208 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 
typical of Dartmoor. Many such rows lie isolated on 
the moor except for nearby hut-circles. On 
Dartmoor and Exmoor, hardly a hundred miles 
from the Marlborough Downs, there are over fifty 
of these independent settings.”! 
There is a paradox. People on the sarsen- 
covered Marlborough Downs did not use stone for 
the foundation-walls of their dwellings and there 
are no recorded hut-circles which may be because 
they are deeply buried under today’s towns and 
villages. On the uninhabited uplands of Dartmoor 
there are many more than a thousand. 
Langdean Bottom, far too small to be a stone 
circle and quite unlike any stone-surrounded 
round barrow in Wessex, may be such a hut-circle 
with tall, wide slabs for its walls, a conspicuous 
entrance and, tellingly for a Dartmoor connection, 
a double row typical of that region close to it. Both 
the style of house and the lines of stones are 
untypical of Wiltshire but almost identical to the 
settings and hut-circles on Dartmoor. It is 
revealing. Like the un-Wessex-like single rows in 
the neighbourhood of Swindon the sarsen settings 
at Langdean Bottom may be one more instance of 
intrusive fashions reaching Wessex, perhaps in the 
Middle Bronze Age when a deteriorating climate 
was already causing people to abandon the 
inhospitable uplands.” 
It must be conjectural but the alternatives are 
unconvincing. The ‘stone circle’ is not only 
claustrophobic but it is on a low mound unlike any 
other Wiltshire ring. The setting differs entirely 
from other round barrows in the county. Of 
necessity, queries remain. Grinsell wavered about 
the rows of sarsens, ‘Query whether the site (was) a 
row of 2 or 3 prehistoric houses’. Mortimer was less 
doubtful. “The enclosure is definitely a rectangle 
with an additional row of sarsens running parallel 
to its northern side’.”* 
Such assessments take no account of later 
interference such as the medieval labour-saving 
expedient of integrating rows of standing stones 
into the walls of cattle- or sheep-pens. Such 
vandalism was commonplace. The Rollright Stones 
circle in Oxfordshire became a Roman _ cock- 
fighting arena. Castilly henge in Cornwall was 
transformed into a play-house in the Middle Ages. 
The high banks of the Maumbury Rings henge at 
Dorchester were adapted for a Civil War gun- 
battery. So was the Castilly erstwhile theatre.” 
There are many similar sacrileges. 
At Langdean Bottom the individual similarities 
of a sarsen ring and stone rows to monuments on 
Dartmoor could be coincidental. What makes the 
distant origin a likelihood is the closeness of the 
ring and the rows, oddities a few steps from each 
other in a countryside of established local forms. 
That, in turn, offers the probability that the double 
and single rows a few miles to the north also were 
related to Dartmoor customs. 
If ideas, even human immigration, from that 
bleak upland to the more sheltered countryside of 
northern Wiltshire did occur then it is from the 
detailed notes of A. D. Passmore that the first clues 
have emerged, providing a glimmer of light on 
prehistory like the flickering of a birthday cake 
candle in the darkness of the past. 
Acknowledgements 
I am grateful to Anne Foster and Val Knowles for 
their respective hand-written and _ typed 
transcriptions of the notebooks; to Lorna Haycock, 
Sandell Librarian of the Wiltshire Archaeological 
& Natural History Society, for information about 
Richard Jefferies and the Day House Farm circle; to 
R. H. Reiss and the National Monuments Record, 
Swindon, for information about Fir Clump; and to 
the National Monuments Record for additional 
information about the Day House Farm stone 
circles; Hilary Schrafft for searching for Passmore’s 
obituary in the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald of 1958; 
and to Neil Mortimer who led me to the 
controversial sites at Langdean Bottom. 
Notes 
' Passmore, A. D. 1893-4, WANHM 27, 104, 171-4. 
?  Stukeley, 1743, 45. 
> Hoare, 1819, 94-5; Duke, 1846, 6, 80-2; Lukis, 
Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London, (III), 
1883, 347; Smith, A. C., 1885, 76-8; Thom, Thom & 
Burl, 1980, S5/5, 132-3. 
+ Andrew David et al, 202. Stukeley sketch of 
Winterbourne Bassett: Bodleian Library, Oxford, 
Gough Maps 231, fol. 216. 
Broome circle: Aubrey, 1980, 106-107. Passmore and 
the Long Stone: WANHM 44, 1929, 84-5. 
® Destruction of the Broome circle and Cricklade: 
WANHM 23, 1887, 115-16. French portal-dolmen: 
ibid, 156-7. 
Glantane recumbent stone circle: O’Nuallain, 1984, 
12, no. 3, plan, 52; Burl, 1995, 220. 
8 Passmore’s death: There were obituaries in 
WANHM 57, 1959, 255-6, and, reputedly, in the 
Wiltshire Gazette € Herald of March 13, 1958, 
although there is no report in that or adjacent issues. 
° Richard Jefferies and Coate: North Wiltshire Herald 
