Publication Account

Date 2011

Event ID 887078

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/887078

RCAHMS, The Recumbent Stone Circles of Scotland

In 1938 a small group of stones situated just above the flood-plain on the north bank of the River Ythan in Ellon was removed by William Grieve, a market gardener, ‘who deposited them haphazardly along the river bank’ further upstream, where they may still be seen in the company of a more recent interloper (NJ 95483 30221) (Godsman 1958, 23). The original location of the stones is marked on the 1st edition of the OS 25-inch map (Aberdeenshire 1871, xxxvii.15), but they are not shown as antiquities. Coles was informed about them in 1903 by Henry Mitchell, a respected member of the Buchan Field Club, who described them as ‘some stones of the type usually found in circles with recumbent stone, arranged in a sort of circle’ (1904, 258). Coles, however, who was probably privy to more information than he published, concluded that they had been moved from elsewhere and that their original site was irretrievably lost; consequently he did not pay a visit. It was left to James Ritchie to provide the only detailed record, from which it is clear this was not the remains of a recumbent stone circle, and indeed there is no particular reason to believe that any of the stones had been brought from such a circle. Nevertheless, in Ritchie’s opinion three small pillars no more than about 1m and 0.7m wide had been set upright on the south and north respectively of a small circle no larger than 6m in diameter; the other two stones were low rounded boulders that he believed had been brought from elsewhere (1917, 34–6). His photographs show the ground around the stones sloping down to the edge of the flood-plain, a position that in 1968 led Keith Blood of the OS to suggest that they had been no more than an ornamental construction. Other writers have preferred to follow Ritchie (Burl 1976a, 351, Abn 48; Barnatt 1989, 282, no. 6:38), and more recently Burl has drawn a connection between the entry for Ellon in his gazetteer and a circle in the parish at Fochell mentioned by James Garden in his correspondence with John Aubrey (Burl 2000, 420, Abn 48). Fechil was a steading on the south side of the river (NJ 9690 2971), but contrary to Garden’s contention that Fochell translated as ‘below the chapell’ (Hunter 2001, 120), it probably means a green place or field of pasture (Alexander 1952, 56, 58). The circle that Garden claimed stood on higher ground nearby was presumably to the west near Hillhead of Fechil (NJ 9571 2966), but there are no records of such a structure here, nor of any discoveries that might hint at its existence.