Hare Stanes

RCAHMS surveyed the remains of Hare Stanes stone circle on 31 October 2003 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, 520).

Two boulders lying in a field on an east-facing slope 450m north-west of Feith Hill are all that remain of this stone circle. The larger is a prone slab measuring 1.75m in length by 1.5m in breadth, and its smaller neighbour on the west measures about 1.45m in length by 0.6m in breadth and 0.5m in thickness. When first recorded by the OS surveyors, about 1866, the larger slab was still upright and was identified as the Hare Stone; the smaller is only mentioned in the Name Book as an inserted note (Banffshire, No. 19, p 54). Nevertheless, both appear on the 25-inch map, marked with dots 5m to 7m apart. However, by the time Coles paid a visit in 1902 the smaller lay no more than 1.35m to the west (1903a, 116–17, fig 28). Since then, this stone has been moved still further, Richard Little of the OS reporting it upright in 1967 and the present survey finding it steeply canted over. The cupmarks Coles noted on its upper surface, which were subsequently described by James Ritchie (1918, 108), are now on its underside, six of them adjacent to a raised mineral vein. Despite its small size, Coles believed that the Hare Stone was a recumbent, which his plan shows aligned roughly east and west, and on the understanding that the smaller stone had stood close by he identified it as the fallen west flanker. The farmer, John Morrison, who was probably the J Morrison cited by the OS surveyors in the Name Book almost 40 years earlier, told him that the circle had been about 18m in diameter and its interior was very stony, though there is now no evidence of any concentration of stones in the ploughsoil round about. He also told Coles that several cists had been found within the interior. The Hare Stanes appear in most lists as a probable recumbent stone circle (Burl 1970, 60, 79; 1976a, 355, Ban 4; 2000, 424, Ban 4; Barnatt 1989, 286, no. 6:49; Ruggles 1984, 59; 1999, 185, no. 18), but the present survey has been more circumspect in its assessment. The present configuration of the two stones is misleading and it is clear from the first recorded position of the smaller stone that it is unlikely to be a fallen flanker. Furthermore, the overall shape of the larger slab, and its rough upper surface, formerly its south face, do not make for a particularly convincing recumbent – even if the stone has been cut down and partly results from relatively recent stone breaking. It would be churlish, however, to deny that this is the site of a stone circle enclosing a cairn, finding at least one parallel close by at the Greymuir Cairn (NJ64NE 9).