Melgum

Three enclosures lie at the foot of a slope in unimproved pasture within a clearing in mixed open woodland. Each measures about 20m in diameter within a wall reduced to a low stony bank spread up to 5.5m in thickness. The NE enclosure is the least well-preserved, having been robbed of the majority of its stones save for six large boulders. These have previously been interpreted as the remains of a stone circle, though they are no different from the large boulders incorporated into the banks of the adjacent enclosures. What is not known, however, is whether they formed part of the core of the wall or whether they belonged to its inner or outer face.

Visited by RCAHMS (ARG) 12 May 2005

RCAHMS surveyed Melgum stone circle and enclosures on 12 May 2005 with plane table and self-reducing alidade producing a site plan at a scale of 1:500. The survey drawing was later used as the basis for an illustration redrawn in vector graphics software at a scale of 1:1000.

RCAHMS surveyed Melgum enclosure on 12 May 2005 with plane table and alidade producing a plan and section at a scale of 1:100. The plan and section were used as the basis for an illustration, produced in ink and finished in vector graphics software, that was published at a scale of 1:250 (Welfare 2011, 528).

The classification has been updated from 'Stone Circle' to 'Enclosures'.

Information from RCAHMS (ARG) 12 May 2005

The easternmost of three hut-circles or enclosures at the foot of the south-east flank of Gallow Hill has been noted as a possible recumbent stone circle (Barnatt 1989, 292, no. 6:63), a misidentification that can be traced back to when they were first mapped by OS surveyors in 1868 and annotated Stone Circles (Remains of) (Aberdeenshire 1870, lxx). At that time this term was being applied to a wide range of structures, ranging from hut-circles and thick-walled enclosures to rings of freestanding orthostats (Gannon et al 2007, 70–1), and in this case the Name Book entry displays what little the surveyors knew: ‘Three circles formed by large boulder stones, but a quantity of the stones has been removed, yet the circles is quite visible. It is a mere conjecture what these may have been, whether encampments, or used in conjunction and part of the surrounding Druidical Temples or Stone Circles’ (Aberdeenshire, No. 56, p 96). Each of the enclosures measures about 20m in internal diameter within a wall reduced to a low stony bank up to 5.5m in thickness, but the robbing of the easternmost has left a series of large boulders standing proud above the top of the bank, two of which probably mark one side of the entrance on the south-east. At the beginning of the 20th century Sir Alexander Ogston recognised that these were not circles of standing stones (1931, 95–6), but in the 1920s Douglas Simpson described the easternmost as an ‘hitherto undescribed stone circle’ (1927, 265–6). Since then it has been their fate to appear in lists of stone circles (Burl 1976a, 352, Abn 75a-c; 2000, 421, Abn 77a-c; Thom et al 1980, 208–9), which in its turn left Barnatt to struggle with their interpretation, his ideas ranging across freestanding rings of orthostats, ring-cairns and recumbent stone circles (1989, 292, no. 6:63). More likely parallels for these structures are to be found in the nearby settlements for which the area around New Kinnord is famed.