Stanton Drew, the third biggest stone circle in the UK, was first surveyed and mapped by John Wood, the Elder in 1740. Written almost 30 years later, in 1769, Chatterton’s Elegy, Written At Stanton-Drew begins as a landscape poem with the melancholic speaker brooding over the Druid stone circle. But it turns, gradually, into an ideal-descriptive ode. Where the descriptions of the landscape are vivid, the memories of Maria are imprecise. The surroundings are characterised by the speaker's troubled imaginings of the supernatural: of local folklore, Druid sacrificial rituals, and a less definable spirit of place.