Nine Maiden Stones, Devon, England

The Nine Maidens is an incomplete stone circle with sixteen still standing. The circle stands to the west of the village of Belstone in an area of clitter. This additional source of stone may have saved the destruction of the circle by local masons. None of the stones are much higher than three feet (one metre) and the diameter of the circle is approximately twenty-one feet (seven metres). Samuel Rowe, a nineteenth-century rambler, provided a description of the stones in his 1848 book A Perambulation of the Ancient and Royal Forest of Dartmoor and the Venville Precincts:

We shall mount the steep ascent towards Belstone Tor, and within a quarter of a mile, on its western slope, we shall observe the circle called in the neighbourhood Nine Stones, but which in reality consists of seventeen stones, erect, the highest of which is not more than two feet and a half from the ground.

The missing seventeenth stone may have since fallen down to join several other stones that are no longer upright. The Book of Belstone says the tally of stones can be increased to twenty should 'small stones and five toppled or insecure temporary ones' be included. Dora James wrote in 1930 that four stones had been 'wantonly defaced and broken' in 1929

Local folklore suggests that the stones dance:

The stone circles on Dartmoor, are said to have been made "when there were wolves on the hills, and winged serpents in the low lands." On the side of Belstone Tor, near Oakhampton [sic], is a small grave circle called "Nine Stones." It is said to dance every day at noon.

The stones are said to have originally been nine maidens who were cast into stone and damned to dancing every noon for eternity as a punishment for dancing on the Sabbath. Equally, the story has involved seventeen brothers. It is also said that the ringing of the nearby church bells brings them to life.

John Chudleigh noted in 1892 that heated air which rises from the ground gives the appearance of movement, which may give an origin to the legends of dancing maidens.