Seen from the barrow at the top of Withypool Hill, the common stretches away south like a lion’s back, tawny grass glinting as the land dips and then rises to the open skyline. Apart from a bridle path worn through like a rubbed seam, and a distant, narrow thread of road, the ground appears empty. But it’s not – we’re only a few hundred metres from a bronze‑age stone circle.
Forget the mighty 4-metre-tall megaliths of Stonehenge, this modest, ground-hugging construction could almost be mistaken for a series of natural stony outcrops. The 29 miniliths are less than knee-high, set earthfast among wiry mats of heather and whortleberry, more trip hazard than landmark. Absent from early maps, the monument wasn’t rediscovered until 1898, when a rider, led astray in the mist, stumbled over one of the markers.
Made of grey gritstone streaked with opaque bands of white quartz, the uprights were quarried locally. It was thought they were so small because large rocks were hard to come by on Exmoor, even though the clapper bridge of Tarr Steps is made of massive slabs from the same strata. More recently, archaeologists have suggested the miniaturisation is deliberate, and that the hidden portion of stone buried out of sight underground held more significance than the stubs on the surface.
Exmoor is a subtle place where features, wildlife and even people merge into the landscape, their visibility depending on how you see them. This is especially true of the work of the Exmoor nature writer and artist Hope Bourne (1918-2010).
Fiercely creative and resolutely independent, Bourne lived for years in a remote, ramshackle caravan outside Withypool. She had no electricity, drew water from a spring and lived off the land as much as possible. Intensely frugal, she wasted nothing and reused what she could. Bourne bought her clothes at jumble sales and often painted on old envelopes or other salvaged scraps of paper. Sometimes dismissed during her life as an eccentric local character, her ecological awareness, rejection of materialism and close relationship with the natural world now appear particularly prescient.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is out now; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
• An exhibition exploring Bourne’s work and life, co-curated by Sara Hudston, is now open at Somerset Rural Life Museum in Glastonbury
