Long Meg and Her Daughters is a Neoltithic or possibly early Bronze Age stone circle contructed around 3-4000 years ago.
Long Meg herself, is the outlying stone which has some interesting examples of prehistoric rock art as well as some more modern graffiti. Most of the stones forming the circle may be granite/Borrowdale volcanic erratics (this is disputed) whereas Meg herself is sandstone.
Sixteenth century documents say there were 77 stones and possibly two burial cairns inside the circle. There are certainly not so many stones today but apparently it is impossible to count the same number of stones twice. Any successful attempt to count will bring bad luck upon the person who counts.
You have been warned!
Another legend says that Meg and her daughters agreed to dance on the sabbath day and were, for that reason, turned to stone. Yet another story suggests a local squire, Colonel Lacy, was planning to blow the stones to smithereens for some whim in the late 1700s (perhaps to more easily plough the fields or to find the hidden treasure that was long believed to be buried under such stones). Before his men could light the powder a terrible storm raged and the attempt was abandoned.
Some of the stones appear to have fallen. For example, near Meg herself, there is a massive stone with a huge clump of quartz embedded in what is now the base. It is thought that this stone was once upright and that this lump of quartz would have been on the top and may have caught the light at the times of the winter solstice.
So what are the facts? We can clearly see the stone circle which may well have been an important gathering point, throughout hundreds of years, for the people of this area or further afield for religious, ritual and ceremonial purposes.
What is not so easily visible on the ground, but visible from aerial photography, is the large enclosure to the north, touching the circle and roughly 200m in diameter. This predates the stone circle as does the cursus running 600m from the cliff above the River Eden to the entrance on the south western side of the stone circle.
The cache is easy to find, in the new car park funded by Fell Foot Forward/AONB.