Nine Stones, Winterbourne Abbas

The Nine Stones, also known as the Devil's Nine Stones, the Nine Ladies, or Lady Williams and her Dog, is a stone circle located near to the village of Winterbourne Abbas in the southwestern English county of Dorset [1]. The Nine Stones is part of a tradition of stone circle construction that spread through much of Great Britain, Ireland, and Brittany between 3,300 and 900 BCE, during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age [1]. The Nine Stones circle is positioned at the national grid reference 36100904, on the western edge of the village of Winterbourne Abbas in Dorset [1]. The roots of a beech tree have engulfed two of the megaliths in the circle [1]. Seven of the nine surviving stones are under 90 centimetres tall, but two of the northwestern stones are considerably larger [1]. The circle is located at the bottom of a narrow valley [1]. In the nineteenth century the site was visited by the antiquarian Charles Warne, who wrote about it in his 1872 book Ancient Dorset [1].