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Circle moved?

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hotaire wrote:
It wouldn't be the first time. There's one on the Treshnish Islands, off the west coast of Scotland, that was found resting in a low wet area by a nineteenth century antiquarian. So he moved the whole thing slightly uphill! As a result, we can never research e.g. alignments there. It's a singular warning against tampering with anything you don't understand - people a century from now will probably want to measure aspects of which we haven't yet got a clue, and we can easily knacker it up for them.
Never heard of that one H . Any refs ?

Yup. It's noted in Frank Fraser Darling's 'Island Years' (1940) chapter 3 :

"The Scottish naturalist Harvie-Brown paid several visits of a few hours each to Eilean a' Chleirich, and the place fascinated him so much that he wrote some pages about it in his 'Vertebrate Fauna of the North-West Highland and Skye'. On his first visit he saw what he thought was a stone circle on the west bank of the burn and in the little green flat [he's referring here to the shores of Lochan na h'Airidh]. He found it had disappeared next time he was there and, imagining it to be of too great interest to be lost, he returned with an excavation party. The stones had evidently sunk into the turf, which had become much more boggy than on his earlier visit. He dug them out and replaced them in circular form on the east side of the burn where the ground is firmer ; they lie there still ...".

There's a short but interesting biog of J. A. Harvie-Brown at www.highlandnaturalists.com/biography/j-harvie-brown.