Nine Stones Close

Nine Stones Close, also known as the Grey Ladies, is a stone circle on Harthill Moor in Derbyshire in the English East Midlands. It is part of a tradition of stone circle construction that spread throughout much of Britain, Ireland and Brittany during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages, over a period between 3300 and 900 BCE. The purpose of the monument is unknown. Nine Stones Close originally measured 13.7 metres in diameter. In the mid-19th century it had seven stones in its ring, although by the early 21st century that number had declined to four. There are two carved cup marks, a form of rock art, evident on one of the remaining stones. Previously, there may have been an earthen tumulus inside the ring, suggested by a slight elevation observed in the mid-19th century. It is possible that the ring was deliberately positioned to allow sightlines to the nearby Robin Hood's Stride, a gritstone crag, and that a nearby sandstone boulder decorated with cup markings also had reference to the circle. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the monument attracted the attention of the antiquarians Hayman Rooke and Thomas Bateman. In 1877, William Greenwell and Llewellynn Jewitt excavated at the site, and in the late 1930s the Derbyshire Archaeological Society set two of the orthostats standing again.