Publication Account

Date 2011

Event ID 886969

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/886969

RCAHMS, The Recumbent Stone Circles of Scotland

In about 1854, when the Castle Hill in Kintore was removed to make way for the Great North of Scotland Railway, what has been interpreted as a prehistoric stone monument was discovered beneath it. The Castle Hill was a royal castle and the caput of the thanage of Kintore in the 12th century. The motte, a substantial mound according to Alexander Watt, the local schoolmaster at the time, measured about 45m in diameter at the base, 9m in height and a little over 20m across its flat top (1865, 141). Many Scottish mottes are simply tailored from natural features, but in this case the upper 3m of the mound seems to have been artificial, and Watt, who had witnessed its destruction, described a substantial structure on the surface below: ‘This lower surface was covered with a layer of burnt earth of considerable depth, and along the eastern margin of the hill… and for some distance back from it, were deposited, in an irregular manner, a quantity of stones, and among them eleven large blocks…, a large block, was lying on the west end of it, about seven feet [2.1m] long, and about two feet [0.6m] broad, and about eighteen inches [0.45m] thick’ (ibid). Two of these blocks were inscribed with Pictish symbols and are slabs 1.5m and 1.05m in length respectively (Fraser 2008, 28, no. 30). In summary Watt concluded: ‘From the appearance of the stones it seems probable that a circle of stones, connected by a wall, had formerly existed on the hill’ (1865, 141). Watt, who rescued the Pictish symbol stones, is evidently the source for a similar account that was published slightly earlier in the first volume of John Stuart’s study of sculptured stones, where the description is elaborated slightly to run ‘that a circle of large stones, connected by a low wall of smaller ones (as is still the case with one class of the “Druidical” Circles) had formerly stood on the summit of the hill’ (1856, 33–4). It was Douglas Simpson, however, who forcefully asserted that this was the remains of a recumbent stone circle (1943, 97), employing an argument that is almost as obscure as it is spurious; lying unstated behind his train of thought was possibly Watt’s description of a large block lying on the west, though from its size it is more likely to have been an orthostat than a recumbent. In truth, it is impossible to be certain that these stones were any more than the substructure of the motte; if a prehistoric monument, however, the description cannot be stretched beyond a cairn with a ring of orthostats in its kerb.