Publication Account
Date 2011
Event ID 886971
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/886971
This robbed cairn, which lies in a plantation of conifers on the rising ground behind Westerton, measures about 14.7m in diameter over a kerb of slabs and small boulders, of which about thirteen remain in place. Neatly built, the kerb is graded in height, the tallest of its stones standing about 0.6m high on the south-west. In this respect the cairn resembles some of those recorded within recumbent stone circles, though in this case there is no evidence that the kerb was ever adapted to incorporate a recumbent, nor that there was once a surrounding circle of orthostats. The cairn was already robbed by 1867 and is described in the Name Book as ‘a circle of standing stones of no great height nor size’ (Aberdeenshire, No. 13, p 102). The suggestion that this is the remains of a recumbent stone circle was first made by James Ritchie (1917, 40–1), and from that source it has found its way into later lists as a probable or possible example (Burl 1970, 79; 1976a, 350, Abn 26; 2000, 420, Abn 26; Ruggles 1984, 60; 1999, 187, no. 64). It was Ritchie’s contention that the Ark Stone, a block incorporated into the dyke separating the plantation from the fields about 100m to the north-north-west (NJ 7058 1908; NJ71NW 28), was the recumbent robbed from the circle, though neither its size nor its shape would have lent itself to such a use. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that the Ark Stone is anything more than an erratic, lying where it was dumped by ice thousands of years ago. It was a well-known local landmark in the days before the ground was enclosed and served as a marker on the march between the estates of Monymusk and Balquhain (Name Book, Aberdeenshire, No. 13, p 104). The name of the cairn, Chapel o’ Sink, carries with it a similar folklore to the Sunken Kirk (NJ52NW 6), in which building work on a chapel by day disappeared by night (ibid, p 102; Ritchie 1917, 40–1; 1926, 306).
