Jane

I’ve seen a few hut circles in my time, but these are the most perfect I have yet seen. They may only be a series of small walls, but what small walls! Today up to 20 of them nestle among tall bracken and heather strung along the hillside which is bright purple. All beautifully restored, it’s not hard to imagine them with their conical wood and thatch roofs and all the activity of domestic life... smell that roasting pork and those frying guillemot eggs!

Park in the RSPB South Stack car park. And while you’re here why not teeter along those cliff tops? We saw gannets and choughs!

Blimey Batman! We liked these! Tall, elegant and graceful, this pair of megalithic goalposts stand long after the game is forgotten. Having only just returned from Aberdeendshire, I couldn’t help thinking how much like flankers these were, without the recumbent. It’s hard to be here and not try to bridge the gap between the stones. What went on in the sacred space?

Just across the new, fast main road from the aluminium smelting plant is this nicely restored chambered cairn. Lots to see here: from a distance and due to the slatey material it’s made of, it reminded me very strongly of a French allee couverte. I liked the juxtaposition of the industrial plant so close and the new road. Despite the continual urban and industrial growth, this thing survives – and rather well.

While you’re here, look out for Ty Mawr just up the lane. It’s a biggun!

We hadn’t seen many of the Dunideer sites as mostly they’re pretty knocked about, but I had to see Stonehead, rearing up next to Dunideer hill. I wasn’t disappointed. This is a monster with a looming voice. The stones and the hill seem to be engaged in a quiet, whispered conversation.

You can drive all the way down the track to it, so is really good for those less able (or too goddamn lazy like me) to walk. The sun was shining and hot again, the bees buzzed in the thistles, a woodpecker joined us and we sat and marvelled at this perfect little circle, lovingly restored on its perfect flying saucer mound to welcome visitors. I sat and sketched. A perfect end to the day!

Foiled again, Moth! Moth has been trying to get here for years but has been consistently beaten back by cattle. Today, within sniffing distance there it was – this time we were held back by barley. There was no way we dared wade through that verdant crop against the tramlines. Very disappointed.

You can never predict how a site will make you feel. Memsie cairn is really quite simple to describe – a pile of stones. It has no entrance, no chamber to crawl into, no redeeming features other than it’s a huge pile of grey stones. But I loved it! Simple pleasures, eh.

As we parked it started to rain a few drops. But I was looking forward to this. The approach to it is marvellous, too. The overgrown track takes you up a hill, through a deep dark pine wood which softened the rain to mist and muffled our footfalls on the carpet of needles, then throws you out in the circle!

Wow! Wow! Damn the rain for coming now, for I would have liked to paint here, but at least I’ve seen it. The best bit is that thrillingly, the recumbent is a giant penis!

The rain was falling steadily. Dampened spirits? Not a chance. Cock on!

We asked at the farm, rather than at the cottage with nasty plastic swans in the garden. A friendly young man of dangerously fat proportions who was tinkering with a tractor in the yard told us it was OK to go in and have a look. He seemed quite pleased to have a visitor.

The circle is pretty trashed and looked shabby because for some reason it has recently been fenced off, so it hadn’t been grazed and was full of nasty weeds.

Moth really loved this, but I was really quite indifferent.

A whopping single standing stone in a tiny churchyard is all that is left of what was perhaps once a stone circle. This is one of those crazy stones that you don’t realise how tall it is until you stand right next to it and it towers above you!

The lane takes you right up to Thorax Farm and we could see from the map that the stone circle lies was just on the other side. We rang the farmhouse bell to ask permission, but there was no reply, so we parked sensibly and left a note in the window saying we had come to see the stone circle and set off through the farmyard complete with peacocks, llamas and horses.

As we walked up to the circle we could see people already in it, one of who was the farmer, a woman called Sandra.

The circle itself is lovely with a very small diameter and six good sized stones standing in a bank of rubbly cairn material. One stone is heavily cupped marked to the east.

She told us she was very proud of having her own stone circle and had taken the advice of Historic Scotland’s inspector and had got help to clear out the rubble dumped there over the years to reveal the original cairn platform.

Sandra’s attitude to her ownership of her stone circle was in complete contrast to the farmer we had met less than an hour before at Rothiemay.

She has a holiday let, called Antiquity Cottage which looked like a delightful retreat: The standing stone in front of the cottage is not prehistoric. It makes the resting place of her favourite old horse, Jim.

I was really looking forward to seeing this one as the sheer blocky bulk of the heavily cupmarked recumbent really appealed to me in papery TMA. But I didn’t dare enter the field though as there was a herd of cattle present complete with bull. Moth dared, but he runs faster than me. So I sat on the non-prehistoric stone gatepost to observe. Its flankers are gone but there are still four beautiful evenly placed stones of the circle still standing.

As I sat observing, the farmer drove up and stopped. “Just looking at your stone circle” I said. “That’s fine” he said, “but I don’t think anyone really owns a stone circle, do they. It’s just on my land.”

Just a little up the road from Loanhead of Daviot New Craig stone circle is just a recumbent and flankers. We couldn’t get to it as the field in front was inhabited by cattle with bulls. However, even from the road you could see just how huge the recumbent is and how these stones dominate the landscape.

In the care of historic Scotland this well-tended site was too well restored for my taste, but it was hot nevertheless. I loved the cremation site immediately next to the stone circle and one of the flankers looked like a gigantic penis.

Despite the tedious 20 minute walk up a stoney track to the site, it was worth the effort. What a name, what a place! It helped that as you walk you could see where you were going, as the stones stick up high out of the hilltop. And then you get there. There’s so much to see – both the site itself with lovely stones, a bit of cairn material, some woodland and fab views down to the airport. We spent ages quite alone here and I felt so relaxed that I lay down and went to sleep in the protective hollow in front of the recumbent. Delicious!

Very close to Auchquhorthies & Auld Bourtreebush this enjoys the same sightlines and atmosphere. It has four nice stones on a raised platform but there does seem to be something suspiciously wrong about it. Nevertheless, I liked it and access to it is so easy, it’s worth a look-see.

This pair of large stone circles (Auchquhorthies & Auld Bourtreebush) are clearly connected as they are little more than 200ms apart, but are definitely separate sites.

They’re both rather a jumble of stones, but there is lots to see and enough large tall stones still standing to help the viewer reconstruct the scale and importance of these sites.

Didn’t really enjoy it here, though. It may have been that there was a bull in the field.

Nice sea views!

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.

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.