The Nine Stones of Thimbleby Moor

Isn’t it funny how when you haven’t been to a place for months, you seem to end up going there over and over again? This is now the third time in just a few weeks that I’ve ended up around Thimbleby Moor. This time, I took a different route, coming via the Hanging Stone after getting dropped off in Thimbleby village, on a one-way trip to Osmotherley. Once again, I got tangled up in the bracken, but a route which was opportune to check out the “Nine Stones.”

These Nine Stones make up a pre-historic stone circle, or a “four-poster stone circle” as the folks at the North York Moors Historic Environment Record call it¹NYM HER No: 4926.. By this, it is meant four upright stones standing at the corners of an irregular quadrilateral²‘FOUR POSTER STONE CIRCLE | Canmore’. 2019. Canmore.org.uk <https://canmore.org.uk/thesaurus/1/1772/FOUR%20POSTER%20STONE%20CIRCLE> [accessed 26 August 2023]. There might well be more than four stones altogether, as here on Thimbleby Moor, but the ones at the corners are the most prominent. I couldn’t see all the nine stones though – some must have been hidden deep in heather or inside the dense forestry over the boundary wall. Some folks even think it looks more like a stone row than a circle. Even with aerial photography, it is not clear cut. I wonder, though, why those Bronze Age folk didn’t put their monument at the highest point of the moor.

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  NYM HER No: 4926.
• 2
  ‘FOUR POSTER STONE CIRCLE | Canmore’. 2019. Canmore.org.uk <https://canmore.org.uk/thesaurus/1/1772/FOUR%20POSTER%20STONE%20CIRCLE> [accessed 26 August 2023]