Newbigging

Newbigging 1 NO 541 693 NO56NW 3

This cairn was removed in the 19th century and is reported to have been surrounded by a double circle of stones (possibly kerb-stones).

RCAHMS 1983

(Jervise 1853, 125; Name Book, Forfar, No. 60, p. 61).

Nothing remains of this cairn, the site of which was under plough at the date of visit.

Visited by RCAHMS (SH) 13 September 1989

Nothing remains of a substantial cairn that stood on the slope above Newbigging until the early 19th century. It had been largely removed by the time Andrew Jervise published a description in 1853, and about ten years later, the OS surveyors found no more than a low swelling in the surface of the field and an upright stone some 1.6m high. The tenant of Newbigging, John Ramsay, estimated that he had removed 400 cartloads of stones from the cairn (Name Book, Forfarshire, No. 60, p 61). Jervise’s description is more detailed, if cryptic. He describes it as follows: ‘a good specimen of concentric circles… but of the twenty or thirty large stones that enclosed an area from fifty to sixty feet [15m–18m] in diameter, only one remains… This boulder, which is about eight feet high [2.4m], is sometimes called Druidical… When demolished, the middle area of the inner circle was found to be filled with small stones to the depth of about three feet [0.9m], under which lay a quantity of black clammy earth, mixed with pieces of charcoal, while a track about two feet [0.6m] broad, composed of loose red sandstone, laid to the depth of a few inches, ran directly through the clammy earth and pebbles, from side to side of the outer circle’ (Jervise 1853 152–3). Jervise’s knowledge of cairns and stone circles was becoming quite extensive, so his reference to concentric circles and then an inner and outer circle can be taken with some confidence to indicate that he was describing more than just a kerb of boulders ringing the cairn. His estimate of the height of the single stone that survived was wildly adrift, and is closer to the girth of 9 feet (2.7m) measured by the OS surveyors. Yet, even at 1.6m in height this is an unlikely kerbstone and can therefore be taken as evidence that Jervise’s outer circle was a surrounding ring of orthostats. The significance of the deposits at the centre is more difficult to understand, unless the ‘track … from side to side of the outer circle’, was a platform between the ring of orthostats and the kerb of the cairn. Burl was first to suggest that this was possibly a recumbent stone circle enclosing a ring-cairn (1970, 79; 1976a, 354, Ags 9; 2000, 423, Ags 12), an interpretation in which he has been followed by Ruggles (1984, 60; 1999, 188, no. 97). Barnatt, however, considered the evidence insufficient for such an identification (1989, 463, no. 6:148), a conclusion with which the present survey concurs. The presence of a cairn surrounded by a ring of orthostats, possibly set out along an encircling platform, are all features of recumbent stone circles, but they are also found in other monuments, notably at the cairn close by at Bridgend of Lethnot (NO56NW 14).

Information from RCAHMS (ATW) 2011