The three circles, two avenues leading from two of the circles towards the river, and some outstanding stones were most carefully surveyed by Mr. C. E. Dymond some years ago. He was good enough to send me copies of his plans and levelling sections. I have not had the advantage of perusing his memoir, but I have studied the monuments as well as I could by means of the 25-inch Ordnance map. This, combined with an azimuth which Colonel Johnston, the Director-General of the Ordnance Survey, was kind enough to send me, should give me bearings within a degree. I will begin by giving a short account of the stones which remain, abridged from the convenient pamphlet prepared for the British Association meeting at Bristol in 1898 by Prof. Lloyd Morgan. The circles at Stanton Drew, though far less imposing than those of Avebury and Stonehenge, are thought to be more ancient than are the latter, for the rough-hewn uprights and plinths of Stonehenge bear the marks of a higher and presumably later stage of mechanical development. Taken as a group, the Somersetshire circles are in some respects more complex than their better known rivals in Wiltshire. There are three circles, from two of which “avenues” proceed for a short distance in a more or less easterly direction; there is a shattered but large dolmen--if we may so regard the set of stones called “the cove”; and there are outlying stones--the “quoit,” and those in Middle Ham--which bear such relations to the circles as to suggest that they too formed parts of some general scheme of construction. From the photograph of the Ordnance map (Fig. 47) it will be seen, as pointed out by Prof. Lloyd Morgan, (1) That the centre of the great circle, that of the S.W. circle, and that of the quoit, are nearly in the same straight line. (2) That the cove, the centre of the great circle, and that of the N.E. circle, are nearly in the same straight line. The quoit, which generally means the covering stone of a cromlech--“Hautville’s Quoit,” as it is named on the Ordnance map--looms large in Stanton Drew tradition; it is locally as much respected as the circles themselves. It is pointed to most unmistakably by the fact that a line from it to the S.W. circle passes nearly through the centre of the great circle. If the observation line, then, meant anything astronomically, it can only have had to do with the rising of a star far to the north, in a position far more northerly than the sun ever reaches. The “quoit,” lying in an orchard by the roadside, has nothing very impressive about its appearance--a recumbent mass of greyish sandstone; but it seems to be a brick in the Stanton Drew building. By some regarded as a sarsen block from Wiltshire, it is, in Prof. Lloyd Morgan’s opinion, more probably derived from the Old Red Sandstone of Mendip. In any case it is not, geologically speaking, _in situ_; nor has it reached its present position by natural agency.