Haltadans, also known as Fairy Ring or Haltadans stone circle, is a
stone circle
A stone circle is a ring of standing stones. Most are found in Northwestern Europe – especially in Britain, Ireland, and Brittany – and typically date from the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, with most being built from 3000 BC. The ...
on the island of
Fetlar
Fetlar ( sco, Fetlar) is one of the North Isles of Shetland, Scotland, with a usually resident population of 61 at the time of the 2011 census. Its main settlement is Houbie on the south coast, home to the Fetlar Interpretive Centre. Fetlar i ...
in
Shetland
Shetland, also called the Shetland Islands and formerly Zetland, is a subarctic archipelago in Scotland lying between Orkney, the Faroe Islands and Norway. It is the northernmost region of the United Kingdom.
The islands lie about to the n ...
, Scotland.
This site is a ring of 38 stones,
of which 22 are still fixed in the soil, and it is in diameter.
Inside this is an earthen ring in diameter, with a gap in the southwest side.
In the center of the rings are two rectangular pillars.
According to
Jakob Jakobsen
Jakob Jakobsen (22 February 1864 — 15 August 1918) was a Faroese linguist and scholar. The first Faroe Islander to earn a doctoral degree, his thesis on the Norn language of Shetland was a major contribution to its historical preservation.
I ...
, the name ''Haltadans'' means: "lame or limping dance".
This is a reference to the legend that the circle of stones was once a circle of dancing trolls and that the two rock pillars in the centre were once a fiddler and his wife.
They had fiddled and danced all night long, and, heedless of the time, were still fiddling and dancing when the sun rose and
petrified
In geology, petrifaction or petrification () is the process by which organic material becomes a fossil through the replacement of the original material and the filling of the original pore spaces with minerals. Petrified wood typifies this p ...
them all.
See also
*
*
Stone circles in the British Isles and Brittany
*
List of stone circles
*
Neolithic Europe
The European Neolithic is the period when Neolithic (New Stone Age) technology was present in Europe, roughly between 7000 BCE (the approximate time of the first farming societies in Greece) and c.2000–1700 BCE (the beginning of the Bronze Ag ...
References
Archaeological sites in Shetland
Neolithic Scotland
Stone circles in Shetland
Fetlar
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