Visited here last Wednesday (April 14th) to investigate reports that the circle had been destroyed and yup, it's gone! A sad clearance pile of rocks heaved out and dumped near the style still bear JCB marks and the field in which the remains of the circle stood has been stripped down to the soil and is now grassed over. A very slight depression in the soil remains overlooking Bradup Beck.
This was a protected monument on the Scheduled Monuments Register and I'm sure the landowner can be prosecuted if the destruction was carried out without permission.
Local folklore also tells that a number of stones were taken from the circle many years ago to build the nearby Bradup Bridge.
A few days after a wrote the preceding fieldnotes I returned to Bradup after a space of 3 or 4 years. The boulders I had seen before were still there but this time the heather had been burned back, I knew these stone were not the circle, and that only one stone remained within an earth embankment. However the area of the field where Paul Kenyon said that the stone stood has recently been completely ploughed – there is no stone left. All I could find was a patch of roughly circular soil that was a slightly lighter colour than the surrounding land, and a pile of boulders at the field edge. These all showed deep gouge marks from the bucket of some kind of earth mover. Whether one of these stones is from the circle or not, I don’t know, but it looks like the sad end to yet another monument.
I hope I’m wrong.
I never managed to find the elusive Bradup circle. At the time I visited it a few years ago the area where I thought it was was covered with a thick carpet of heather. Rooting around in this heather I uncovered several large boulders, some of the 12 remainig stones that my guide book told me remained of an original 18 – aha! I had found it.
Unfortunately these stone were not part of the circle, I had made the same mistake that Paul Kenyon first made when he visited, but at least he found the correct location of the site and the one remaining stone. Check his website for more information.
Site doesn't appear on English Heritage's Pastscape site at all , from which it would appear to have been un-scheduled either pre- or post-'vandalism' .
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