Gaval
Recumbent Stone Circle (Neolithic) - (Bronze Age)
Site Name Gaval
Classification Recumbent Stone Circle (Neolithic) - (Bronze Age)
Canmore ID 20734
Site Number NJ95SE 3
NGR NJ 9805 5150
Datum OSGB36 - NGR
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/site/20734
- Council Aberdeenshire
- Parish Old Deer
- Former Region Grampian
- Former District Banff And Buchan
- Former County Aberdeenshire
NJ95SE 3 9805 5150.
(NJ 9805 5150) Standing Stone (NR).
OS 6" map, (1959).
One stone, fallen according to the Ordnance Survey Name Book (ONB 1870), but in situ according to Coles, the remains of a recumbent stone circle. It measures 9ft 6ins round the base, 5ft 1in at the top and is 4ft 10ins high.
The area of the circle, complete until about 1844, may have extended to the E of the stone.
Name Book 1870; J Peter 1885; F R Coles 1904.
Stone, as described. It is impossible to say whether it is in situ, or has fallen and been re-erected. No trace of stone circle.
Visited by OS (RTL) 17 April 1968.
Scheduled as Gaval, standing stone.
Information from Historic Scotland, scheduling document dated 7 November 2000.
Classification amended from stone circle to recumbent stone circle.
Information from RCAHMS (ATW) 20 January 2009
Field Visit (21 August 2003)
A single boulder set upright on a low rise 230m SW of Gaval marks the site of this recumbent stone circle, though details of its architecture and plan are scarce and the commentaries recording its destruction by Rev James Peter (1885, 376) and Rev Andrew Chalmers (1903, 11) are retrospective. Peter claimed that the circle had survived relatively intact until the mid 1840s, and Chalmers went so far as to suggest that it had been ‘more complete’ than Aikey Brae (No. 1). Thereafter the stones were cleared away until according to Coles’ informant, John Milne, who had lived for many years at Mains of Atherb, there were four left (Coles 1904, 280–1), one of which was a massive recumbent. In about 1868 the recumbent was blasted, apparently by apprentice masons working nearby (Peter 1985, 376), and shortly after, probably in 1870, the OS surveyors reported: ‘One stone is still there, but has fallen down; the Altar Stone was blasted about 2 years ago and weighed about 30 to 40 tons’ (Name Book, Aberdeenshire, No. 82, p 11). Curiously, however, they depicted two stones some 30m apart on the 1st edition of the OS 6-inch map (Aberdeenshire 1874, xiii); the northern roughly coincides with the position of the present stone, and the southern presumably represents the blasted residue of the recumbent. The present long axis of the surviving stone, however, lies NE and SW, and in its current position cannot have stood on the N side of the circle. While this led Coles to suggest that the circle lay to the E, the evidence of the OS surveyors should probably be preferred; in effect, its axis confirms that the stone was re-erected as a rubbing stone after 1870, and if Peter is correct before 1885. Coles noted that the fragments of the other stones had been simply dumped in the angle between the road and the farm track to the NW where they were later seen by Keiller. However, they have since been removed.
Visited by RCAHMS (JRS and KHJM) 21 August 2003
Measured Survey (21 August 2003)
RCAHMS surveyed the remains of Gaval recumbent stone circle on 21 August 2003 with plane table and alidade producing a plan of the site at a scale of 1:100. The plan was redrawn in ink and used as the basis for an illustration produced in vector graphics software and published at a scale of 1:250 (Welfare 2011, 367).
