Come up the minor road alongside Maes Howe [marked Fursbreck Pottery] up and past Hybreck until you reach the Grimeston road junction. Pass along the Grimeston road to a fieldgate on the left. Here I entered the place where the standing stone is, striking a diagonal by a small dry burn (these being all over and about Staney Hill I imagine one can rule out glacial deposition for the big rocks ?). From the Staney Hill road you can see the stone behind a ledge like a very low cliff, and then coming this way it reveals itself to be standing above one end of a long wiggly quarry
All that is recorded are the bare measurements and yet this is the stone that named the hill and the road . Unfotunately my scanner insists on cutting off the bottom of the slide , but just visible here on the very bottom right-hand side is an exposed horizontal rock stratum and I wonder if this extends behind to form a natural platform for this stone ( or even have to do with why it was stood there in the first place ) . Oriented ENE/WSW.
A possible alignment for the Ring of Brodgar , this was one of the stopping-off points in the procession of St.Magnus' remains from Birsay to Kirkwall .
Apparently a local ex-archaeologist "once mentioned a mini stone circle on the Grimeston side road (between Staney Hill Rd and Harray Rd". Another archaeologist friend, who related this, added that there was summat "visible on the S side of the road" but that she thought that "the OAT view is it's a damaged and unusually wide bell barrow".
In 1920 the author (J.F.) of a two-part newspaper account of Harray believed large irregular stones lying roadside (? over the other side, on the way to the horned cairn) could be the ruins or start of a circle.
There are some outsize stones in the roadside bank at the right as you go up to the standing stone, over half a metre and much too oddly shaped for any drystane wall.
The first speaker at tonight's O.A.S. meeting described his work at a third Staney Hill site he simply called Henge [none of the archaeos present disputed the term, so it is Orkney's 4th if Bûkan is one], 80m diameter and cut across one end by the road. Described as little known either it has a different name for the NMRS or another antiquarian one as it rings no bells. Unfortunately I could not identify the place from either photo shown. One was of a putative entrance ,though the devil's advocate says it resembles the passage into a field across a ditch if there had been a field boundary there once. I might even have images myself if I knew where it was !
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Posted by wideford
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