Cheetham Close

Cheetham Close is a small megalithic stone circle in the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, Lancashire, near the Greater Manchester border. It stands on farmland known as Cheetham Close, a quiet spot between fields and low hills. The site once formed part of a larger ritual landscape used in the early Bronze Age. A Roman road passed within two hundred yards of the circle, showing how long this place has been a crossing point. The farmer’s attack in the 1870s left the circle broken and scattered, but fragments still mark the original ring. Archaeologists have pieced together the site’s history through careful surveys. In 1850 Dryden counted six standing stones, and Greenhalgh found a seventh in 1871. Later digs uncovered a ring bank cairn to the south and Bronze Age tools such as a saddle quern and three barbed arrowheads. A 1983 survey showed only two stones still upright, yet the outline of the circle remains visible. Experts believe the circle once held ten evenly spaced gritstone slabs set between 2100 and 1500 BC. Visitors walk across grassy fields to reach the low earthen bank that once supported the stones. Two upright slabs stand close together, while smaller fragments lie scattered nearby. The ring cairn to the south appears as a low, grass-covered mound with a shallow hollow in the centre. The surrounding farmland stretches away to distant hills, giving a sense of the wide, open landscape that Bronze Age people knew.