Publication Account
Date 2011
Event ID 887076
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/887076
This stone, which in 1999 was still upright, is now lying beside a pile of field clearance immediately south-west of an old quarry 240m west-north-west of Drumfours. It stood on the scarp forming the east lip of a hollow in the field to the west of the quarry, and measured about 1.3m in height. The OS surveyors visited the stone in 1866–7 and were persuaded by their local informants, who included Rev Alexander Taylor, author of a detailed historical account of the parish and its people in the New Statistical Account (xii, Aberdeenshire, 1102–31), that it was the remains of a stone circle (Aberdeenshire 1869, lxii; Name Book, Aberdeenshire, No. 53, p 47). Annotated as such on the map, in 1900 Coles mistook four points along the contour defining the hollow to the west as additional stones forming ‘a rude oval’ (1902, 490–1). He concluded that these had been removed long since, and drew attention to at least four stones lying 25m to the east on the edge of what he then described as a small quarry. One of these was cupmarked and on further enquiry he discovered that it had lain for many years against the standing stone, and had only been removed to the edge of the quarry for its safe-keeping. According to James Ritchie, the reasons were more practical, so that the standing stone might serve as a rubbing stone (1918, 89–90). Ritchie believed that the cupmarked stone had been cut down from a much larger boulder, an opinion in which he was almost certainly swayed by the knowledge that it had once lain beside the standing stone. Thus, he concluded that it had ‘every appearance of having been originally the recumbent stone of the Drumfours circle’ (ibid 90), betraying his underlying assumptions rather than any real assessment of the character of the boulder. At any rate, Coles does not seem to have shared this view, for though he accepted that the standing stone was the sole surviving orthostat of a circle, the cupmarked boulder measured only 1.4m by 0.8m (taken from plan, 1902, 490, fig 3) and with its rounded shape this evidently did not suggest to him that it had ever been of sufficient size to be a recumbent. Had he read the map correctly in the first place, he might not have been so ready to accept that this was the remains of a circle at all, for the position of the standing stone lying east and west on the lip of the hollow in the field to the west indicates that any circle to which it belonged would have broached uncomfortably across the scarp. Sadly the cupmarked boulder is now missing, presumably as a result of the expansion of the quarry between the visit by Richard Little of the OS in 1968 and the arrival of the present farmer, Arthur Smart, in 1970.
