Stone circles in East Cumbria. You really need Copey's 'The Modern Antiquarian' and a decent OS map to find most of the stuff around Shap - the bottom circle is at Oddendale. There are so many sites it's tempting to think of some extensive local civilisation centred around the area, which would have been wooded and fertile.

Today, it must rank as one of the least appealing landscapes in Cumbria, or even the World, due to the unrelentingly dull grassed slopes and moorland. And Shap, well what a dump. Seldom does one come across a settlement that makes Accrington seem like Seville set in a landscape that makes The Falklands seem like Mallorca.

The top circle, Gamelands, is in more attractive limestone farmland near Orton. It's quite big, must be the 4th biggest in Cumbria after Long Meg, Castlerigg and Sunkenkirk. It's in a field of its own, only 200 yards from a road but you could drive past every day and never know it's there. It has great views despite being in the valley, and seems to be aligned directly between a distant High Street in the west, and that peak on the Coast to Coast with all the old cairns on top in the east. Whether this is significant or not is, of course, unknown.