Rites of spring: the Lake District’s ancient stones marking the passage of the seasons

Castlerigg and Long Meg and Her Daughters form a celebration of the landscape and astronomical alignments that signpost seasonal rhythms

Spring is coming, and I am planning a pilgrimage. I’m going to the vast landscape of the Lake District to visit two of the country’s most picturesque and fascinating prehistoric monuments: Castlerigg stone circle and Long Meg and Her Daughters.

Castlerigg, a circle of 38 boulders of varying sizes, the tallest standing over two metres, is about a 1½ miles from Keswick. It sits on a plateau ringed by some of Cumbria’s highest fells: Blencathra, Helvellyn, Grasmoor and Skiddaw. The view from the circle is so impressive that when Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited in 1799 with his friend William Wordsworth, he declared “the mountains stand one behind the other, in orderly array as if evoked by and attentive to the assembly of white-vested wizards”.