Publication Account
Date 2011
Event ID 887304
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/887304
Two stones standing in a field above the road 560m north-east of Nether Wheedlemont are the remains of some form of megalithic setting, but its form is quite unknown. The western and taller of the two (A) measures 1.7m from east-north-east to west-south-west by 0.5m in thickness and 1.7m in height, while the other (B), standing no more than 3.7m to the east, is set at right-angles to its long axis and measures 1.4m by 0.55m and 1.3m in height. The two stones were sketched by OS surveyors in the Name Book (Aberdeenshire, No. 6, p 41), but on the map they showed four in all (Aberdeenshire 1870, xlii), the other two strung out over a distance of 20m in a straight line north-west of the western slab (A). According to their description these were ‘prostrate or mutilated’, but there is an implication that there may have been others, which had ‘disappeared in whole, or were blown to pieces as circumstances required’ (ibid). Coles recorded both these stones on his plan, together with another earthfast boulder, and he shows the first two in his sketch (1902, 563–5, figs 78–9). Though neither has the appearance of a fallen orthostat, he persuaded himself that they belonged to a circle about 22.5m in diameter, in which the two upright stones on the south were the flankers of a recumbent setting. Another heavily leaning stone some 30m to the east-north-east of his flankers, which he mistakenly identified as the standing stone shown on the map 200m up the slope to the north-west (NJ84NE 3), he suggested was an outlier that had stood about 1.7m high; for some reason this stone does not appear on any edition of the OS map. A century later his argument is far from convincing, for there is no other recorded setting in which the flankers are aligned in this way, either in relationship to a circle or each other. Despite this, Upper Ord has been included in all subsequent lists as a possible or probable recumbent stone circle (Burl 1970, 79; 1976a, 353, Abn 108; 2000, 422, Abn 112; Ruggles 1984, 59; 1999, 186, no. 32), only Barnatt discussing the problems that this entails (1989, 306, no. 6:99).
