Rather curiously the cairn by the King Stone is visible on our photographs. Curious because you'd normally expect a cairn to show up as a parch mark when it's very dry---it actually shows up as a dark mark. The reason is because the rest of that land has that much soil straight on top of solid rock, whereas the cairn has: that much soil; then it has that much stone with some soil in it, and then it had a really nice thickness of undisturbed original soil underneath.

{Was there any evidence of any paving in the circle at all?} No. I have this slight theory that the interior was levelled. {The way the bank works it looks as if something like that has happened.}And that certainly is rather more obviously the case with some of these other circles like Swinside in the Lake District.

{Is there any evidence that they were ever used for excarnation?}There isn't here. Not enough excavation has been done.{Because generally we're a bit short of bodies, aren't we, for various parts of prehistory, and I do wonder about that.} In broad terms, stone circles belong to the period where people were being buried as whole bodies rather than being buried as parts. {For which you would need an excarnation area.}At this stage you probably do.

{Has there been any field-walking done in this place?}Yes. There's that field and this field, the next one, and two over here, I believe. We found a lot of flints from Mesolithic through to Bronze Age; a stone axe fragment from Cornwall; a large chunk of flint from a [???]; a moderate smattering of Roman pottery. The flint work tends to be denser as you go down the hill towards the spring line.

{CT: Thank you very much indeed.}Not at all!