The Merry Maidens

I've visited this wonderful stone circle at Boleigh, near St Buryan, in Cornwall dozens of times. It was a favourite place to go with my family when I was a boy growing up in nearby Penzance. And when my kids came along I took them there too.

The circle - also known as the Dawn's Men (a corruption of the Cornish Dans maen or 'Stone dancers') -  is composed of nineteen stones plus two accompanying outlying stones called The Pipers. They are spaced three to four metres apart with a larger gap between the stones on the east side. The circle is approximately twenty-four metres in diameter and is the most round of all Cornish circles. To the south is another stone which suggests a possible north-south orientation. 

About 300 metres to the northeast are The Pipers – two 3-metre-high standing stones (see above). These have been described as largest surviving standing stones in Cornwall. Local legend has it that nineteen maidens were turned into stone as punishment for dancing on a Sunday. The Pipers are so far away because they heard the church clock in St Buryan strike midnight, and realised they were breaking the Sabbath. They started to run up the hill away from the maidens but were caught and frozen to the spot.

Another tradition says that The Pipers were erected to commemorate Howel and Æthelstan, two leaders who died in a 10th-century battle.

In earlier times there was another stone circle located 200 metres away, but this had been destroyed by the end of the 19th century. 

Here's a visitor's video of the site so you can experience it for yourselves.