Shap Stone Avenue

Shap Stone Avenue is a prehistoric megalithic complex near the village of Shap in Cumbria. Once one of Europe’s largest such monuments, it included two stone circles, a two-mile avenue of standing stones, and burial mounds. Today only a damaged mile-long alignment and the buried Kemp Howe circle remain. The site lies in the Eden Valley, where Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments are common. Many of these use local pink granite boulders carried by Ice Age glaciers. The area also contains numerous burial cairns and smaller stone circles. Antiquarians once compared Shap Avenue to Avebury in Wiltshire. William Stukeley visited before much of the avenue was destroyed and described it as a vast serpentine temple. He noted a spring near the Greyhound Inn and a brook crossed by the stone rows. Stukeley received a detailed plan from a Carlisle antiquarian, Mr Routh, which he found convincing. Camden’s 16th-century account mentions huge pyramidal stones arranged in rows for nearly a mile. The avenue’s northern end once led to Skellaw Hill, a large burial cairn. Visitors today walk a rough line of standing stones stretching northwest from Kemp Howe. The terminal circle at Kemp Howe is mostly buried under a rail embankment. Nearby are other prehistoric sites such as Mayburgh Henge and Long Meg and Her Daughters. The landscape around Shap holds many burial cairns and ring cairns, including Moor Divock and Gunnerkeld Stone Circle. A 1775 painting by Lady Mary Lowther shows Kemp Howe with an avenue crossing a stream toward the Greyhound Inn. The view east is restricted, and old place names like Keld suggest springs once marked the route.