Nine Maidens Stone Circle

• Period: Bronze Age
• Type: cairn circle (a ring of stones round a burial mound)
• Stones: at least 16 standing, up to about 0.7 m high, set round an area about 7 m across
• Also known as: Nine Stones
• Scheduled monument: Historic England list entry 1017871 (Nine Stones ring cairn on Belstone Common)

The Nine Maidens stand on the western slope below Belstone Tor, about a kilometre up onto the common from Belstone village. The Ordnance Survey map calls them the Nine Stones, but there are more than nine: a ring of at least sixteen granite stones, none much more than knee high, set round a slightly raised area about seven metres across. In the middle a loose granite boulder may cover a cist, and there are traces of a mound around it.

What survives is the ring of a round burial cairn. The centre has been disturbed, the cairn robbed and the burial chamber destroyed, but the circle itself is well preserved and was scheduled in 1971.

Nobody agrees on how many stones there are. Samuel Rowe, in his Perambulation of Dartmoor (1848), counted seventeen standing, the tallest not more than two and a half feet high, and L. V. Grinsell still found seventeen visible in 1976. Most counts today give sixteen, while the Book of Belstone (2002) allows up to twenty if small stones and toppled or insecure ones are included. The total depends on what you decide to count.

R. Hansford Worth described the circle for the Dartmoor Exploration Committee in two of his Barrow Reports in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association: number 21 (1902) and number 42 (1923, with his photographs).

The name comes from the folklore. The tale told here is the familiar one: nine maidens went out dancing on the Sabbath and were turned to stone, and at noon they are said to dance again. Grinsell gathered it in Folklore of Prehistoric Sites in England (1976), and an earlier version appeared in Notes and Queries in 1850. Eden Phillpotts reworked it in The Book of Avis. Ruth St Leger-Gordon pointed out that Nine Maidens is a name given to circles across Britain whatever their number of stones. Local belief holds that anyone who disturbs the stones will come to harm.