The man creating modern stone circles that fulfil an ancient need

In a hilltop field by a Wensleydale farmhouse, nine stout brown sandstone boulders, each weighing several tonnes, stand in a socially distanced circle. Their crude, irregular shapes and lichen-furred edges blur easily into their rural surroundings: coarse turf, a rough hedgerow, dishevelled treetops sprouting from the valley beyond. It is almost as if the stones had grown organically from the Yorkshire landscape.

Yet that thought no sooner crosses your mind than you realise that it cannot possibly be true. The arrangement is too deliberate: the even spacing, the shared verticality, the balance of large and small. This is a circle alive with conscious intent. It would hardly seem strange if the stones began to dance.

So you think instead about what prehistoric tribe might have caused them to stand like this, and why they did so. Or you would, if you didn’t know that the circle had been here for less than 15 years.

For Edith Ropner, the 93-year-old widow who lives in the farmhouse, the stone circle serves a simple but profound purpose: it is her daily reminder of her only daughter, Carey, who died 27 years ago. Edith derives great comfort from its presence. But the standing stones also embody a longer story, whose key protagonist is the youngest of Edith’s four sons.

Dominic Ropner, who grew up near where Carey’s memorial now stands, lives with his wife and three children in Kent but works for much of the time in Hampshire, which is where we meet. He is a tanned, fit man in his mid-fifties, casual in dress and confident in manner. He hardly needs to explain that he spends much of his working life outdoors.

What’s less evident is that he also spends many hours travelling, visiting clients in far-flung places and, crucially, finding enormous boulders for them. But that’s what you have to do when you’re Britain’s most prolific creator of stone circles.

It is not an occupation to which Ropner aspired. It never came up in school careers guidance. But the calling found him anyway and he’s been doing it now for almost half his life. “I’m a kind of stone hunter. I bring stones from Lewis, the Orkney Islands, west Wales, Cornwall.” He gathers them into his Hampshire yards (one in Yateley, one in Upton Grey), matches them to clients, then plants them back into the land, often in circular arrangements, in places where they will be cherished.

It goes back to his sister’s death from breast cancer in 1996. Ropner was 28 and Carey was 39. It was his first close-up encounter with mortality and the non-negotiable horror of it shook him. He had been earning his living until then in a variety of ways, from truck-driving to picture-framing to running a small art gallery in London. Now he felt lost.

Then came a memory from nowhere: a family walking trip when he was nine, along the Ridgeway, marvelling at such man-made wonders of the landscape as Wayland’s Smithy and Avebury stone circles. That, he realised, was what he wanted for Carey: a memorial in the prehistoric manner. “She was a very spiritual person,” Ropner explains in his low, gentle voice. “She loved nature and everything in it.” What could be more fitting than to embed her memory in the landscape, perhaps for centuries to come?

He did some research and a process was set in motion. Months later, the whole family gathered in a field adjoining Ropner’s garden — in Cranleigh, Surrey, in those days — and shared a slow, healing moment of deep remembrance in the big stone circle they had built for Carey: nine boulders of local Hurtwood sandstone, each weighing several tonnes, standing in a circle as if preparing to dance.

Four smaller recumbent stones marked a central fire pit — just as they do now in Carey’s mother’s field in North Yorkshire — and Ropner and his family found themselves returning often, singly or together, to be “with” Carey. Their loss hurt no less, but the circle seemed to give them something solid to cling to.

They were not the first British family to place a large memorial for a much-missed loved one on private land. Nor were they the first to come up against a subsequent pitfall: what if you move house? But by the time that issue arose, 14 years later, Ropner had become an expert in such matters.

Again, there was no plan. He just wondered one day if others might find comfort from similar creations. He put an advertisement in The Times’s gardening section — and the rest of his life began.

He founded his business, Time Circles, in 1997. Soon he was earning his living from it. He wasn’t entirely alone in the field: Memorials by Artists, now called the Lettering Arts Trust, had been helping the bereaved to find bespoke memorials since 1988. But Ropner’s megalithic approach gave him a unique selling point and he quickly found a market, especially among those with large gardens. Some clients had purely decorative motives, or occasionally neopagan ones; Ringo Starr was an early client. Most sought memorials. Ropner did his best to help all comers and became — and remains — a kind of matchmaker, providing standing-stone-based solutions for each customer’s needs.

His speciality is stone circles, but that’s a flexible concept. The phrase usually denotes a ring (not necessarily circular) formed by an arrangement of large standing stones. But it could also mean a large stone with a circular hole cut through it (a “holed stone”, to avoid confusion); or a stone that is itself a circle, such as a mill-stone (a “core” or “wheel”); or even, arguably, a stone of any shape on to which a circle (typically a spiral) has been carved. Ropner can supply any of these.

He is also happy to provide smaller, circle-free headstones with hand-carved inscriptions for clients who want something more conventional. He dislikes “shiny Chinese granite with gold lettering” but he has nothing against traditional cemeteries and churchyards, whose gatherings of personalised memorials are really just variations on the standing-stone theme. What matters most, Ropner says, is not the design or the size or the location but the stone itself. “Everything flows from that,” he says.

He has 25 samples on display in his Upton Grey yard: three recumbent, three holed, the rest simply standing. Their above-ground heights range from one to two metres (anything up to a third may ultimately be buried), and they weigh half a tonne to six or seven. But each has been chosen for a reason.

“Look at this,” Ropner says, touching the side of a mighty, almond-shaped slab as if it were the flank of a favourite racehorse. “Cornish granite. Look at the way it glints in the sun. It’s warm too — feel it. Much warmer than this sarsen, for instance, which is a finer-grained stone. So is bluestone, of course: this one’s a lovely stone, from the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire. See this bit at the top where you can see the blue in it? That’s dolerite. And look: this is the mossy side. Magical.”

He could be a waiter introducing a board of gourmet cheeses. “Look at the corrugations in this,” he enthuses, darting excitedly to show me a huge slab of Horsham sandstone. “It’s like a prehistoric beach. You know, when the tide goes out.”

Clients often meet him for the first time in this display area. Many are raw from recent bereavement. They hear about Ropner by word of mouth, get in touch, talk tentatively about what they have in mind, then come to Hampshire to get a feel for the options. Some arrive with firm plans. But, Ropner says, “You only know when you’ve seen the stone.” He prefers to visit the intended location before offering guidance — standing stones have to work with the landscape, not the other way round. There’s the question of access too. “That’s the first thing I want to know. Some things simply can’t be done.” Yet he is willing to give most things a go. “We’ve carried stones weighing several tonnes through people’s houses. We once even lifted one over someone’s roof, using an enormous crane.”

Often, he says, “it’s surprising how easy moving a big stone can be” once you’ve tuned in to its gravitational needs. “They do their own work.”

Yet most assignments bring major logistical challenges and Ropner — who once did a course on “neolithic stone moving” — derives great satisfaction from grappling with them. “Sometimes you’ll get half a village out there watching, all saying: ‘I wouldn’t do it like that if I were you.’ But we get there in the end.”

A Ropner client might pay anything up to £1,000 for a single standing stone, while a 1.5m granite holed stone might cost £3,500. A circle, which could involve up to a dozen large stones, would cost proportionally more. Yet these are bargain prices compared with the prehistoric equivalent; and — in contrast to the 4,500-year-old henge in North Yorkshire that Knight Frank was recently offering for £200,000 — a Ropner stone circle doesn’t come laden with regulatory baggage from Historic England. You can even ask him to relocate it for you when you move house, if you don’t mind the extra expense — which is how Carey’s circle ended up with her mother in North Yorkshire.

Julian and Kim Piercey are on their second Ropner circle. They bought the first in 2005. It wasn’t a memorial, just a ring of five bluestones and a sarsen for their Oxfordshire garden, to represent the couple and their four sons. It was a great success: a place where the family celebrated itself. But they left the stones behind when they moved house. “We’ll have to leave everything behind eventually,” reflects Julian Piercey, who is now semi-retired from a successful career in medical technology. But later, after a subsequent move to Warwickshire in 2014, he commissioned a new circle: still six stones (“Five males, one female”) but with the sarsen and bluestone proportions reversed.

The low boulders are already weathered and mossy, camouflaged against the gnarled bark of the wiry trees that surround the circle on a grassy mound that would look naked without it. You’d think the stones had been there for centuries and one day they probably will have been. All six stones will then be memorials, symbolising lives that have ended. “Years from now, our circle’s significance to our family will be forgotten. But others might puzzle over it,” Piercey says. “It’s a great place to come for a quiet think.”

Ben Goldsmith, the financier and environmentalist, was put in touch with Ropner after Goldsmith’s 15-year-old daughter, Iris, died in an accident on his Somerset farm. Ropner visited Goldsmith and his ex-wife and spent a long, poignant afternoon being introduced to the landscape and to Iris’s story. “That was terribly difficult for them,” Ropner says softly. “I hope I helped.” The installation took two full days; the bereaved father watched throughout. Later, in his haunting meditation on grief and nature, God Is an Octopus, he wrote: “It felt good to be doing something tangible to remember Iris.”

That’s a motive that drives most memorials, from grand sepulchres to flowers tied on railings. But large standing stones offer the added comfort of anticipated permanence. Their “massy strength and stature scorn . . . the power of years”, as William Wordsworth put it, awed by the Cumbrian stone circle known as Long Meg and Her Daughters.

“I imagined people millennia from now marvelling at Iris’s stone circle, barely changed, without a clue who Iris was,” Goldsmith wrote. And the comfort of thinking on such a vast timescale was that it “diminished . . . the difference between her 15 and a half years and the expected human lifespan of 80 or 90 years.”

Stone circles also connect us with the distant past. Our prehistoric ancestors built them prolifically for two and a half millennia. Examples survive in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, but most were concentrated in northwest Europe. At one point there may have been about 4,000 in the British Isles and Brittany alone, of which more than 1,000 survive. Then, from about 900BC, they fell from fashion. No one really knows why. Some believe a climate crisis caused a loss of faith in their efficacy. But that’s speculation. We don’t even really know what they were for in the first place.

What we do know is that, in recent decades, the developed world has experienced a megalithic revival — to use a phrase coined by the 20th-century American circle-builder Rob Roy. Some trace the trend to Sighthill Stone Circle in Glasgow, erected as part of a politically controversial job creation scheme in 1978-79 (it was relocated in 2019). The website megalithic.co.uk now lists 250 modern stone circles in the UK alone. Some are mere jeux d’esprit: charming arrangements of boulders that just happen to have been at hand. Others are part of a wider harking back to the real or imagined belief systems of earlier millennia, in which ancient and modern, folklore and fantasy merge in a misty world view sometimes referred to as “nature spirituality”. More than 8,000 enthusiasts crammed into Stonehenge for the 2023 summer solstice. Many then went to Glastonbury, where they could enjoy the modern mysticism of the Swan Stone Circle (created by the latter-day druid and “geomancer” Ivan McBeth in 1992). Some may have taken the stones more seriously than others; few would have quarrelled with Piercey’s view that “there’s something intangible about a circle that relates to people”.

Ropner, who estimates his career output of stone circles at “probably over 50”, is understated about the neopagan side of things. But he thinks of McBeth (now dead) and Roy as friends and he shares “absolutely” their belief that stone circles have “energies”. Some clients, he adds, are “completely on board with all this” and talk eagerly of dowsing and ley lines. For others, stones are just stones. Yet all benefit, Ropner believes, from the “good vibes and energy” his circles generate.

Perhaps this is New Age warm air. Yet you would need a sadly reductive spirit to spend time within a thoughtfully assembled stone circle and feel nothing. The vastness of stones reminds us of our puniness; their silence is non-judgmental. Echoes of prehistoric lives inspire what Wordsworth called “a weight of awe . . . cast from the dread bosom of the unknown past”. And circles — cited in most major religions to evoke thoughts of eternity — can be almost hypnotic in the sense of magnetism they generate.

“People are drawn to it,” Piercey says as we chat quietly within his six-stone ring. “No one who comes up here ever stays outside it. They come in, and they wait until they’re inside the circle before they speak.”

“It’s something we all have within us,” Ropner says. “It’s in our psyche. When I’m dead and gone, people will still be doing this.” His creations will still be working their magic too. He wants his stones to “look as though they fell from the sky”, but their effect is gradual and cumulative. Owners see them in rain, sunshine, frost and snow; by day and by night; in countless variations of light and shadow. A knowledgeable observer might sense geographical dislocations. (Preseli bluestone in Oxfordshire? Cornish granite in Kilmarnock?) But the circles are mostly absorbed in the larger narrative of the natural world. Moss and lichen colonise them. Birds and squirrels rest on them, or worse.

Yet the practical human questions — Who? How? Why? — will never stop suggesting themselves to those who see them.

Perhaps this is the source of the “energy” Ropner talks about: an interplay between present, past and future that invites more timeless ways of thinking. If so, there is much to be said for experiencing that energy on your own land. In public places, including churchyards, a perceived obligation to act reverently can stifle our response to stone memorials. At home, you can be yourself. You can wander past your megaliths casually, with or without noticing them; gather for drinks or meals among them; lean things against them; sit on any that are low enough; forget about them, then notice them again. The circle remains a memorial, if that was its original purpose, but it stands in the realm of the everyday. And sometimes, as a result, it may almost feel as though your lost loved one has a foothold there too.timecircles.co.uk