Where did the stone circle builders live?
The Penrith Museum field walking project seeks to map evidence for prehistoric settlement in the Vale of Eden, an important region in the Neolithic and Bronze Age (c.3800 – 1500 BC). Eden contains an exceptional number of monuments, including the stone circles of Long Meg and Her Daughters and the henges of Mayburgh and King Arthur’s Round Table. Elsewhere are many barrows, chambered mounds and rock art sites. Despite this proliferation of sites, we know almost nothing about the people who built and used them. One of the primary objectives of the ‘Living Among the Monuments’ project is to trace where people lived. Research has been conducted across the western coastal plain of Cumbria (eg Cherry and Cherry 1983) and in the limestone uplands to the south-east of Eden (Cherry and Cherry 1987), and considerable quantities of prehistoric artefacts discovered. But no survey has been conducted across the Vale itself, leaving a large gap in the evidence and our understanding. This project see
