Upper Ord
Stone Circle (Neolithic) - (Bronze Age)
Site Name Upper Ord
Classification Stone Circle (Neolithic) - (Bronze Age)
Alternative Name(s) Rhynie; Ord Hill
Canmore ID 17221
Site Number NJ42NE 6
NGR NJ 4825 2696
Datum OSGB36 - NGR
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/site/17221
- Council Aberdeenshire
- Parish Auchindoir And Kearn
- Former Region Grampian
- Former District Gordon
- Former County Aberdeenshire
NJ42NE 6 4825 2696
(NJ 4825 2696) Stone Circle (NR) (Remains of)
OS 6" map, Aberdeenshire, 2nd ed., (1902)
Upper Ord, Rhynie. The OS record for these is a Standing Stone and the remains of a Stone Circle, within a furlong of each other.
The stone on the extreme right 'D' (the OS 'Standing Stone') has a considerable lean inwards, but was probably 5ft 6ins high when erect. Of the circle there now remain only the five stones shown in the plan. The two stones nearest together at the south are probably the two Pillars between which may have rested a Recumbent Stone about 13ft long. Stone 'C' is either a broken Standing Stone or a short squat earth fast stone. Treated as integral parts of the circle these stones produce a radius of 37ft which is too great to include stone 'A', and too small to include stone 'B'. The straightness of line of stones B, A, P, is perplexing, but evidence on the ground shows that 'A' certainly and 'B' most probably are not in their original positions. Resetting, and on the assumption of equidistant spacing, this circle could have contained 10 stones in all, and 'D', standing at a point 96ft nearly east of the centre, would be the outlier.
F R Coles 1902
Only two stones remain of this stone circle, one 6ft high and the other 3ft and are those marked 'r' on Coles plan. There is no evidence to support his contention that they are flankers of a recumbent stone. There is no trace of the outlier 'D'. The stone recorded by the OS a furlong away is not outlier 'D' as suggested by Coles, but a separate entity (see NJ42NE 3), unless Coles' measurements, plan and orientation are all manifestly inaccurate.
Visited by OS (AA) 12 October 1967.
Only two stones remain of this stone setting, which lies 560m NE of Nether Wheedlemont farmsteading (NJ42NE 109). The NW stone is a large granite boulder, which measures a maximum of 1.7m in breadth from ENE to WSW by 0.5m in thickness and 1.7m in height. The second stone, also of granite, is situated 3.7m to the ESE, and measures 1.4m in breadth from NNW to SSE by 0.55m in thickness and 1.3m in height.
Visited by RCAHMS (JRS, IF), 25 October 1996.
Air photographs: AAS/00/02/G3/14.
NMRS, MS/712/100.
Scheduled as 'Ord, stone circle... the remains of a stone circle... visible as two standing stone monoliths.'
Information from Historioc Scotland, scheduling document dated 2 March 2007.
Measured Survey (27 October 1998)
RCAHMS surveyed the standing stones at Upper Ord on 27 October 1998 with plane table and alidade producing a plan at a scale of 1:100. The plan was 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, 545).
Publication Account (2011)
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).
