Devil’s Quoits Stone Circle

The Devil’s Quoits, a stone circle near Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire, was one of the bigger stone circles in Britain. Little of its original structure survived Medieval destruction and the construction of a Second World War airfield, and what is seen today is a near-entire reconstruction.

The 80-metre wide, slightly flattened circle today comprises 28 stones, originally 36, with an outlier outside the circle to the south-southeast. Folklore states that the devil was playing quoits one Sunday on nearby Wytham Hill, the only prominent landmark in the area, and these stones are the result. They are local stone with a lot of gravel inclusions, of irregular shape, up to 2m in height. Most of those present today are replacements.

The stones are set inside a henge ditch with an outer bank, which probably predate the stone circle. The ditch was originally 7m wide and 2.5m deep, with two entrances to the west and east. As was standard practice, antler picks, presumably those used to dig the ditch, were laid in the bottom after work was finished. The ditch was dug around 2900BC or slightly later, with deposits of cattle bones and pottery continuing for the next thousand years.

The circle with the outlier. The bank is in the background.

The Devil’s Quoits is located on the entirely flat floodplain of the river Thames, which today is three kilometres to the south but in Neolithic times was probably a multitude of braided streams winding through a marshy landscape, flooded in winter and reasonably dry with a few flowing channels in summer. The confluence with the river Windrush is nearby.

Several great ritual complexes were sited along the Thames during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, almost all of them on confluence points. The Thames and its tributaries were of vital importance for travel and navigation when the land was still largely impenetrable forest with few roads or paths, and the river was also used for rituals, offerings and burial.

The confluence of the Thames and the Windrush.

The local landscape bears no resemblance to former times. Gravel extraction pits have left huge lakes, and mounds and banks have destroyed any natural features. In the original landscape, the huge site would have been a landmark for miles around and a focal point for journeys, gatherings and trade. It was a focus for Bronze Age burials long after its construction. Those which were excavated before their destruction revealed the graves of men, women and children, often with elaborate grave goods such as daggers and pottery vessels.

The western causeway.

The site was abandoned by the Iron Age and was extensively ploughed during the Roman period, although it remained a feature of local folklore, and the village name derives from ‘stone-town’. Gravel extraction during the past half-century has destroyed around sixty Bronze Age barrows, ring ditches which often surrounded burials, and other graves containing an unknown number of human bodies, which are now incorporated in roadworks and construction sites across the country. It’s perhaps a blessing that a small part of the site survives.