Swinside Stone Circle, Cumbria: The 'mini-Stonehenge' which sprang up overnight

The Swinside Stone Circle is little visited, despite its chilling origin story.

Sunkenkirk Stone Circle at Swinside, The Lakes.
Sunkenkirk Stone Circle at Swinside, The Lakes.
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

On the slopes of the Lake District’s Black Combe, near Broughton-in-Furness, this extraordinarily well-preserved Neolithic stone circle is barely visited, perhaps because it’s a mile’s walk to the nearest road. Its spooky story is that the stones appeared in the dead of night, after the Devil stole them from a nearby church, hence its moniker Sunkenkirk.

Sunkenkirk Stone Circle at Swinside Farm in the Lake District, Cumbria.

There are 55 stones — slate from nearby fells — at least half still standing, in a ring with a 94ft diameter and an entrance that aligns with the midwinter sunrise. It’s on private land, but can be seen from the track between Crag Hall and Swinside Farm.

See more of Secret Britain


Heath Chapel, near Clee St Margaret, Shropshire.
(Image credit: Alamy)

Heath Chapel, Brown Clee, Shropshire: 'You’re transported back to the 12th century'

A remote medieval church in Shropshire is today's Secret Britain find.

The view from Coombe Hill to Beacon Hill and Aylesbury Plain beyond.
(Image credit: Alamy)

Coombe Hill, Buckinghamshire: 'Rare chalk grassland humming with butterflies, wildflowers and grazing cattle'

The view from Coombe Hill, Buckinghamshire, is Friday's Secret Britain selection.

The sacred 4000 year old site of Seahenge exposed briefly by the shifting sands on the Norfolk coast near Hunstanton.
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

Seahenge, Norfolk: The ancient Bronze Age circle that lay hidden for 4,000 years

Seahenge lay beneath the shifting sands of the north Norfolk coast almost until the dawn of the 21st century.

Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.