A ring of waist-high stones in the best-sited field in the north — five thousand years old, free, and always open.
Open accessfree to visit at any reasonable time
Standing remainssubstantial fabric survives to stand in front of
Castlerigg’s the one where you park up, walk a couple of hundred yards across a field, and just stop. Not because there’s a great deal to look at up close — it’s a ring of stones, most no higher than your waist, some barely poking out of the grass — but because of where somebody put it. You’re on a plateau just outside Keswick, and the fells come up all round you like the sides of a bowl: Blencathra one way, Skiddaw another, the Helvellyn range filling in the rest. Whoever chose this spot four and a half thousand years ago had an eye for a view, and they didn’t have drystone walls or forestry plantations to work round either.
It’s Neolithic, one of the earliest stone circles anywhere in Britain, and it’s a scheduled monument with a couple of bowl barrows on the same protected patch. Nobody can tell you with any certainty what it was for, and the guides who actually know their stuff will say so straight rather than reach for something dramatic. Gathering place, calendar, market for stone axes traded down from the Cumbrian fells — take your pick, or take none of them.
You can count the stones if you fancy an argument with whoever you’re with; most people land somewhere around thirty-eight, but nobody quite agrees where the circle starts and stops. It’s free, it’s open all the time, and English Heritage and the National Trust look after it between them, which mostly means leaving it alone and mowing the grass.
Go early if you can be bothered getting up for it — the low light on the fells is worth the alarm, and you won’t have the place to yourself but you’ll have it quieter than midday. Latrigg’s a short stroll north-west if you want height afterwards, High Rigg and Walla Crag both within reach too. Wrap up regardless of what the valley’s doing; it catches the wind.
More at the National Heritage List entry
