Even here, as well as in more extensive places, a monumental stone stands in the middle of a plain, ten feet high, and four broad, nearly of the same form with those so frequently met with elsewhere, and, like them also, there is no tradition whatever respecting either the time when, or the purpose for which it was erected. Around it, on the first day of the New Year, the inhabitants sometimes assemble for their amusement, and indulge for a while in the song and the dance.
From ‘History of the Orkney Islands‘ by Rev. Dr. George Barry (1808).