable to the stone circles found further south, on Dartmoor.[15] In contrast to the two known Exmoor circles, over seventy such monuments have been identified on Dartmoor.[16] This may be because Exmoor, unlike Dartmoor, has no natural granite.[16] Instead, it has Devonian slates and Hangman Grits, both of which easily break up into small slabs, resulting in a general shortage of big stones on Exmoor.[16]
This scarcity of large stones may explain why Neolithic and Bronze Age communities used small stones, termed miniliths, in the two Exmoor circles and other monuments within the region. There are nevertheless other constructions in the area, such as the clapper bridge at Tarr Steps and the three-metre Long Stone at Challacombe, which do use locally sourced large megaliths. This suggests that larger stones would have been available had the sites' builders desired and that the use of miniliths was therefore deliberate.[17]
Exmoor also has a henge, near Parracombe, although it has been damaged by ploughing.[16] Alongside this, the moor bears a profusion of other Bronze Age monuments, including between 300 and 400 round barrows, standing stones, linear stone rows, and stone settings.[16] The creation of these different monument types might also explain why so few stone circles were created here.[18] Most of the surviving prehistoric stone monuments on Exmoor are located on those areas of moorland outside the limits of medieval and post-medieval agriculture. For this reason it is likely that the surviving sites are not a reliable indicator of their original extent.[15]
