Travel: Bagnold's Stone Circle

ThothWeb

"In a small basin in the hills we came the next day (27th October, 1930) upon a circle 27 feet (8.5 metres) in diameter of thin slabs of sandstone, 18 to 24 inches high. Half were lying prone, but the rest were still vertical in the sand. There was no doorway or other sign of orientation, and though we searched within and without the circle, no implements could be found. I understand that other similar circles have been found in the neighborhood of the Gilf Kebir."

Bagnold and his party made their discovery purely by chance, as the low structure is only visible from a few hundred metres. Bagnold did mark the circle on his map acompanying the Geographical Journal article, however on the scale of 1:10 million the half milimetre dot represents an area 5 kilometres in diameter, plus of course any error in Bagnold's position estimate. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack when we set out to locate the circle in march 2001.

However luck was with us, after rounding a low hill suddenly the circle right in front, though the GPS still showed six kilometres to go, based on the position plotted from Bagnold's map.