Crookmore

The supposed existence of a recumbent stone circle at Crookmore has a long history of confusion, not only in recent gazetteers but also going back to the first accounts of a discovery that was made in the 19th century. This took place probably in 1828, when what was termed a Druidical circle at Crookmore was removed and its site brought under cultivation. In the course of this work two stone ladles or lamps were discovered nearby, both of which are now in the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, having been donated by John Stuart in 1838 and 1853 respectively (AQ 10–11, but see below). Stuart also supplied Daniel Wilson with a description of their discovery. In this he reported that the circle ‘was of considerable size, and the stones composing it were inserted in the centre of a mound or dyke of some elevation. The earth in the interior had been withdrawn… and it presented the appearance of a bason which, at a former period, might at the centre have been eight or ten feet [2.4m–2.7m] deep. Around the circle, to about the extent of an acre, the ground was covered with a close pavement of large flag-stones … Pointing in a south-easterly direction, a paved road, of about twelve feet [3.6m] in breadth, of the same material as the causeway, was discovered extending about five hundred yards, and from the situation of the ground it seems to have been intended as an approach to the circle through a marshy piece of ground’ (Wilson 1854, 116–17). The ladles had been found under the external paving, though an entry in the OS Name Book for what is presumably the site of the same Stone Circle at Crookmore, compiled in 1866, places them within the circle, gives the date of their discovery as 1829, and reduces the length of the road to 200 yards (Aberdeenshire, No. 88, p 97); a cross was placed on the map to mark its site (NJ 5864 1868), though the exact location of the circle was by then forgotten. Wilson correlated the ladle Stuart donated to the museum in 1838 with one of two mentioned in the New Statistical Account for the parish (Wilson 1851, 111), which also gives a detailed description of how they were found during the demolition of a Stone Circle; unlike Stuart’s account, however, this does not name the farm upon which they were found and, confusingly, in 1866 the site of the discovery was pointed out to OS surveyors as being the two stones standing at Druidsfield, Montgarrie (Name Book, Aberdeenshire, No. 88, pp 85, 90; see also NJ51NE 1). Nevertheless, the New Statistical Account mentions the same principal features reported by Stuart at Crookmore – a circle levelled internally into the slope, a paved road extending for a distance of 600 yards through a bog to the south-east, an extensive area of external paving and two stone ladles – and there can be little doubt that it refers to the same discovery. Thus, the additional details that it furnishes provide a further insight into the character of the Stone Circle that stood at Crookmore: ‘The upright stones were mostly gone; but it was evident they enclosed a circle about fifty feet [15m] in diameter… The upright stones were on top of the bank… There was no pavement within the circle’ (NSA, xii, Aberdeenshire, 449–50). The only discrepancy lies in the descriptions of the lamps, which do not fit the two preserved in the museum. Having been donated separately ten and twenty-five years respectively after the event, one or both may have become confused with others from elsewhere in Aberdeenshire. The New Statistical Account itself mentions another found nearby in a Druidical circle at Whiteside (NJ c571 199; NSA, xii, Aberdeenshire, 450). Alexander Keiller believed that Crookmore was probably a recumbent stone circle (Keiller 1934, 18), which accounts for its inclusion as a possible example in the lists prepared by Burl and Ruggles (Burl 1970, 78; 1976a, 351, Abn 36; 2000, 420, Abn 35), though the latter elaborated his suspicion that there had been some confusion (Ruggles 1984, 57 note m, 59; 1999, 187 no. 50, 266 note 9). Keiller’s reasoning was largely based on the presence of the road or causeway, a feature that had been reported at several other sites that he believed were recumbent stone circles. A more recent review of the evidence for these causeways has concluded that their lengths tend to have been exaggerated and at Newbigging, Clatt (NJ52NW 10), for example, it is more likely that the description refers to the remains of a souterrain attached to a large hut-circle (Gannon et al 2007, 70–1). The circle at Crookmore certainly sounds more like a hut-circle than any stone circle, with its floor sunk deep into the slope and a wall incorporating a few particularly large stones. What may be its site is revealed by a disc-shaped cropmark that has been photographed on a low spur about 100m north of the estimated location plotted in 1866 by the OS surveyors (NJ 5864 1878). No sign of a souterrain can be seen on this photograph, so in this case the causeway was possibly an early field boundary, other examples of which are sometimes referred to in this way in antiquarian sources (eg NSA, xii, Aberdeenshire, 463). The external paving uncovered at Crookmore hints that the hut-circle formed part of a much more extensive settlement.