Mitchell's Fold
Mitchell's Fold stone circle
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 Shown within Shropshire
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| Location | Stapeley Hill |
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| Coordinates | 52°34′43″N 3°01′34″W / 52.5787°N 3.0261°W |
| Type | Stone circle |
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| Periods | Bronze Age |
Mitchell's Fold (sometimes called Medgel's Fold or Madges Pinfold) is a Bronze Age stone circle in South-West Shropshire, located near the small village of White Grit on dry heathland at the south-west end of Stapeley Hill in the civil parish of Chirbury with Brompton, at a height of 1083 ft (330m) o.d.
It is a Scheduled Ancient Monument (number 107448) in the guardianship of English Heritage.
As with most sites of this type, its true history is unknown. The name of the circle may derive from 'micel' or 'mycel', Old English for 'big', referring to the size of this large circle.
Its doleritic stones came from nearby Stapeley Hill. Many of them are now missing and others are fallen. One example is that “This circle was the site of vandalism by a local farmer in the summer of 1995 when several stones were uprooted by a mechanical digger. The stones were promptly righted and "planted" again and the culprit punished. Ongoing unsympathetic use by both local youth and townie pagans, such as the creation of numerous fire pits and the leaving of litter and broken glass after the festivals, does nothing for the atmosphere of this site.”
In the beginning there may have been some thirty stone pillars. The survivors that still stand range in height from 10ins to 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m), and stand in an ellipse 89 ft (27 m) NW-SE by 82 ft (25 m) The tallest is at the south-east end of the major axis, standing, perhaps by coincidence or design, close to the line of the southern moonrise. This pillar and a companion have been taken to flank an entrance about 6 ft (1.8 m) wide.
Aubrey Burl has stated in his 2000 book 'A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany' that "There was a claim for a central stone and a very dubious eighteenth-century report that 'there was a stone across your two Portals, like those at Stonehenge, and that the stone at eighty yards distance was the altar.'" but that the "probability of a trilithon, otherwise unique to Stonehenge, at Mitchell's Fold, like an identical claim for Kerzerho in Brittany, should be regarded as rumour rather than reality."
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Wikipedia