Stone Circles Map: 18 Maps of Megaliths and Standing Stones

Dolmens bring up 573 maps on MapIndex, megaliths 328 and stone circles 308, and many of their makers borrow someone else’s yardstick. Three of the largest copy the Megalithic Portal’s marks out of five for condition, ambience and access, two Irish maps load the national Archaeological Survey record by record, and a Swiss one counts the cups ground into each rock. Others make their own: a French timeline that starts in Neanderthal graves, a German counter who has numbered 10,002 rings across the Sahara, a traveller who dated 419 dolmens visited between March and June.

1. Megaliths Map: 20,923 Sites From Neanderthals to the Iron Age

   The oldest layer opens in the Grotte de Bruniquel, where structures 336 metres inside the cave have been dated to about 175,000 years ago, and at Regourdou, a Neanderthal grave under a slab weighing 850 kg. From there this French map of 20,923 sites runs as a timeline, one layer per period: before 4400 BC, 4400 to 3800, 3800 to 3500, on to 1300 BC and “recently”. Each entry is a short essay with its sources, and the reach is wide: Sigus in Algeria with 1,200 megalithic tombs, Ōnodai in Japan with 70 dolmens in four groups, groups of standing stones in the Negev that the text calls matseboth. The two largest layers hold what has no date, 5,939 undated graves and 7,858 “other megaliths”.

   

   Objects

   20,92320,793 points, 116 lines, 14 areas

   Countries

   FranceItalySpainand 107 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

2. Standing Stones Map UK: 3,163 Sites Rated for Ambience

   Bedd Llywarch in Powys is a pair of stones under a metre tall that scores 5 out of 5 for ambience and 1 for access. Every site on this map carries the Megalithic Portal’s marks for position accuracy, condition, ambience and access, split into layers by country and type: 531 Scottish stone circles, 379 English, 90 Welsh, standing stones, stone rows and multiple rows. Its author Parsa9 adds the 50 sites of Burl and Piper’s guide Rings of Stone with their page numbers, and Burl’s henge lists. The notes keep surprising: stones on the village green at Faulkland in Somerset reused as stocks, a 15-metre circle on St Kilda, and 225 sites whose condition reads only “Destroyed”.

   

   Objects

   3,1633,163 points

   Countries

   United KingdomIreland

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

3. Sahara Stone Circles Map: 10,002 Rings in the Desert

   Ten layers of exactly a thousand rings each, named “Rund 0001-1000” to “Rund 9001-10000”, cover the Sahara from Western Sahara and Mauritania across Algeria, Mali, Niger and Libya to Sudan. Nearly every ring is an unnamed point; the few labels give a size, from “40 m” to “120 m !!”, and one ring lies “unter Lava”, under lava. A map built the same way, with the same German layer names, counts 4,070 rings in Saudi Arabia, 943 of them in a layer for divided circles.

   

   Objects

   10,00210,002 points

   Countries

   AlgeriaNigerMaliand 7 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

4. Irish Stone Circles Map: 222 Circles From the National Survey

   At Grange near Lough Gur an embanked stone circle was levelled in the early 1830s while the Limerick to Cork mail road was being built beside it. These 222 entries come straight from the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, with class codes for five-stone, multiple-stone and embanked circles and the surveyors’ field notes; 96 of them lie in County Cork. The notes count stones like an inventory: five stones, one fallen, internal diameter 3.5 metres; a circle partly built into a field fence; another destroyed between 1963 and 1970, one around 1984, one before 1910, when pottery turned up in the course of its destruction.

   

   Objects

   222222 points

   Countries

   IrelandUnited Kingdom

   Made with

   Google My Maps

5. Ley Lines Map Cornwall: 453 Alignments Between the Stones

   Line 37 starts at the cliff sanctuary of Treryn Dinas, passes Boscawen-ûn stone circle and Lanyon Quoit and ends 13.7 km later at a menhir by the Nine Maidens, with its bearing given to a tenth of a degree. This map draws 453 such lines across Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, 231 of them signed “PJ.”, others “Found by Kenny Price” or “Reported in Meyn Mamvro”. Line 207 runs 131 km from Start Point in Devon to St Michael’s Mount; the Michael Line runs 311 km from Avebury by Glastonbury and the Hurlers to Carn Lês Boel. Beneath the lines lie more than 4,500 sites with grid references, among them 624 on Scilly and Boscawen-ûn’s Cornish name, Dons meyn, “dance of stones”.

   

   Objects

   5,0564,548 points, 453 lines, 55 areas

   Countries

   United Kingdom

   Made with

   Google My Maps

   Versions

   6 other versions

6. Statue-Menhir Map: A 63 km Circuit in the Monts de Lacaune

   Two of these carved stones served as footbridges over streams, and a third went into the wall of a cowshed. This circuit of 63 km through the Tarn leads to 16 statue-menhirs, menhirs and a dolmen, each with its size and where to look: in a farmyard ringed by spruces, in front of a garden hedge, outside the tourist office at Lacaune. The one from the Moulin de Loubat began as a man and was turned into a woman, “breasts still visible”; the Pierre Plantée, 3.5 metres of granite, still upright in 1845, was later toppled for an excavation that found nothing; the Menhir du Lauzetto was found in a field in 2005.

   

   Objects

   1918 points, 1 line

   Countries

   France

   Made with

   Google My Maps

7. Dolmens and Menhirs Map of Europe: 16,373 Sites, Rated

   A modern menhir by the artist Michael Flatau, 3.7 metres high and 18 tonnes, was put up in Lower Saxony in 2006 with a borehole through it for visitors. It is one of 208 modern stone circles and monoliths among the 16,373 Megalithic Portal sites that tbuijsro has mapped across France (9,168), Germany (5,366), Italy (1,697) and Belgium (142). The rest is old: 4,164 dolmens, 2,571 menhirs, 805 brochs and nuraghi, each with the Portal’s ratings. The Champ-Dolent menhir in Brittany stands 9 metres tall on stone brought from more than 4 km away; a dolmen at Albersdorf has a visitor’s note: “I have searched for it but couldn’t find it.”

   

   Objects

   16,37316,373 points

   Countries

   FranceGermanyItalyand 9 more

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

8. Dartmoor Stone Rows Map: 6,191 Prehistoric Sites on One Moor

   The Upper Erme row runs for 3,386 metres, the longest of the 87 stone rows on this map of Dartmoor. Each site gets its grid reference, its size and its reference in Butler’s volumes on the moor: Beacon Plain A, a menhir of 6.4 by 1.93 metres; Grey Wethers, two stone circles side by side of 31.5 and 33 metres; and a standing stone listed simply as “Oxenham Arms”. The 16 stone circles and 19 menhirs are the rare part. Most of the 6,191 points are the moor’s prehistoric houses, 4,835 of them in three layers, beside 1,032 cairns and 202 cists.

   

   Objects

   6,1916,191 points

   Countries

   United Kingdom

   Made with

   Google My Maps

9. Cup-Marked Stones Map: 1,301 Swiss Rocks, Cups Counted

   “6563.31 Mesocco 298 o 38 +”: each of these Swiss stones is named by postcode and place, then counted: cups ground into the rock (o) and other signs (+). The record holder is a rock at Saint-Luc in the Valais with 350 cups, and stones at Zermatt and Sils im Domleschg carry around 200. Most of the 1,301 entries are cup-marked boulders, 951 of them with cups alone, gathered in Ticino, Graubünden and the Valais; one at Falera is marked “natürlich”, natural after all, and a rock in the Muotathal bears only initials and dates. A smaller layer lists 46 dolmens, stelae and menhirs.

   

   Objects

   1,3011,301 points

   Countries

   SwitzerlandItalyFrance

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

10. Irish Megalithic Tombs Map: 1,845 Giants' Graves and Beds

    More than a hundred of these tombs were labelled “Dermot and Grania’s Bed” on old Ordnance Survey maps, others “Giant’s Grave”, “Druid’s Altar” or “Cromlech”. The map keeps those old labels next to the official record of the Republic’s megalithic tombs: 524 wedge tombs, 304 court tombs, 198 passage tombs, 150 portal tombs, 337 unclassified tombs and 332 other megalithic structures. Each has its survey number and coordinates, from Moorneen on the Galway coast to Cartronplank in Sligo, still a “Giant’s Grave” on the latest edition.

    

    Objects

    1,8451,845 points

    Countries

    IrelandUnited Kingdom

    Made with

    Google My Maps

11. Dolmen Road Trip Map: 419 Megaliths Visited Day by Day

    Every point on this map is named by the day of the visit: “5 mars”, Menhir Puig de la Llosa in Catalonia; “17 mars”, Anta do Patalim 2 in the Alentejo; “11 avril”, the Arca do Rabós in Galicia. The traveller behind LesPierredeMontreuil saw 85 megaliths in March, 193 in April, 101 in May on the way back through France, and 21 in June in Brittany, ending on 17 June with the Chaise de Saint-Telo and the Bateau de pierre, the stone boat, of Saint-Conogan. Along the way come antas, orcas, cromlechs and rock engravings at the menhir of Luzim.

    

    Objects

    419419 points

    Countries

    FranceSpainPortugal

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

12. Sardinia Megaliths Map: Giants' Tombs, Nuraghi and Menhirs

    The giants’ tomb of Coddu Vecchiu at Arzachena began around 2500 BC as a gallery grave, and its 10-metre corridor still forms the middle of the later tomb. This map of 629 Sardinian sites, most with text from the site donnanuragica.com, counts 86 giants’ tombs, 125 rock-cut domus de janas and hundreds of nuraghi. At Pranu Muttedu menhirs stand in pairs, in rows and inside the tombs themselves; at Perdu Pes stand three betili, the conical stones set beside giants’ tombs. One nuraghe, at Mandonis, is marked as unpublished and quotes the report of a Cagliari archaeologist instead.

    

    Objects

    629629 points

    Countries

    Italy

    Made with

    Google My Maps

13. Pictish Stones Map: 443 Carved Standing Stones of Scotland

    On the Hilton of Cadboll stone a woman rides side-saddle in a hunt, a mirror and comb in front of her and two trumpeters behind. This corpus places Scotland’s Pictish carved stones by class, 200 symbol stones, 57 cross slabs, 50 later cross slabs still marked work in progress and 136 cross-marked stones, each with its Canmore number and its symbols. The crescent and V-rod comes first most often, ahead of the double disc and Z-rod and the Pictish beast. Sixteen stones also carry ogham, the Burrian stone in Orkney with the transliteration “…ES MEQQ JSTAJSTAMMOFFEST”.

    

    Objects

    443443 points

    Countries

    United Kingdom

    Made with

    Google My Maps

14. Caucasus Dolmens Map: Stuck Plugs, Fish Stones and Ruins

    “A slab dolmen with its plug stuck”: the notes of this Russian map are made on the spot, around Pshada and Shirokaya Shchel in Krasnodar Krai. Of its 236 main entries, 61 are collapsed dolmens; one has two reliefs that look like “the imprint of a trilobite” or a sun with rays, and beside the dolmens lie a ritual bowl and a long stone shaped like a fish, with a small hollow where its eye would be. A field of Bronze Age burial mounds, the map adds, was partly bulldozed during logging in May 2008. Five update layers then leave the Caucasus for pyramids from Bosnia to the Maldives, Bimini Road and a “Tropical Stonehenge”.

    

    Objects

    284275 points, 3 lines, 6 areas

    Countries

    Russian FederationMexicoPeruand 22 more

    Made with

    Google My Maps

15. Galicia Petroglyphs and Dolmens Map: 1,520 Sites

    Galician dolmens keep folk names, and this map lists them as found: Forno dos Mouros, the oven of the Moors, Casiña dos Mouros, their little house, Pedra Moura. Most of the 1,520 points link to a post on the blog Megaliticia, hundreds of them written in 2015. Petroglyphs make up two thirds of the map, more than a thousand rock carvings, beside 106 dolmens, 78 castros and the burial mounds called mámoas.

    

    Objects

    1,5201,520 points

    Countries

    SpainPortugal

    Made with

    Google My Maps

16. Henge Map of Lokeren: A Flemish Town Aligned to the Moon

    The crossing tower of St Laurence’s church is marked as the centre of the henge, its altar stone. From there someone has drawn the midsummer sunrise to a pond in the town park, the midwinter sunrise along Zelestraat and the moon’s most northerly and southerly rising and setting points of the major and minor lunar standstills across the town of Lokeren. A second layer adds what stands on the lines: a mill built in 1751 and demolished in 1937, the Ueberg, labelled the north “barrow”, and De Put, a hill dug away in 1974.

    

    Objects

    3825 points, 13 lines

    Countries

    Belgium

    Made with

    Google My Maps

17. Stone Rows Map: 306 British Rows and What Ends Them

    This map sorts Britain’s stone rows by one question, whether a cairn or a stone circle stands at the end of the row, and gives each its own layer. The 306 rows reach from the moors of the southwest to Caithness and the Western Isles, where Callanish North counts as a row with a terminal; Dartmoor alone has more than 80 and Exmoor 38. Each links to its page in a gazetteer of the stone rows of Great Britain.

    

    Objects

    306306 points

    Countries

    United Kingdom

    Made with

    Google My Maps

18. Swedish Stone Circles Map: 135 Monuments in Good Condition

    The only layer of this map is called “Bra skick”, good condition, and it holds 135 Swedish monuments that qualify. Sixty-six are stone circles, stenkretsar, each under its number in the national heritage register: Eskelhem 147 on Gotland, Södra Möckleby 10:1 on Öland, eight in the parish of Hjortsberga in Blekinge. Between them lie grave fields, stone settings and a few rock carvings.

    

    Objects

    135135 points

    Countries

    Sweden

    Made with

    Google My Maps