Publication Account

Date 1987

Event ID 1016987

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1016987

RCAHMS: Exploring Scotland's Heritage - Fife and Tayside, 1987

There are three settings of stones in the field, two of which were excavated in 1970. The first now comprises three uprights, but excavation revealed that there were originally eight set out in a rectangular arrangement with the largest stones at the corners. There are four stones of the second setting, but it too had originally comprised eight uprights. Charcoal and cremated bones survived from the prehistoric period but it is likely that the sites had been deliberately slighted in Victorian times, for a beer bottle was discovered under one of the toppled stones. The third setting consists of a massive boulder at the centre with two taller flanking stones, a layout that has been compared to that of the recumbent stone circles of Grampian.

On the flat river-terrace to the south-east of the village there is an unusual medieval earthwork of a class known as homestead moats (NN 734466); described on early editions of Ordnance Survey maps as Praetorium and thought of as part of a Roman camp, it, is in fact a rectangular moat with an inner and formerly an outer bank, within which there would originally have been timber buildings and perhaps a wooden stockade associated with the inner bank. The ditch is about 15 m broad and the central area is about 1.5 m above the level of the surrounding ground. There is an entrance causeway on the eastern flank of the moat.

Further to the west there is a mound with a cupmarked stone (NN 731465), and to the west near Bridge of Lyon (and visible from the road) there is what may be a neolithic long cairn (NN 729465); to the south-west of the moat there is a fine standing stone some 2 m high (NN 731464).

Information from ‘Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: Fife and Tayside’, (1987).