Hordron Edge stone circle
I took these photos as reference when a friend asked me to design a book jacket for a novel he'd written (still unpublished) that involved the general environment of the moors near Sheffield, and an unspecified stone circle in particular. The two best known real-life examples of such circles near Sheffield are Arbor Low—which has definite earthworks of ditches and ramparts as well as its stones (so making it a "henge" monument)—and Nine Ladies, but there are several in the Peak District just south of the city (in Derbyshire). The circle featuring in the photos below is Hordron Edge stone circle, on the edge of Moscar Moor, overlooking the Ladybower reservoir.
Of the three circles I mentioned, Arbor Low is oldest, being Neolithic, while the other two are Bronze Age monuments. None are as imposing as the famous Stonehenge in Wiltshire, consisting as they do of far smaller stones, often obscured by erosion and vegetation. Arbor Low has its earthworks, Nine Ladies sits in a clearing amongst trees, and Hordron Edge—also called The Seven Stones of Hordron (although there are now ten known stones and there is educated speculation that there might be as many as 26 in all, some still buried)—sits on open moorland.
Ladybower reservoir, to the circle's west, is a large, artificially created, Y-shaped body of water completed in 1949. It was made by the damming of the rivers Derwent and Ashop and two villages of the same names were abandoned to a drowned fate in its construction (residents were relocated beforehand, of course!). Structures within the villages are occasionally visible if water levels are low, and a church tower was, I think, eventually dynamited to deter the curious from dangerous exploration. The reservoir has two "bellmouth" overflows by the dam head that are very impressive when in spate, though there may well be larger examples elsewhere in the world.
This is a view of Hordron Edge circle, looking east:
The following images were taken looking west, toward the Derwent valley and Ladybower reservoir:
This "adjusted" image is of the stone circle, looking north:
The last three images are of the wider location at Hordron Edge, firstly looking west over Ladybower and lastly looking north to moorland:
