Professor Alexander Thom suggested that the stones from the centre of the Northeast Circle
through the Southwest one are aligned to the major southern moonset. Professor Aubrey Burl
wrote:

"Midsummer processions and ceremonies may be imagined, rituals by moonlight celebrated by hundreds of people from the countryside, assembling for reasons long forgotten but preserved
silently in the stones themselves."

There are several local traditional stories about the megalithic complex. The best known one is
yet another man into stone story designed to scare the poor pagan peasant into church on a
Sunday. It tells how a wedding party was turned to stone. The party was held on a Saturday and
the celebrations were going on well into the night. Around midnight, a man clothed in black (the Devil in disguise) came and started to play his violin for the merrymakers continuing well into
holy Sunday morning. When dawn broke, everybody had been turned to stone by the Devil.
The stone circles represent the dancers, the avenues are the fiddlers and the Cove is the bride
and the groom and the drunken churchman at their feet. They are still waiting for the Devil who promised to come back someday and play again for them. Another legend, shared with Long
Meg and Her Daughters and many other megalithic monuments, says that the Stanton Drew's
stones are uncountable. John Wood, in 1750, reported the story that when he tried to count the stones a thunderstorm broke out.

Stanton Drew is a huge megalithic complex consisting of three stone circles, two stone avenues,
a cove of stones and an outlying stone. The Great Circle, consisting of 27 stones of pustular
breccia and oolitic limestone is the second largest in England, the outer circle at Avebury being
the largest. Next to it is the Northeast Ring formed by eight huge boulders, four of which are
still standing. These are the biggest of the complex. The Southwest Ring, which is on private
land, is badly ruined and not accessible to the public. The two accessible circles each have
avenues running eastwards towards the river Chew. The avenue from the Northeast Ring contains seven surviving stones. The avenue from the Great Circle has been almost destroyed had it
remained intact it would have been seen to merge with the Northeast avenue into one.

The Cove is in alignment with the centres of the two accessible stone circles. It consists in two
large upright stones with a recumbent slab lying between them, which are of blocks of dolomitic breccia. The outlying stone known as Hautville's Quoit, 1850ft northeast of the circles, on a high ridge also in alignment with the centres of the Great Circle and the Southwest Ring. It is a sandstone boulder, which is now recumbent.

In September 1997 archaeologists found the buried remains of a prehistoric timber temple twice
the size of the monument at Stonehenge and just as important at Stanton Drew. A survey of the
area revealed traces of "one of the largest and most elaborate'' prehistoric ceremonial sites ever
found in Britain,'' The site, concealed by the stone circles, was detected with sensitive instruments designed to reveal ancient remains without disturbing the land. The evidence so far points to the existence of timber circles and a ditch, or henge, the English Heritage commission said.

Dr. Geoffrey Wainwright, the group's chief archaeologist, called the discovery the most significant
in British prehistoric archaeology since the 1967 excavation of a timber temple of Durrington
Walls, near Stonehenge.

"We have about 3,000 stone circles in Britain, but previously only seven timber temples,'' he said. "The Stanton Drew find is by far the largest -- twice as big as anything previously discovered.''

The newly discovered henge is a near-perfect circle with an outer diameter of about 443 feet.
Within the Great Circle are at least nine concentric circles that are thought to be burial pits. Sir Jocelyn Stevens, chairman of English Heritage, suggested that people seeking to control the supernatural built the complex structure as a symbol of power.

English Heritage who manage the site which is on private land, said it will examine only the
remains of the temple posts, which may have stood up to 30 feet above ground. The rest of the
site will not be extensively excavated. The find was made by archaeologists using ground-scanning equipment in an attempt to learn more about the three stone circles at Stanton Drew.

"The survey showed that the Great Circle was once enclosed by an enormous ditch,'' said Dr.
Andrew David, English Heritage's head of archaeometry. "Such enclosures -- named henges after
that at Stonehenge -- are well-known but highly enigmatic features of Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain between 3200 to 2500 BC.''