(22/08: 3:15pm) My second time at the Rollrights, and this time I choose to spend my time with the King Stone. The perfect way to de-stress after a three hour journey from South Wales. There are dozens of people crowded into the circle, and only me here.
A quick walk down to the Whispering Knights, then I’ll say my farewells again. Until next time.
An amazing circle I’ve just visited it (19/8/00) on the way up the track to the circle someone has made a symbol out quartz on the right hand side when heading for the circle. The symbol is that of a female you know the circle with the arrow. but more than this with a few calculations (basic I admit) it seemed to be pointing to the winter solstice and I beleive the circle does the same, obviously a mother lover in the know.
That aside the circle is well worth the pilgrimage up the steep track I felt an amazing feeling of well being whilst up there being blown around and drenched by rain, the elements only added to the emotion. Highly Recommended!
Why isn’t this one in any of the books I’ve seen ? (OK, not that many, but...)
I can see why it’s not in the Modern Antiquarian as you’ve had to be selective, but it’s not in Burl’s ‘A guide to the stone circles of...’ either. And let’s face it, most things are in there.
It’s clearly marked ‘stone circle’ on the OS map, ref 38.795.949 by my reckoning.
The map seems to show it a bit closer to the edge of the forestry than it actually is, so it could be quite difficult to find. It’s well worth trying though, and if I got lucky anyone can!!
It’s a peaceful but quite striking circle of originally, I’d guess, around 6-8 stones of which 5 or 6 remain (6 on the map, for what it’s worth).
The stones are around 5-6 feet tall I think, though I’m not too good at guessing measurements, especially after a couple of months.
Continuing to be less than helpful, I can’t remember for sure whether it had a recumbent. I think it did, and considering where it is, you’d expect it to have one....
I do remember it had stones in the centre that could have been the remains of a cairn of some sort...though I’m by no means an expert. It could have been a pile of stones.
Sorry I couldn’t send a photo, but my scanner blew up!!
Unfortunately my photos don’t help that much as it’s set in a bracken laden semi-clearing. The bracken was reaching about half way up the stones when I was there (the last week in June this year).
Just in case, I’ll do my best at a quick vaguely Copesque description of getting there, but assuming you’ve found it on the OS map in front of you!
The circle is in the relatively small piece of forestry immediately SW of Durris Cott. You can park where the main track on the east of the forestry meets the lane from the school to Durris Court. Walk along the wide track, keeping going up the hill.
Carry on until about the point where you reach the brow of the hill and start to glimpse the fields beyond. The trees have lessened by this point, but there is a bit more forestry in front of you to the right (west).
Take the last obvious track on the right – towards the West, putting this last bit of forestry on your left. You may have to retrace your steps a little to find it. (I don’t think this is the track leading west shown on the OS map.)
Follow this path for about 5 minutes keeping a sharp eye to your left for paths in the undergrowth, leading towards the trees mentioned above.
The circle is, at the most, about 100 yards along the first noticable path into the undergrowth to your left. (Well, it was the first path I noticed!)
Moth
I agree that this is a pretty special place. You have no idea of the site when driving along the road that skirts it.
I was there this summer with my family and girlfriend. We arrived at the site wet and miserable from a fruitless search for another Stone Circle (bit of a map reading mishap!) with all but myself getting rapidly bored of the idea of traipsing through fields looking for old stones.
First we found the big row, then we found the standing stone, then the circle. Spirits lifted. We then walked the big row, finding the cists. Spirits were positively animated. We all then headed off in different directions – pointing, speculating, wondering. Phew! To round it off we walked down the second row and finally back to the car.
The point is, no matter what mood you are in, these places are special and will always be special and they have the ability to lift the spirit time and time again.
The Plague Market. Pah! Merry Vale saved the day.
Situated down a side road on the left about 1 mile south of Matfen village on the edge of an impeccably manicured grass verge lies the Matfen stone. A strange fortified house/farm is across the road and whoever owns it obviously likes to keep the stone from becoming overgrown which is cool (although their reuse of the old pump down the road as a flower basket hanger is a tad twee).
The stone is about six foot high and has the same deep harsh vertical grooves caused by weathering as the Devil’s Arrows. What’s different about the Matfen Stone is the many cupmarks carved around the base (well over thirty).
Not really a place to stop and linger (you have the uncomfortable feeling someone is tut-tutting at you from behind a curtain across the road), but a good antidote if you’ve had too much of Hadrian’s Wall.
Roughting Linn is the most famous of the Northumberland rock carvings, but it would be a shame to pass by some of the less well known rock art in the area. Doddington is one of those sites that is well worth the effort and its a perfect place for a picnic as well if you’ve got kids in tow.
Doddington is a small village on the B6525 out of Wooler. Travelling north through the village you’ll see a sign to the right for Wooler golf club. Park somewhere safe in the village and walk up the country lane to the golf course. Once at the clubhouse a path cuts straight through the course to the stones (beware of bad golfers though!).
The best and most richly carved stones are in the rough at the southern end of the course. In front of you is a small cottage (Called Shepherd’s house on the map) and to the right is a big iron age earthwork called Dod Law. Once you’re in this area search among the grass until you find the main carved rock and its smaller satellites. The main rock is a large flat outcrop, with not just cups-and-rings, but ovals, rectangles and heartshapes. Its quite unlike any other examples I’ve seen. Roughting Linn is claustrophobic, enclosed within its woodland glade. Doddington is the exact opposite, wide open skies, the Cheviots to the west providing a spectacular backdrop. This is a perfect chill-out zone (weather permitting).
The main carvings are the best and most impressive, but the area is full of other examples. I totally recommend anybody thinking of visiting the area to get hold of “Northumberlands Prehistoric Rock Carvings” by Stan Beckensall, a real labour of love and with good maps and directions for all the Doddington sites. Northumberland Rock art is one of Archaeologies big secrets (I live in the area and even I didn’t realise how much there was!) perhaps Julian’s next book could include some more sites. The area is so wild and unexplored, new sites are being found every year which is crazy.
(Incidentally a headline on local news recently, “Rock star joins campaign to preserve Rock art”, which I tuned into thinking it might have been JC on one of his rambles turned out to be Bill Wyman of all people, puffing on a fag in the midst of some carvings! I suppose if you were in a band called the Rolling Stones its only natural!)
What can you say really.. gut reaction when I saw him was to laugh my ass off. Im sure he has had this effect on pilgrims for thousands of years.
I read with interest what Proffesor Ronald Hutton had to say about him being a Reformation joke aimed at Cromwell. The argument is based around the fact that no one wrote about him until that period.
The theory being that a local landowner went out and cut the figure into the cliff to flick the V’s at Olly.
The trouble is no one at the time, including the aforementioned landowner wrote about the appearance of a vast nob monster on a Dorset hillside. No one involved in the joke seems to have felt the need to mention it or draw anyones attention to it. A lot of effort to go to to raise a laugh and then not share it with anyone.
The argument seems to be “no one mentioned it, so it didn’t exist”. By the same measure Britain didn’t exist until the Romans started writing about it. End of rant.
I have a couple of stories about the big mans pride and joy. He has lost it on a few occasions. The prudish Victorians turfed it over and then during the Second World War he was emasculated again. The story goes that Luftwaffe pilots were using his nob to target Bristol.
My favourite story is about the Sunday school teacher who led a party of children up onto the giant for a day out. When an inquisitive child asked about the monster dick the flustered teacher told the kids. ” He must have been a tailor, and those must be his scissors”.
The village of Cerne Abbas has a cracking holly well near the church.
Visited 6/8/00
Due to a combination of not reading TMA properly and Bovine Intervention, we didn’t get into the Mother’s Jam proper. You head up Eastwards out of Avebury, past the scaggy farm and up on to the Ridgeway (you can just see the crest of Silbury above Waden Hill). Cross straight across (following the coloured bridleway sign) along the unbelievably sheep-shit coated path (I swear the sheep do it on purpose – the rest of their field isn’t that bad) until you get to the horse gallop thing (looks like a racecourse).
Attentive readers of the TMA will now cross these gallops, and “descend to a sea of stones”.
Fellow Gibbons will not cross the gallops, but instead head down into the field on the “wrong” (Western) side, and no doubt, like us, find themselves literally marooned on top of an enormous stone, eating sandwiches, and looking back at the 10+ curious cows gathered around the base of the stone.
There was loads of them! We were sat down by a large stone, and had decided against sitting on it, due to possible damage to lichens, “what if every who came here did it?” and so on, got the butties out, and generally admired the view. Mrs Gibbon let out a bit of hoot as she spotted a young calf, followed by several others, coming in about 15 ft away. We scrambled up the stone (there’s 2 quite big ones, at the south-western end of the gallops, on the Avebury side), and watched in horror as the couple of cows mooed as loudly as they could, calling in the others for a look, surrounding the whole stone, looking at us.
We were up there for over half an hour. Occasionally the odd cow would drift off, but it would soon be replaced by another, galloping in from over the horizon, in response to the signal. We were praying that no-one was going to come past and see us, perched up there. It wasn’t as if we were *frightened* or anything. Oh no. Just that the cows had formed a very solid circle around us. And they were looking at us. Ruminating.
We were finally saved by the rattle of the feedbucket. All the cows all legged it off down to the farm at the bottom of the hill, and we were left to have a root about. As it turns out, we were in the “wrong” side, but there’s still plenty to amuse. Down at the bottom of the field, there’s a whole heap of stones, many arranged in various straight lines. Follow the field straight up (there’s a long-barrow shaped tumulus, with poles in the top – not sure exactly what it is), and there’s at least 2 more “destroyed” circles, one on a small hillock, the other around a small ditch. Not quite the “natural earth altar” we were expecting, but that’s what you get for not paying attention, and being scared of cows.
Possible the most beautiful part of the Avebury complex we’ve visited so far. Well worth the visit just to try and imagine what a shocker of a job it must have been to bring the stones in, and to see the Henge of Avebury from a new angle. Will return, avoiding the cows. Probably get aliens next time or something ...
I visited Coldrum on a bright sunny day, but there was a fierce wind! It whistled through the trees above and seemed to add to the atmosphere of the place . Like a lot of these palces, you’d never know it was there until you fell over it – but once you’re there you feel like you’re at the centre of everyting. In the shadow of the North Downs that dominate the landscape so much around here, with white chalky fields all around and big views to the South it’s clear to see why they put it where they did.
(notes from inside the circle, 2 July 00)
Intrigued by the OS map marking a circle not even credited in the Modern Antiquarian’s list of ‘non-gazetteer sites’, we wilfully sought this one out. On the OS map the track up from Towmill looks best, but it’s actually overgrown in grass a metre and a half high, and anyway it’s uphill from there. So we came to the next turnoff to the north. It was marked Druidstone Croft. Druidstones! At last we had a name for this circle! We looked it up in the Modern Antiquarian index and it gets a quick mention in a list of sites unvisited in 1994. Very mysterious.
A household called Rashiewells is nearest the road, and the entrance to the field with the stones is straight in front (*not* down the track to the right). Through the entrance to the field we found that a generous gap of fifteen or twenty metres had been left between the edge of the crop and the edge of the field. We walked along this, soon cresting the hill and seeing the two small copses in the field, the nearest of which was around the stones. We walked down a tractor wheel-run to the trees and stones. Behind them is an abandoned house with some trees beside it.
The OS map optimistically shows four blobs for this stone circle. There are two stones standing, one is at the north-west, two and a half metres tall, a metre across each side and grey. The other’s opposite, a tiny metre-high thing, and at the south-west there’s a jumble of large rubble, surely the remains of the recumbent and/or flankers. Five trees grow in the circle among knee-deep grass.
Despite the two standing stones this feels like a truly ruined circle, the destruction here has a feeling of absoluteness, somehow. The dead tree in the circle and the abandoned house beyond the don’t generate the creepy vibe you’d expect, in fact there’s seemingly nothing of such potency here.
That said, the sense of place is amazing. To the south-east Corrie Hill slopes down to allow a clear line of sight on Cothiemuir Wood and beyond to a far horizon of the Corrennie Moor peaks. The south-west aspect looks over Brindy Hill and, behind and left, the two peaks of The Barmkyn. To go straight over the absent recumbent would take you through the lea of The Barmkyn peaks and directly down to the recumbent of Old Keig! Druidstones circle is in sight of Cothiemuir Wood, yet this is on a slope and the circle at Cothiemuir Wood is on a summit. If Druidstones were on a summit then The Barmkyn would no longer be the far horizon. I’m thinking this really suggests The Barmkyn as a sacred hill.
The positioning of this circle is superb, and for me this is a must-visit.
(notes on top of the hill, 2 July 00)
Having read of Julian Cope’s bullock barricade blocking his visit to Hawk Hill, we were dismayed to see a field full of horned male and female cattle as we came up the track, but the friendly man at Loanend said they were young and harmless. However, thirty cows running makes a frighteningly thunderous noise and we were nervous enough to bunk into the adjacent field for as much of the climb as possible.
Eventually we reached the summit and climbed the wire fence by the monstrous freestanding recumbent and the cows stayed back. And there we saw for the first clear time *that* view. The last five metres brings Dunnideer into view to the north alongside its two sister hills, and then to the west, after three days of it hiding in mist and cloud, we saw the distant Silbury shape of Tap O’Noth!
This hill that looked so weedy and low from the road at its foot feels so very high and central up here, deceiving me into feeling above the Dunnideer triplets! The recumbent is absolutely HUGE and appearing to be contoured to align with the south-western horizon. The breeze comes through the hilltop pine trees making a sound like the sea and the sun is shouting down at us to love this place.
Don’t let the OS map’s ‘Stone Circle (rems of)’ or the Modern Antiquarian’s ‘destroyed stone circle’ denotation put you off coming here, this is such a site, as big a buzzy mindblower as we’ve seen anywhere on this whole Aberdeenshire trip!
There are two ways to approach this site, either from the road that runs north out of Daviot, or from the New Craig Farm to the east. We chose the latter in order to ask permission. Unfortunately we didn’t know that New Craig Farm was running a farm-scale GM test, and our visit resulted in us being interrogated and searched by the police, but that’s a whole different story.
Approaching from the Daviot road side, you crest the hill and are presented with the mighty recumbent and flankers, now set into a field wall. The picture in Modern Antiquarian of the broken recumbent set in the wall really doesn’t do the place justice, indeed no photograph could. When you’re there it is the most magical place, I’ve *never* buzzed so strongly at a standing stones site! It faces, as RSCs do, south-west, but from here that’s straight to the Mither Tap, ‘the mother’s tit’, the mountain that’s a clear focus for so many of these sites.
And then it also looks south to the mighty Loanhead circle, and then looking out west we saw our first sight of Dunnideer, instantly recognisable from its Glastonbury Tor-style ruined tower on the summit. These things alone would’ve amazed us, but from here Dunnideer and its two sister hills, Hill of Christ’s Kirk and Hill of Flinder, formed a triple-pyramid design. Turning back to Mither Tap, the Bennachie Hills behind it formed a startlingly similar triple pyramid! Whoah, with Loanhead to the south and the rich rolling land behind this was the most amazing place! Most circles elsewhere feel like they’re at the centre of the landscape, but this place feels like it’s at the centre of *everything*!
Out to the west beyond Dunnideer, beyond our vision on this misty evening, are the mountains of Tap O’Noth and Hill O’Noth, the looming big mountains that start the landscape’s climb out of rolling fertility and into Cairngorm hostility.
And here on the site, behind the massive recumbent and flankers among this mad faerie copse are two large stones, one standing and one on its side, but it’s difficult to see either as part of the circle. The latter is the one called the New Craig Flyer in the Modern Antiquarian, and Cope says it predates the standing stones as the original focus here. It has a big dip in it, which Cope suggests was imitated in the dip of the recumbent stone (which initially looked to us like a chunk had been broken off and was missing).
The circle has gone, the recumbent is cracked and built into a wall, but all the same, this place feels like the control panel of the whole landscape.
(visited 30 June 00)
The Modern Antiquarian’s mindbender map of the Aberdeenshire landscape (pages 100 & 101) marks Old Rayne as a ‘destroyed’ stone circle, but the OS map marks it as just ‘Stone Circle’ (without the ‘(rems of)’ suffix they give destroyed ones). As we drove out from the village a single upright stone appeared in the raised field on our left. When we got to the fence the mighty but toppled stones became visible.
There’s a field boundary of wire fence running through the remains of the circle, separating the single remaining upright and one fallen stone from the rest. The OS map marks five dots, and these denote the stander, three fallen and a pile that includes the easily discernible recumbent and flankers, several small stones and a pile of stones that could be cairn remains or could be just farmers field clearance. The stones are pretty large, not quite as big as Loanhead, but perhaps a bit bigger than Sunhoney. The fallen recumbent sticks up at 40 degrees, making it seem absolutely huge. As you stand in the circle facing south, the left flanker’s fallen to the left, the right has fallen inwards and broken in two, and the recumbent has fallen inwards too. The flankers are grey granite, but the flat topped and bottomed recumbent is brown. The recumbent faces a flat horizon of hilltops, and if your eye follows it to the east then it drops down to reveal Mither Tap behind.
To the west the top of Dunnideer is clearly visible with another similar shaped peak to the left making as fine a pair of taps as can be. Modern Antiquarian says Tap O’Noth is visible from here, but it’s not a clear day today and I don’t think we can see that far. I think the other peak might be Hill of Christ’s Kirk. Still, the fact that Tap O’Noth is generally visible from here means this site is phenomenally positioned on the landscape.
The ground inside the circle slopes up to the recumbent, as at Balgorkar, but whether this is part of the original design, or the result of cairn building and/or field clearance is not obvious to me. Either way, the effect is dramatic, accentuating the belittling feeling of standing at the smallest stone (or rather the site of the smallest stone). The poking up of Mither Tap and Dunnideer to the same degree as each other coupled with the flat horizon at the south-west gives this RSC a feeling of perfection.
(visited 1 July 00)
Back towards Tap O’Noth by 500 metres from the Cnoc Cailliche stones, and the stones here at Templand appear tiny in their field until we realise that the grass isn’t grass, it’s knee-deep young wheat that prevents us getting right up to the stones. Modern Antiquarian says two stones, OS map says remains of a stone circle. From here Tap O’Noth is again a peak only, and, as Cope say, a pretty precise Dunnideer shape, in fact. When you think how familiar the builders were with this landscape and the shapes of the hills on it, and their obvious reverence for Dunnideer, the positioning of these stones must surely have been to deliberately to give this effect.
Despite this being a small six stone circle, the B947 manages to run through the middle, and this novelty is what initially attracted our visit as a detour on our route home to England from Aberdeenshire.
Two stones stand each side of the road, and one more in each of the adjoining fields. The two stones beside the north side of the road have been turned to be flat-on parallel with the road, and the stone in the southern field has been broken and brutally repaired with iron bars being concreted up its length. Still, despite all that and the road through it, this is still a gobsmacking site. Probably *because* of the road hurtling through it, but also for a great sense of place and a fabulous gnarly horizon.
(visited 3 July 00)
(notes at the real standing stones, 2 July 00)
As you turn off the road up the track to Whitehaugh House and the farm, the stones are up a slope on your left. There’s a big cattle shed at the bottom of the slope that’s so new it’s not on the OS map. We parked in the concrete yard at the front, beside the offices of the cattle shed. The farmer was very friendly and pointed out the two small stones just the other side of the fence from the yard. These were erected for the hell of it after being dug up during the construction of the shed. The farmer said they were half-expecting a preservation order to be put on the new stones! The digging of the foundations had also uncovered remains of large fires, about a foot below present ground level.
Up in the field, the two real standing stones are Batman-ear shaped like flankers. However, they face south and are not in line with each other, so it’s generally thought that they don’t stand in their original position. The view south-west is towards Laggadlie Hill, with, I think, Scar Hill poking up beyond topped with a distinctive transmitter acting as a modern day Dunnideer/Glastonbury Tor tower, and the peak of Craiglea as a sister to the right, with a flat south-western horizon running between. To the east is Mither Tap. Friendly heifers are now so close behind me that I can hear them breathing.
The farmer and friends had a Millennium Eve party by the standing stones and the circle of their fire is still scorched earth a full six months later. Let this remind people who light fires at sites – indeed, anywhere – of how much damage it does to the earth. Seemingly (if the present position of the stones is thought to be more or less the original) this is another crest-of-hill circle.
A hundred metres along the hill to the east is an area of semi-buried large granite boulders. Nothing large enough to be a megalith, and in a straight line like a wall then widely scattered, so no clear pattern but certainly not ancient. From down on the track this looked like an area of embedded toppled stones a la Balgorkar, but I’m now in it and it’s obviously field clearance rubble.
(notes beside the last standing stone and on the way home, 3 July 00).
Having seen no reference to this circle anywhere else, I’m not sure this is the right name.
Another circle not listed as even a ‘non-gazetteer site’ in Modern Antiquarian caught our attention as we looked at the map. Coming up through the woods to the clearing on top of the hill, stones glared down at us, stark against the sky. Recent field clearance stones, as it turned out.
The map makes it look like this circle is surrounded by a U-shape of trees, as indeed it is, but being a crest-of-hill circle the view is above the trees, and only a 30 degree section of the panorama is obscured. This is another one where OS is confusing; if Templand is ‘stone circle (rems of)’ I don’t see how this warrants the full ‘stone circle’. All that stands is the metre-high bottom half of a stone that suggests itself as the left flanker. The recumbent, aligned on a level, high horizon (one of only two horizontal parts in the whole panorama) is missing entirely.
A pile of cairnstone-sized rocks lie in the place of the other flanker. Three metres from that lies a fallen circle stone, broken into half a dozen chunks where it fell. Just by that are two other metre-long slabs, seeming like fragments of fallen stones.
Fifteen or twenty metres to the south is a grey granite boulder which, although two metres long, is clearly a fragment of a bigger stone – the north face is a mass of jagged edges. The south face has at least 15 dips that are seemingly cup marks. Some are deep and obvious, some shallow and more questionable. If the marked face of the stone is, as I’m guessing it might be, the top of the recumbent, then it’d be a conservative half of the top, and flat with a rise to the right (perhaps to align on the rise at the right of the south-western level horizon). Knowing that cupmarks are difficult to see in photos we put a yellow gorse petal in each one before taking a picture, facing west out to Knock Hill.
The name ‘Knock Hill’ is, as Cope points out about another hill of the same name, an English corruption of the Gaelic ‘cnoc’, meaning hill. This means it’s name is simply ‘The Hill’, the lack of a real name possibly implying it had great significance.
Out to the east a distant peak rises in the lea between Knock Hill and Craigievar. The important south-western aspect is towards Collie Hill and Corse Hill (again, clearly the same root as names like Corrstones, Correen Hills, Cothie-muir). (I only sussed that it was hills with these significant names while mapreading after leaving, so I don’t know if its these that make up the horizon). Sadly, the small segment of the view blocked by trees is to the north-east and Mither Tap, but I don’t think it’d be visible from the stones, but then again the hills on this landscape play such games (especially Mither Tap) that I wouldn’t like to say for certain.
The pile of stones to the north of the stander suggests this area was the inside of the circle. If so, the recumbent stood on the very crest and the smallest stone would’ve been slightly downhill looking up. The flat north-east face of the standing stone feels like the infacing edge somehow, but it is possible that it’s not the flanker and is the backstone. Its NW/SE alignment means it couldn’t be any other stone in the circle and it does seem a bit large for a back stone, but as we can’t see where the precinct of the circle was we can’t say with any certainty. Here, as at the other seriously trashed sites in the area, so much is left to guesswork. And this really is a seriously trashed site; half a standing stone and a load of randomly placed rubble. But the presence of the cup marks contrive to make it an intriguing and really captivating place nonetheless.
Well, Stonehead is in horse pasture, but here at Craighead we’re in dog pasture. The field is owned by the adjacent Ace Kennels, where you ask and the friendly folk bring the dogs in off the field and let you visit in peace. The kennel owner said the stones are getting two or three lots of visitors a week at the moment.
There’s a weird feeling at this mutant four stone circle, perhaps assisted by the ominous industrial chicken sheds at the north end of the field. The stones seem to have been moved and jigged with and all but drained of significance. Two stones are aligned N/S, and one E/W. The fourth stone has the look of a flanker, but if it is then this stone has also been moved, or else the recumbent would have to have been facing south (as at Auchquhorthies nearby).
Certainly, it’s an intriguing piece of positioning here, in sight of both the sea and, a mile and a half to the south-west, Hill of Auchlee, which was home to the Cairnwell stone circle. This site may even have been in sight of the Cairnwell stones, but I can’t be sure. So much is unknown here, and an air of disjointedness permeates this site.
(notes in the evening sunshine looking west to Tap O’Noth, 2 July 00)
These Corrstones stand on the hilltop overlooking the foot of the Tap O’Noth. Although the Silbury aspect is decreased by the revealing of the whole mountain, Tap O’Noth still has a powerful presiding feeling here. Corrstones is certainly a near ruin, but, as at Hawk Hill, the positioning is very arresting. A gentle conical hill surrounded on all sides by farmland, this place has become a monster farm dump. These trees around the stones are shelter not only for so much field clearance stone that only a couple of fallen Corrstones are distinguishable but there’s also an assortment of other discarded cack, even an old 1960s-looking car on its side!
Still, the grove, the situation and the view are big enough not to be dominated by it, and a tremendous sense of place affects us, and others too; a small patterned stone had been recently reverentially placed at the recumbent.
Following from the recumbent to the south-western edge of the copse we find that from here six hills in four layers conspire to make a straight-lined horizon! Moving westward round the edge of the trees to face Tap O’Noth, some inquisitive bullocks and the setting sun, the composite horizon is still a straight line but already from this angle it’s stopped being level and now slopes down to the left. Corrstones hill, where the Tap O’Noth starts in the valley below and the south-western horizon is horizontal! What must the ancients have made of *that*?
This is a beautifully tranquil place and truly I could stay here for hours, here in the sunshine being sniffed at by bovines, but it’s our last full day up here and the call across the valley to Cnoc Cailliche is just too strong.
Also known as Wheedlemont Hill, this hill has caught our attention several times, standing out in the landscape or poking up over another hill with a distinctive shape similar to that of The Barmkyn and Barmekin Hill. The interest has been piqued by finding the bit in the Modern Antiquarian that what the OS map calls a ‘fort’ at the summit is – even according to official HMSO books – not a fort but a ritual causewayed enclosure.
The OS map marks a single standing stone at the foot of the hill, Modern Antiquarian calls it the remains of a circle, but says it was lost in deep crop on the field trip so they left it alone. Today the stones are clear in cropped cattle pasture.
The farmer is (as they’ve all been) very friendly and absolutely fine about us visiting the stones. I really do like having permission, it frees you to really look around, walk around, poke around in the hedges, get the map and spread it out and generally take your time and get a true vibe of the site. Ones where we’ve not had permission always give me a background unease, like trying to have a conversation on a car journey when the petrol warning light’s been on for 10 minutes.
The stones do indeed appear to be two, and suggest themselves as the remains of a circle, and our initial feeling is one of Modern Antiquarian: 1, OS: nil. The fallen and moved stone lies on top of some small stones 20 or 30 metres from the solitary stander that has the Batman ear shape and NW/SE axis that suggests it as a flanker. The fallen stone is larger and is flat on one side which would suggest it as the recumbent except that it would’ve only been two foot high, so this seems unlikely. It may even be unrelated field clearance and the OS map is right.
The standing stone has an unweathered look on the ‘inside’ and a lack of lichens like the side of a flanker that was partially protected from the elements by a recumbent. However, the lack of lichens on the lower inside of a stone may not be due to the protection of a recumbent; it’s more likely to be the result of being a favourite rubbing post for itchy-arsed livestock. And indeed in this case further examination shows a certain polishedness on the corners that is clearly the work of extensive buffing by cows arses.
On the slope of the Hill of Auchlee (topped with a thing called Boswell’s Monument) there’s dense, thick, sharp gorse a metre and a half high. If there are any standing stones still upright then they’re in the gorse and not tall enough to stick up above it. We found a slab over two metres long, possibly a recumbent (or sizeable fragment of it) judging by its shape, and another two stander-sized stones a few metres to the north, one of which was broken into three bits. The dots on the OS map mark four blobs and call it a ‘Stone Circle’ (not a ‘rems of’), which is no guarantee of anything, but does suggest the possibility of there being things hidden in the gorse bushes. It’s certainly possible; if, say, the Craigievar circle were here we’d not see a thing.
(visited 29 June 00)
Beside a dual carriageway, behind a BP petrol station there’s a field containing a 30 metre circular bank and ditch, causewayed to the north and south. On an island in the middle are three stones. It’s a puzzling site. The stones are clearly not edge-on like circle stones; perhaps they have been moved, perhaps they are a ‘cove’. Difficult to tell how many (if any) stones are missing. One stone has a beautiful Pictish bird-thing carved into it.
I’m told that it was once a circle, and that the pictish stone was moved from its original site in the 19th century and put here for want of anywhere better.
About 100 metres due south in the same field is a single stone. Another 100 metres beyond (over a road and through a hedge into someone’s garden) is another stone. Beyond that (as far as I can tell from the map) by another 200 metres is another, but it’s in the grounds of Broomend paper mill, a big fuckoff factory.
I’m told that these stones were once part of a long alignment running from the river up to the henge and then beyond, in a manner similar to Shap in the English Lake District (Modern Antiquarian, page 250). Whether the north-south alignment of the causeway and the missing stones is due to the seasons and compass or the north-south alignment of the river is a matter for conjecture.
The mill, road, petrol station, flats and houses around this field are all clearly very recent. The fact that the three outliers are on three separate properties doesn’t bode well for their safe upkeep. The way it’s been so rapidly surrounded with such overpoweringly intense development, I’ll be surprised if the field itself is still a field in twenty years time.
(visited 30 June 00)
These were the first Aberdeenshire stones we visited that stand on private land, and we set ourselves a good and decent precedent by knocking first to ask. We found that not only does this invariably lead to a friend granting of permission, but it means that when you’re at the stones you can really get into it instead of always looking over your shoulder for the angry farmer coming to hassle you. It also means that the landowner comes to know that people into the stones are considerate and polite, so it’ll help future visitors too.
But there was nobody in, so we asked at the house nextdoor, who said that the landowners are fine about visitors as long as they obey the Golden Rule of Walking on Farmland: SHUT THE GATE BEHIND YOU!
We crossed a field of ripening wheat and came into the circular grove of trees that surrounds the circle. The woman down at the Corrieburn house said ‘but there’s really nothing to see up there’. Ha! This is such a beautiful place, a luscious warmth radiates through the site, and not just because of the lurid glowing pink colour of the stones. On the crest of a small hill, this has a classic stone circle Centre Of The Landscape vibe. Barmekin Hill looms massively down behind the smallest stone, as much a horizon focal point as Mither Tap at East Aquhorthies. Barmekin Hill is a classic sacred hill shape, and has the same shape and name as The Barmkyn, a hill on which Old eig and Druidstones are aligned.
The fallen and broken recumbent stone is a sad sight, but it is still in better condition than most of the RSCs, and with the outer circle of trees and the landscape-central feeling, this is as bright and enchanting a place as you could see anywhere.
(NB In the Modern Antiquarian’s gazetteer entry for Sunhoney (page 393), the directions say that by their 1994ce trip Sunhoney Farm had been renamed Corrieburn Farm, but they didn’t find out why. In fact, Sunhoney Farm is still Sunhoney Farm, and the sign up the track to Corrieburn is for entry round the back to the new house nextdoor).
(notes from the recumbent stone, 2 July 00)
Yet again a slender antiquarian copse leads from the road to the stones, like at New Craig, Dunnydeer and others. These copses appear to be of roughly the same age, too. Who planted them? They seem deliberately planted to protect the stones from farmers like the trees planted on Wiltshire hilltop barrows. As if to prove it, here at Old Keig an arc extends back from the recumbent and flankers in a good approximation of the position of the circle, and no tree stands within the precinct. On the south side there’s a gap of forty or fifty metres so the south-western view is unobscured, save for a single stout tree that protects the recumbent from close-up farming! (The present farmer’s thrown field clearance boulders between the tree and the standers, a metre from the recumbent).
These copses have the feel of a BBC Sunday evening TV drama Avalonian/Narnia enchanted grove. The excited and expectant roar of thousands of buzzing insects up in the canopy of the trees fed this enchantment as we approached.
And there they stood, the epically proportioned stones. As at Dunnydeer, there’s only the recumbent and flankers. And as at Dunnydeer, it’s all that’s needed to generate a real sense of the scale of this massive circle, and a very potent sense of place. This huge recumbent stone feels so serene, centre of a wide and peaceful 270 degree landscape with the peaks of Bennachie poking up at the north-east and a fort-topped (therefore anciently sacred?) hill of The Barmkyn immediately behind.
We’re slowly discovering that the Modern Antiquarian’s directions of ‘requires an OS map’ can mean ‘not on a path’. Initially I envisioned that line as meaning three-mile slogs across hill and bog, but it’s definitely been used liberally. Old Keig certainly doesn’t need one at all. From the B992 take the western road out of Keig, there’s a farm on your left after a mile, then 400 metres later a thin line of trees on your left, perpendicular to the road. The stones are 200 metres down from the road in those trees.
Also, The Modern Antiquarian describes as subjective a thing as atmosphere at a site in such ‘factual’ terms, and I’ve been sceptical; surely a lot of it’s to do with the state of the observer, what you already know/don’t know of the area and the history, the weather, the season, the surrounding crops, etc. And yet I’ve found it to be invariably correct. At Old Keig ‘the peace overlooking the valley is as though the world has long stopped,’ is precisely and completely right.
Being a restored and state-owned show site, Loanhead is very well signposted. But there’s also recent signposting for others like Midmar Kirk, with even a brown tourist sign logo. We parked up at about 6pm on a Friday evening, just as a load of Scouts and Guides were being dropped off at the Scout campsite that shares the carpark.
As you take the short uphill path through the woods stones are silhouetted against the sky in a dramatic and exclamatory way. The circle, with its bizarrely lengthways-split recumbent, is made more bizarre by the rubble of cairnstones carefully placed within, and weirder still by the cleared circle at the very centre coated in coarse sand. The official info boards are, like others everywhere, obsessed with physical measurements above all, but like the others in this area the ones here are well above the standard of, say, Silbury or Stonehenge – no ‘chief of the clan’ hierarchical bollocks, and mention of lunar alignments; trying seriously to be addressing *why* as well as *what*.
There was a little work to be done in ‘making a practical offering’ to the site; rather than leave flowers or whatever, clear the litter. It gives you a close and binding feel for the site and makes it a better place for the next people who come, encouraging them to treat it with more respect. Quite how the Irn Bru can I pulled out from between the halves of the recumbent came to be smelling of fish is unknown.
I was moved by the (cairn-builder era) cremation site beside the circle – I could really imaging a blazing fire, looking as fire always has and does, cremating a man looking like men still do, right here, this very spot, so long ago that we don’t know any real detail of their lives and thoughts, let alone their language. Trees surround the circle on three sides, but you can *really* feel Mither Tap and the sister hills of Bennachie calling and glaring from beyond the recumbent. The blocking of a direct view does detract from the sense of place here, but the site is still very affecting.
The valley to the east looks like the Marlborough Downs, the same brand of rolling fertile land. And half a mile away we could see the recumbent and flankers of New Craig circle, an absolut must-visit.
