Long Meg and Her Daughters, the large Bronze Age stone circle near Little Salkeld, stands as a scheduled monument in its own right on the strength of its genuine archaeological significance, but this entry concerns specifically the folklore that has been layered onto the stones over the centuries rather than the earthwork itself. Local legend holds that the circle's roughly sixty stones, with the outlying Long Meg pillar of distinctive red sandstone standing apart from the main ring, represent a witches' coven caught in the act and turned to stone for dancing wildly on the moor in open defiance of the Sabbath. Different tellings name the actual agent of their punishment as either a powerful wizard, most often identified as the historical or legendary magician Michael Scot, or alternatively as a nameless saint who simply stumbled upon the sabbat by chance.
The site is also credited with the more playful, self-protecting piece of counting-magic common to many British stone circles found elsewhere in the country: that the stones themselves genuinely cannot be counted and made to arrive at the same total twice, no matter how carefully or repeatedly anyone tries, and that if anyone should ever actually succeed in doing so, the spell holding the coven frozen will finally break and the witches will return fully to life.
As pure counting-magic and shapeshifting folklore, none of this is presented anywhere as an actual historical event, and no date or named source earlier than general antiquarian and guidebook tradition has been identified for this entry. It is recorded here as a genuine, long-standing piece of local witch-lore in its own right rather than as any kind of documented historical case.
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