 Southern end of the row looking south over the cairn circle towards Shaugh Moor in the distance. |
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To the north
of the stone
circle at Brisworthy is this low cairn
with a retaining kerb of standing stones which marks the southern end
of a ragged stone row running south-southwest to north-northeast towards
the centre of Ringmoor Down. Not all here is as it seems though, the
cairn circle is a rather dubious reconstruction carried out by Reverend
Sabine Baring-Gould in 1909 (who incidentally wrote the hymn 'Onward
Christian Soldiers) the work being criticized by the same Mr. Worth
that rebuilt the nearby Brisworthy circle in the same year. At this
time there was only a solitary stone still standing while four others
lay fallen nearby, what Baring-Gould did was to re-erect these fallen
stones as well as bring in several other seemingly random stones from
elsewhere on the moor and place them in what he presumed were socket
holes from missing stones. This has left us with ten uprights forming
a circle with a diameter of 13 metres surrounding a low damaged cairn
than measures about 7 metres in diameter and less than a metre high.
From this circle the remains of the Ringmoor stone row emerges to lead
nearly 350 metres across the Down where it ends with a one metre tall
terminal stone. This row which is a double in some places and a single
in others is quite badly damaged with English Heritage reporting less
than thirty stones remaining although some are so short that others
could lay undiscovered beneath the turf. Again it was partly restored
by Baring-Gould and there is some suggestion that the double sections
of the row may be down to his interpretation of the site rather than
being an accurate recreation of what may have originally existed here.
Suggested Date: Bronze Age |
 Looking north along Ringmoor Down stone row - the dots in the distance are cows. |
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