The Standing Stones of North West Devon

There is a corner of Devon that the megalith books skip. Dartmoor gets its rows and circles, Exmoor gets its miniliths and stone settings, and between and west of them lies a stretch of country — North Devon and Torridge, the Hartland peninsula round to Ilfracombe, the Taw–Torridge estuary, Lundy — that barely appears at all.

I have put together a map and gazetteer of what is actually there: 

nw-devon-standing-stones.netlify.app

It is not a long list. That is the point.

What's on it

Forty-eight records. A handful are unambiguous: the Whitestone above Ilfracombe, the three scheduled Damage Barton stones on the coast, the Mattocks Down pair, nine granite uprights on Lundy, and the Yelland double row on Isley Marsh — excavated in the 1930s and buried under estuary silt since the 1990s, which is the only lowland stone row in the county and the one monument here that would be famous anywhere else.

Most of the rest are quartz. That is the local signature: vein quartz and white quartzite blocks, the Gospel Stone above Woolacombe Bay, the Konk Stone in the next field, the scatter along Lee Downs. Whether some of those are set stones or quarried-out bedrock left standing is a live argument, and I have not tried to settle it.

Then there is a long tail. M.G. Palmer walked the Ilfracombe district in 1937 and published a list of standing stones; the Ordnance Survey went back in the 1950s and decided a good many of them were rubbing-stones, bound-stones or hedge clearance. Both readings are on the map, graded. And there are stones that are not standing stones at all but keep getting counted as such — the Devil's Stone at Shebbear, which is a recumbent sarsen with a folk custom attached, and West Middleton, which is scheduled as forty-eight post-medieval staddle stones and has been mistaken for a stone row more than once.

Everything is graded: certain, probable, possible, doubtful, lost, folklore, rejected. The rejected records stay in deliberately, so nobody rediscovers them.

The tithe layer

The pale diamonds are something else again: field-names from the 1830s tithe apportionments. Long Stone, Grey Stone, Hoarstone, White Stone, Broad Stone, Quoit.

A name is not a date. Some of these will record a prehistoric stone that has since gone into a hedge; many will be medieval boundary markers; some will be nothing at all. But in a region this thin on surviving monuments, the place-name evidence for stones that are no longer there may matter as much as the ones that are. Four fields called Long Stone west of Georgeham, with Longstone Lane running south from them, and no upright to be found — that is worth recording even though it proves nothing.

Toggle the layer separately. Where a grid reference is known the diamond sits on the field; otherwise it sits at the parish centre, which means it is a label, not a location.

Why bother

Two reasons.

The first is that absence is data. If you want to understand what the megalith builders of the south-west were doing, it helps to know where they were not. Mattocks Down, on the last downs before Exmoor, has a fallen menhir, a standing companion, a stone row recorded by Westcote in 1630 and destroyed since, and lost circles planned by Chanter and Worth. There is nothing remotely like that anywhere west of the Taw. The blank is real and it has a shape.

The second is more practical. Scattered across the HER, Palmer's paper, National Trust records and nineteenth-century notes, this material is effectively invisible. On one map with consistent grading, you can at least see what the questions are — and most of the remaining questions need boots and a tape measure, not another database.

A hat-tip to the Megalithic Portal

Anyone who has looked for a stone in the last twenty years owes a debt to the Megalithic Portal. Andy Burnham and a couple of decades of contributors have built the standing general resource for prehistoric sites in these islands, and it is the place most people start — including me.

This gazetteer is not drawn from it. The records here come from Historic England, the Devon HER, National Trust heritage records, Palmer 1937, Chanter and Worth, and the tithe apportionments, which makes the two independent where they overlap. That is useful in itself: two catalogues built from different sources that broadly agree are worth more than one.

It is also a much narrower thing. The Portal covers the world and does what a general gazetteer should — photographs, visitor logs, condition and access ratings, comments from people who have actually stood next to the stone and argued about whether it is bedrock. This site does none of that. It covers one district, west of Exmoor, and it grades records by how much confidence the sources will bear. That is the specialist job, and it only makes sense on top of the general one.

So: complementary, not competitive. If you want to see what a stone looks like, who has visited it and what they made of it, go to the Portal. If you want to know what the documentary record will and will not support for this particular corner of Devon, this map is the narrower tool.

Caveats

Almost nothing here is dated. Historic England's formula for standing stones is Late Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age, for the few excavated examples — and none of the few excavated examples is in this area. "Neolithic" on this map is a possibility, not a result.

Many of these stones are on private land. Inclusion is not an invitation; the Yelland stones are on a tidal RSPB reserve and are, in any case, under the mud.

Corrections and additions welcome. Particularly from anyone who has walked Palmer's list.