SWINSIDE: ‘THE LOVELIEST OF ALL THE CIRCLES.’

‘… from the cramped, gloomy chamber or tomb to the unroofed, wide ring, … from darkness to light, from the dead to the living, from the grave to the sky.’

Situated at the southern end of the ridge that runs unbroken from Birker Moor to where the rough backed mass of Black Combe falls headlong to the sea is Swinside stone circle, one of Cumbria’s most astonishing and ancient monuments. At an elevation of nearly 800ft there is no shelter, no trees, and it is said that Spring reaches nearby Millom six weeks before it manages to force itself up the hill to Swinside. Also known as Sunkenkirk and Swineshead it is one of around 1,000 such monuments recorded in Britain, constructed as a part of a megalithic tradition that lasted for at least two millennia, during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages. But to see this place properly one must erase all the lines, the field walls and hedges, the allotments of bright improved pasture and imagine a landscape unconfined in which this circle was the dominant presence, the core perhaps of some long-forgotten territory, which was to its inhabitants, the whole world.

For centuries the site has been known as ‘Sunkenkirk’, as local tradition has it that during construction of a church here, the devil rose by night and caused the stones to subside back into the earth. What remained was the stone circle. It is echoed in Wordsworth’s Duddon Sonnet XVII:

‘…that mystic round of Druid frame

Tardily sinking by its proper weight

Deep into patient earth, from whose smooth breast it came’.

Although far from being the most imposing of monuments, this almost perfect circle has a sense of quiet completeness. It is described by megalithic specialist Aubrey Burl as ‘the loveliest of all the circles’ in north-western Europe, the stones arranged in close order, huddled together to form a nearly contiguous palisade. The stones themselves are a metamorphic slate collected from the adjacent fells, known locally as 'grey cobbles'. Their warm rough skins, which have soaked the sun for centuries, are mottled in colour from a dark grey to a reddish yellow, all freckled with ash grey lichen and at their bases, a low tide of raddle and lanolin where the sheep gather in.

When retired civil engineer and archaeologist C. W. Dymond surveyed the site in 1872, he recorded 55 stones. Edwin Waugh, in his 1861 Seaside Lakes and Mountains of Cumberland describes ‘… 54 moss-grown stones, some of which are prostrate, a few nearly upright, and all slanting more or less in different directions.’ Other writers have claimed there are only 51; Leslie Grisedale, who farmed at Swindale in the 1960s, claimed that there were 56 if you counted them one way, but count them from the other direction and there are 57! Curiously this lack of consistency gives credence to another piece of folklore which has been recorded locally. The belief that it is impossible to count the stones and come to the same figure twice. The ‘countless stones’ is a motif that appears in English and Welsh folklore and is associated with many megalithic monuments.

On the south-eastern side is an entrance defined by the two outer portal stones standing outside the circumference of the circle. Within the northernmost group of stones is a tall finger of rock which points the way to true north. It is claimed that the circle is aligned to the midwinter solstice, a fossil almanac, charting the death and rebirth of the sun. The flanking stones are closely set and broad shouldered. It was recorded in the 19th century that in one, a rowan-tree had sprung up in a rift. Fragile, yet persistent, in time the stone was rent asunder by its growth. The rowan tree is long gone but the evidence of its work remains.

Swinside falls into a period which in Cumbria saw particularly high levels of stone circle construction, other notable examples include Castlerigg and Long Meg. It was also a period in which British society underwent a series of major changes including a shift in religious practice. As Aubrey Burl puts it ‘There was a change from the cramped, gloomy chamber or a tomb to the unroofed, wide ring, a change from darkness to light, from the dead to the living, from the grave to the sky.’

Early accounts of the site are few and fragmentary no doubt due to its remoteness. Richard Gough in the 1789 edition of Camden’s Britannia describes it as a ‘… druidical temple, … nearly a circle of very large stones, pretty entire, only a few fallen, upon sloping ground in a swampy meadow. … mountains almost encircle it, not a tree is to be seen in the neighbourhood, nor a house, except a shepherd's cot at the foot of a mountain surrounded by a few barren pastures.… The outward part of the circle is surrounded with a buttress or rude pavement of smaller stones raised about half a yard from the surface of the earth. … This monument of antiquity, when viewed within the circle, strikes you with astonishment how the massy stones could be placed in such regular order either by human strength or mechanical power.’

By the 19th century the once swampy meadow had become a well-drained pasture, the shepherd's cot had been succeeded by a good farmhouse and the ‘buttress or rude pavement’ had entirely disappeared, unless as suggested by Dymond it was never anything more than the ring-bed of rubble in which the uprights were set. A few years later Hutchinson in his 1794 History of Cumberland describes it as ‘…a small, but beautiful, druidical monument’. And curiously, ‘A little to the north is another, of larger dimensions, but not in so perfect a state.’ Of this, nothing survives if indeed it ever existed.

In 1901 the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society sponsored the first archaeological excavation at Swinside, under the direction of C. W. Dymond and W. G. Collingwood. The dig lasted from midday on Tuesday 26 March 1901 through to the evening of the following day. The circle was discovered to have been an almost continuous palisade of upright stones seated on top of a layer of gravelly material known locally as ‘pinnel’. The stones had then been steadied with a packing of small cobbles with larger ones being wedged in especially on the inner side. All the stones, but one fragment resting on the ground, have fallen inward. This they attributed to the sheltering of sheep under the lee of the larger stones, which In the course of time wears hollows, in which water collects and softens the ground. The blocks, partially undermined, begin to decline, and, sometimes, finally fall.

When Hutchinson and Gough describe such monuments as ‘druidic temples’ they were much influenced by the 17th century antiquarian William Stukeley and his reliance on a handful of Roman writings on the North European tribes. These polemical accounts compress the great depth of time which constitutes prehistory to a snapshot of life immediately before the Romans. Similarly the rise of the neo-Paganist movement, drawing on ancient traditions, understandably answers to a modern need for a spiritualised natural world in a time of ecological crisis; a hunger for magic. At Castlerigg trinkets and candles are left as offerings beneath the stones, at Long Meg the grand old ash and sycamore trees flaunt spirit catchers and ribbons, but here at remote Swinside the stones are left to themselves.

For me, objects of such age focus the mind not only on their almost incomprehensible antiquity, but also the fleetingness of all else, as an 11th century Welsh poet put it:

‘this leaf driven by the wind

alas for its fate -

old the year it was born.’

Aside from time, there is a deeper mystery that lies at the core of such monuments and perhaps it was always part of their purpose. They flourished within their own context, within a wider, complex prehistoric landscape and as much as we try to subvert them, they remain standing, shoulder to shoulder in their stoic attachment to this centre, this ancient axis mundi. Our time here is short. We sit within the circle and look outwards attempting to count the stones. Once again, we fail to agree on a figure, inevitably distracted by a buzzard wheeling overhead and a scatter of starlings, raucous, as the light fades.

*Swinside Stone Circle entrance photographed by Herbert Bell c.1910*

First published in ‘Cumbria’ magazine August 2023.