Newbigging

RCAHMS surveyed the remains of Newbigging stone circle on 29 March 2000 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, 534).

The site of a Stone Circle approached by a Causeway, which is annotated on the 1st edition of the OS 6-inch map about 400m south-west of Bankhead (Aberdeenshire 1870, xliii), has become entrenched in the antiquarian and archaeological literature as a possible recumbent stone circle. The confusion is fully discussed in the Gazetteer entry for Bankhead (NJ52NW 25). The discovery at Newbigging was described to the OS surveyors by William Booth of Hillhead, who had been one of the workmen involved in the discovery and demolition of the Stone Circle. They had ‘come upon a circle about 40 feet [12m] in diameter beautifully paved with large stones, there was also a Causeway paved in the same manner leading in an easterly direction about 20 feet of it was visible… There were never any upright stones standing on this circle’ (Name Book, Aberdeenshire, No. 14, p 23). The causeway ‘was composed of large uncut stones beautifully fitted together. So nicely fitted were they, that the workmen had great difficulty in getting their picks wedged in to separate them’ (ibid p 25). Here is another example of the universal application of the term Stone Circle by the first OS surveyors to cover any ancient circular structure (see also Bankhead and Crookmore App NJ51NE 16 and NJ51NE 144), and in this case it is almost certainly a hut-circle with a souterrain that is being described (Gannon et al 2007, 70–1). When Coles visited the site of the circle in 1901, however, he was labouring under the misunderstanding that Rev Robert Cook’s description of a recumbent stone circle in the parish entry for Clatt in the New Statistical Account referred to the circle at Newbigging (xii, Aberdeenshire, 851). Coles’ description of a stone set up in a gateway at the angle of two dykes nearby as the only survivor from what appeared to have been a fine monument contains a note of despair. The stone in question (NJ 5287 2646) is simply a large boulder placed at the angle to prevent vehicles damaging the dykes. Coles’ misunderstanding was compounded by Alexander Keiller’s belief that the causeways described by the OS surveyors were all associated with recumbent stone circles (1934, 18). Thus Newbigging’s supposed status has been cemented in Burl’s lists (1970, 78; 1976a, 350, Abn 28; 2000, 420, Abn 27b), though both Ruggles (1984, 56 note j, 59; 1999, 186, no. 34, 266, note 7) and Barnatt (1989, 459, no. 6:118) realised that there may have been some confusion in the antiquarian descriptions.