It’s quite trashed. Half the circle is gone but the six stone left are enough to enjoy in the cool forest glade. The recumbent is quite small and one of the flankers is down. Why-oh-why not erect it again? Liked this one a lot!
This place is also known as Mulloch or Garrol Wood stone circle.
Hideously restored and completely lacking in any atmosphere it felt like a bad example of overly ambitious garden landscaping done by a cowboy builder.
But at least it’s still here.
I was more interested in the line of parkland trees leading to the site and the many nesting boxes secured high up each one.
Excavated by a Dr Eaun McKie, he confirms that the circle was abanoned before completion. The stoneholes of the circle were composed of two elipses with a midsummer/midwinter line of symmetry aligned with a mountain in N.Ireland.
Anywhere else but Aberdeenshire, I would have gone for a poke around the henge and the stones in this undoubtedly important site. But after a busy and long day looking at nearby stuff like Sunhoney and East Aquhorthies I couldn’t even be arsed to get out of the car. So we parked behind the garage and sat and looked at the monument as we munched our chips for tea. This is clearly worth more than the miserable effort I took.
Today deep in thigh-high grass and purple foxgloves spikes, Sunhoney is sublime coolness.
The grass was so deep that we could hardly see the recumbent at all, and the atmosphere here so soporific and drowsy that Moth and I both forgot to seek out the cupmarks. The lovely deep red stones, the warm breeze in the trees, the hum of the insects and the luscious blanket of waving grasses all conspired to create a megalithic lullaby.
So low is the recumbent and so relatively tall the flankers that the arrangement looks more like a showjump to pop over on your pony than a megalithic altar.
It’s on private land, but is a very good example of a farmer accepting his responsibility to let the public view it. There is a place to park and a sign pointing the way along which he has erected gates and a fence to protect his crops.
I’m in love with Sunhoney.
It always makes me smile to see an ancient monument survive in context like this: a churchyard. Ha! Neatly tended lawns and regimented lines of graves and in the middle of it all… a stone circle! What pleasure! The flankers look as if they are triumphal raised arms as if the christians never existed.
Some of the modern graves are a bit too close to the circle for my liking, but it is easy to block them out of your mind and concentrate on those big pink stones.
This one is strawberries and cream!
Gah! We followed greywether’s directions precisely, but after stomping around in the forest for quite some time and losing gallons of sweat we failed to find it. Grrrrr! Very much more specific directions please!
This wasn’t on our itinerary, but we were driving past and couldn’t resist a peep. This was a ‘bonus track’. The map showed a potentially tedious walk which could be a hot, hideous waste of 20 precious minutes. You shouldn’t really go ‘off roading’ in a Mazda 626 but I like a challenge. So at the point where most sensible people would park and walk, I drove on. Success!
Tucked away among oak woodland in the grounds of a hotel/conference centre thing stand five lovely good sized stones set close together in a fairy-ring stylee. From their relative positions, it seemed to me that either two stones were missing or it was a four-poster with an extra one slotted in for a reason I couldn’t conceive.
Completely charming!
High up on a raise and viciously quarried right up the edge, this lovely place seems to teeter like a potential suicide at Beachy Head.
It has been recently restored and now boasts roadsigns, a car park, some picnic tables and a well constructed, unobstrusive path suitable for wheelchairs. Historic Scotland wants this one on the map! And why not? I just wish they’d do more like this and show that people really do care for our ancient monuments instead of them being an embarrassment, like Old Keig. The views are spectacular from the little platform and the sky seems very big.
This is too easy to miss, right on a corner, and with such a tiny entrance that even the sign pointing clearly to the entrance makes you think ‘where’? But it’s huge!
After an initial squeeze down into the banana shaped souterrain, the head height is more generous and I was able to stand up. Treading carefully, as my torch didn’t seem to penetrate the gloom whatsoever, I paced it out at 16 paces and counted seven capstones! Wow!
After the relentless Aberdeenshire sun (and you don’t get to write that very often) the fridge coolness of the earth house was most welcome. This was surely a prehistoric food store-cum-bank-cum-insurance policy.
To reach Old Keig you first have to climb over a nasty barbed wire fence (be careful! I cut my leg!) and trespass down through a narrow strip of copse. The farmer clearly doesn’t want visitors. The stones are set onto a spur of land in a rolling wide valley – a fantastic location. All that is left of the circle stones at Old Keig is a jumble of large broken stones which have been moved and dragged about and hidden in undergrowth. But the recumbent and flankers are just too massive to move or hide. With some effort I clambered onto the gigantic recumbent and paced it out – 6 paces long! It’s also noticeable flat and straight along the top.
The feeling of trespass didn’t leave me, however, especially as we were being watched only metres away by an equally gigantic snorting red bull with testicles the size of footballs and a Mike Tyson look his eye, held back only by a line of barbed wire.
Set in an Arcadian woodland glade, this is a monstrous site! The flankers are incredibly tall and pointy in opposing ways but made to seem small by the huge bulk of the recumbent stone, which is round and streamlined like a whale. With insects whirring and the smell of hot pine and warm forest this was a Loved it!
The woodland is now being used a natural burial ground, with plots for cremations in the wood (though not within a certain distance of the stones) and plots for whole body burials at the edge of the wood. I can’t think of a more appropriate resting place.
Properly called Easter Aquhorthies, this was my first recumbent stone circle – and the one I had been most looking forward to seeing. Beautifully restored and presented and with stones sparkling in the light out of the greenest of landscapes, we spent three delightful hours here during which I got quite sunburned.
People came and went. Local dog walkers, casual visitors, a party of children, mountain bikers, joggers (one woman swore blind she has just seen a lynx or other large cat in the next field) and a friendly mature couple who knew about stones. We got chatting to them about Aubrey Burl and Julian Cope. The gentleman, who must have been well into his 70s who had met Cope at some talk or other commented on Cope’s academic prowess despite his unusual and unique appearance!
Ah, but the stones! What a temple to the heavens! I was enchanted and reached for my paints. I started with a quick sketch, but moved on to a more considered and lengthy study.
I agonised over whether to post this site or not, but then I saw the Kirkstone in Cumbria and decided to after all. 915 metres up in the air, Tryfan is a tall sharp mountain. It really scared me twice, but I got up in the end. Adam and Eve are two natural standing stones on the 25ft sq summit platform. If your man(crazy) enough to jump from one to the other, then the freedom of the mountain is yours. There was no chance of chickening out because there’s just no way I’m going up there.. right on the edge with a very very big drop! In short, it’s a long but exciting climb, with added bonus of the initial stimulus for standing stones... honest!
Just a short note to say thank you to the farmer that I met at this monument. The man was almost apologetic for having disturbed me as I took photographs.
Very easy to find in July 06 as the field is now being used as pasture.
Coming through St.Mary’s from Kirkwall instead of turning on to the Churchill Barriers carry on past Graemeshall. At the bottom of the hill the mound of Mass Howe is at the coast on your right. There is a new coastal path at the base of this. The first few yards are a bit skewhiff, thereafter it is a little narrow and you need to watch out for tussocks of grass and small holes. Leaving Mass Howe you see the WWII buildings and the burnt mound is in the same field. For now I avoided the usual invisiBull and continued further along the short circuit. Just past the buildings there is a long heap of large stones and rocks and fragments. This is where the well(spring) is or was. To its right the small mound you can see is the site (I think Rami Geo might be a more useful name). A little more than a rise there is a slight exposure of material and a few stones, some probably earthfast. The Tower of Clett is the stack that you can see as you look further along the path. From the nearest the path gets to the burnt mound there is a length of fence indicated on CANMAP as where a burial was discovered (HY40SE 17 at HY49480160 – I can find no further details). So perhaps the mound’s black earth is funerary, not settlement. Looking uphill you can see a large mound by the main road and a second or lower extension of the first below this. The very top of this you may just make out the foundations of a sundial of a folly type. Lower on the slopes seems to be earlier stuff. Continuing along the path you quickly come to where it can follow the coast no further and turns straight up to meet the main road. This section is composed of loose stone fragments that could prove tricky in wet weather.
This took me ages to find. It stands exactly where it is on Sheet 68, but with 8 foot high bracken all around it’s really hard to orient oneself. A frontal assault, over the gate at the bend in the track and straight ahead may not be your best bet in the summer. Winter or late Autumn may be different, but I went into the field to the west and followed the wall until I could see a gap in the vegetation and approached the tomb from the south.
The cemented sign about this monument being in state care that sits beside this tomb is a sick joke. As usual, nobody cares. Reading Fourwinds comments on megalithomania when I got back home, my suspicions were confirmed – I couldn’t work out what type this tomb is. My instinct said a wedge tomb, but I noticed the evidence of a court too. The tomb is aligned north-west/south-east and I guess that it’s pointing exactly on Mt. Leinster, though with all the vegetation that’s a hard one to call.
North of the tomb, about 15 metres away, is a large area of flat stones with a huge gorsedd-type outcrop. Some of the half-buried stones are very slab-like and may have come from the tomb itself. I cleared some of the moss off these, hoping to encounter some elusive rock-art, but no such luck.
What can I say here? You’d have to be barking to bother just about sums it up.
This is a robbed out cairn, oval-shaped and quite large – possibly 25 metres on the longer diameter – and about 3 metres high, though it’s hard to tell with all the vegetation. The only real reason to come up here is for the spectacular views. On the day I was there, 27/7/06, an intermittently cloudy and brilliantly sunshone scrocher, I could see as far as Cork to the south-west, the sea off Waterford to the south and God knows how far directly west and north-west. The view across the Barrow valley to Brandon hill was worth the trek up here alone.
It is possible to drive up to this ridge to the mass rock at Ballycrinnigan rock, but you may miss the huge quartz boulders beside the forest track.
This is not marked on the OS Sheet 68. I was told about this by local man Pat Kavanagh and brought here by blow-in Dessie Kavanagh. It’s down a country lane at the southern end of the Blackstairs mountains and is a bit of a beaut.
(Slight edit. this is mentioned in the Archaeological inventory of county Carlow).
This is an odd one – perched on top of a 30 foot chalk quarry face on the edge of a nature reserve. The quarry was once the site of chalk extraction, which was then burned to make agricultural lime and it was while digging around the base of the barrow in the early 20th century that a grave containing a crouched skeleton and a beaker pot was discovered. It is said that the pot (later dated to around 1600BC) rolled down the chalk face and was damaged while the unfortunate occupant of the grave later received a burial in the local churchyard. I don’t know why the quarrymen didn’t continue digging away at the barrow but I would hazard a guess that they didn’t want to disturb any more bodies.
What’s left of the barrow now measures about 15 metres in diameter, stands a metre tall and is situated on a northwest-southeast spur of land overlooking the valley of Burlands Beck. This same spur is also the location of the Deadmen’s Grave long barrows about 500 metres to the northwest.
This is quite a large barrow that has managed to survive intensive agriculture as well as excavation and people riding trials bikes over it in recent years. Measuring between 30 and 35 metres in diameter the oval mound is still a couple of metres tall with the large depression in one side resulting from archaeological investigations in 1941. Although the land that the barrow stands on is fairly flat it seems that the close proximity of the source of the River Bain just a few hundred metres to the north west and the ancient trackway known as ‘High Street’ just to the south west might well have been the reason for its location here.
The barrow is believed to have been reused as the base of a set of gallows and more recently the site’s association with death continued in the early 1960’s when a nuclear missile launch site was commissioned less than a mile to the south east (don’t worry, they’re long gone).
I have to admit that this is a new one to me, I’ve never expected any barrows in this part of the county and hence never bothered looking, but here it is, marked on the map (though not as tumulus) too, which is even more of a surprise. It stands on a slight rise and can be see from some distance due to the trees growing on it but unusually for barrows in the county it is not associated with any streams or rivers, the nearest one is 2-3 miles away. English Heritage say it measures about 17 by 11 metres and stands around 2 metres high.
This is a nice barrow in a pleasant spot standing on gently eastward sloping land between 2 tributaries of the River Lymn with some great views of the surrounding countryside. The barrow itself is oval measuring roughly 30 metres by 20 metres (probably the result of plough damage) and stands about a couple of metres tall with a sizeable depression in its top. It is though that this is the result of the barrow being used as the base for a windmill at some time in the past, indeed it is marked on the OS map as ‘mill mound’.
Blackstones Low stands at 295m above sea level, in a scrub landscape, on the geological border between the carboniferous and dolomotised limestones.
Well preserved the barrow enjoys, making allowances for the hideous Ballidon Quarry, some wonderous views over an ancient and historic landscape that includes Minninglow, the Roystone Valley, Black Rocks and the Longcliffe Crags; the location of Rains Cave.
Located on Open Access land the barrow is relatively easy to find although a parking spot close to the site is difficult. Although the barrow could quite easily be included in a trip to the Roystone Valley.
