Stanton Drew in Somerset contains one of the largest Neolithic ceremonial complexes in Britain: three stone circles, two stone avenues, and a standing stone called the Cove in the garden of the local inn, all built around 3000 BC. The Great Circle, about 113 metres in diameter, is the second largest stone circle in England after Avebury. Yet for most of its history the site's fame rested not on antiquarian interest but on the vivid folk tradition that explains it.
The story
The legend of Stanton Drew runs as follows: a wedding party assembled in the meadow on a Saturday in ancient times and danced with great merriment through the afternoon and into the evening. As Saturday turned to Sunday, their musician refused to play further — it being the Sabbath. The revellers were desperate for music and a stranger appeared, offering to play in the departing fiddler's place. He played magnificently, faster and faster, until the dancers found they could not stop. When dawn came and they saw the fiddler clearly in the light, they recognised the Devil. He stopped playing and the entire company — bride, groom, guests, and all — were frozen in stone exactly where they stood, in the circles and rows their dancing had formed. The wedding party remains there still.
The antiquary John Aubrey noted the Stanton Drew circles in the seventeenth century, and the Devil-fiddler tradition was well established by the time William Stukeley visited in the eighteenth. The stones themselves are popularly called 'the Weddings'. A magnetometry survey in 1997 revealed a previously unknown feature — a circle of pits surrounding the Great Circle — suggesting the monument was even more elaborate than the standing stones indicate. The tradition linking dancing, the Sabbath, and supernatural petrification is not unique to Stanton Drew: it appears at several other English stone circles, suggesting a widely shared medieval folk explanation for prehistoric monuments whose true origin had been forgotten.