Desk Based Assessment

Date 2010

Event ID 884660

Category Recording

Type Desk Based Assessment

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/884660

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A desk-based assessment of published and newly discovered unpublished material about a stone circle on Boreray was made in the summer of 2010. It led to the conclusion that the unrecognised remains of a stone circle may exist high on the sloping terrain of Boreray above Tigh Stallar.

In The History of St. Kilda 1764, Kenneth Macaulay describes ‘a Druidical place of worship, a large circle of huge stones fixed perpendicularly in the ground, at equal

distances from one another, with one more remarkably regular in the centre, which is flat in the top’.

PSAS Volume 10, 1874 contains a reported recollection by Miss Euphemia Macrimmon that ‘there was a temple in Boreray built with hewn stones. Euphemia Macrimmon remembers seeing it. There is one stone yet in the ground where the temple stood, upon which there is writing: the inhabitants of St Kilda built cleitean or cells with the stones of the temple. Euphemia Macrimmon has seen stones in

Tigh a Stalair on which there was writing’. She was ‘sixty years of age in 1860’ and it is therefore possible that the stone circle/temple still existed in the early 1800s, but had almost completely gone by 1862, when the letter from St Kilda was written. It is a common error for natural marks on stones to be regarded as man-made inscriptions. Unsurprisingly later visitors to Boreray were unable to locate either the circle or the remaining megalith on which there was writing. Perhaps Euphemia’s expression ‘hewn stones’ refers not to the fact that they were dressed, but to their shape (long and thin), which would have made the megaliths suitable for reuse as lintels.

In PSAS Volume 62, 1928 J Mathieson states ‘A stone was found on this island with an inscription upon it. I made a search for some hours hoping to find this precious relic, but failed. There was also a stone circle mentioned by Macaulay: but the St. Kildan has no respect for antiquities, and the chances are that both places have been used as quarries for material to build their huts’.

In The Road Through the Isles 1986, John Sharkey and Keith Payne describe ‘the last standing stone’ of the ‘now broken circle’ and its impressive cliff top location. The drawing by Keith Payne was given to my late husband Ron Curtis in 1983. Keith says that the drawing is of ‘the lost stone circle of Boreray totally unique and never recorded’. Keith writes in 2010 that the drawing is sufficiently accurate

that ‘one only needs to visit with drawing in hand and you will find the circle stones’.

M R Curtis 2010