Country diary: Just how low can a stone circle go? | Sara Hudston

Withypool, Somerset: This is a landscape where things can lie hidden - not least a bronze-age structure that is more trip hazard than landmarkSeen 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. Continue reading...