Field Visit

Date 28 March 2000

Event ID 961480

Category Recording

Type Field Visit

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/961480

RCAHMS, The Recumbent Stone Circles of Scotland

The inclusion of Sands of Forvie in lists of recumbent stone circles has come about through a series of misunderstandings and misidentifications, probably initiated by the wording of Professor William Kirk’s report of some of his excavations. In the introduction to the various structures emerging from the sand he employed the term stone circles, but as a description rather than a classification, while in his conclusions he wrote that the small ring-cairn (NK02NW 3) he had discovered exhibited ‘in more complete fashion, on a smaller scale, the structural characteristics of many ring-cairns enclosed by recumbent stone circles’ (1954, 169). While there is no evidence that Alexander Thom had read Kirk’s report, it is presumably this that drew him to the Sands of Forvie, specifically to the stone circle Kirk referred to as Site D (1954, 158; Ralston and Sabine 2000, 11, ID). In his report Kirk mentioned that the stones of its wall increased in height towards the entrance on the east, where two jamb-stones 0.9m long lay fallen in the sand. Thom surveyed what he could see of this structure, including one of these jamb-stones, and it turned out to be elliptical on plan; the survey also covered the ring-cairn a short distance to the south, which he annotated concentric circles (RCAHMS DC4404). He interpreted the elliptical structure as a megalithic setting, publishing the plan in Megalithic Sites in Britain (Thom 1967, 79, fig 6.20), where an entry for Sands of Forvie in one of his tables is accompanied by the letters CR, C and CC, codes for Recumbent Stone Circle, Circle and Concentric Circles respectively (1967, 136, Table 12.1). The arrows and annotations on the plan direct the reader ‘to concentric circles’ on the south, and ‘to much disturbed circle’ to the north-west. Reconciling these annotations to the letter codes, it would appear that the elliptical structure, Kirk’s Site D, is Thom’s recumbent stone circle; it was probably excavated by Kirk in 1955, producing a domestic assemblage, and is almost certainly a hut-circle (Ralston and Sabine 2000, 11). The appearance of Sands of Forvie as a possible recumbent stone circle in Burl’s lists (1976a, 351, Abn 49) must come directly from Thom’s table, but it would appear that Burl, quite correctly, could not believe that the plan that Thom had published represented a recumbent stone circle. Therefore, he seems to have concluded that it was one of the other circles annotated on the plan; and as he knew that the concentric circles to the south were Kirk’s ring-cairn, he deduced that the ‘much disturbed circle’ to the north-west was the recumbent stone circle – his reasoning duly given away in his lists by the conversion of its diameter from megalithic yards to metres. In any case, he recognised that the ellipse was probably a hut-circle (Thom et al 1980, 192–3), though he did not make the connection between this other circle to the north-west and Kirk’s Site E, another probable hut-circle (Kirk 1955; Ralston and Sabine 2000, 11–12, IE). Thereafter debate and misunderstanding has continued, with Ruggles evidently not convinced that there was a recumbent stone circle here (1984, 57 note u), and Barnatt preferring to interpret Thom’s two circles as additional ring-cairns (1989, 485, no. 6:r). Ruggles finally concluded that there was no more than Kirk’s ring-cairn adjacent to an extensive settlement in the dune system (1999, 187 no. 79, 266 note 19), but still the existence of a possible recumbent stone circle in the Sands of Forvie has persisted, appearing in the most recent recension of Burl’s gazetteer, which also acknowledges Barnatt’s interpretation (Burl 2000, 420, Abn 49). It can only be repeated in conclusion that there is no recumbent stone circle amongst the structures recorded in the Sands of Forvie, and to date only one ring-cairn.

Visited by RCAHMS (ATW) 28 March 2000