Inchmarlo

This massive granite standing stone, which is situated in a private garden 2.8m NNE of the NE corner of a bungalow named ‘The Beeches’, stands at the leading edge of a natural S facing terrace. It is rectangular on plan and measures 1.13m broad, 0.77m thick and 2.85m high. Its imposing S face is vertical, with moss growing in some of the shallow fissures, while its N face is a little narrower and very slightly more rounded. Its summit inclines upwards from E to W when the stone is viewed from the S. A rectangular recess close to its NW corner on the N side, measures 0.44m tall, 0.4m broad and up to 0.13m deep. A smaller boulder (A), measuring 0.47m by 0.28m by 0.8m, is situated in the same flower bed 0.8m to the N. No packing stones are visible.

The standing stone was first noted by the Reverend William Anderson, minister of the parish of Banchory-Ternan from 1830-43, who not only recorded that it was situated in a belt of trees between the road to Aberdeen and the River Dee, but that it was all that remained ‘of a large Druidical circle, almost entire about fifty years ago’ (NSA, xi, Kincardineshire, 336). The stone’s location was plotted on the 1st edition of the Ordnance Survey 6-inch map where it was shown 70m NW of the corner of Inchmarlo Cottage (Kincardineshire 1884, Sheet V). The accompanying description in the Name Book was content simply to repeat Anderson’s account verbatim (Name Book, Kincardine, No.3, p116). The stone was visited, measured and described by the Edinburgh surgeon, Dr William Brown, c.1868 (Smith 1880, 307-8). He also reported that it was commonly known as ‘The Druid’s Stone’, adding that ‘the late Sherriff Douglass, who was born at Inchmarlo, told me of the existence of other stones near this one, and I think he had seen them’. Brown’s wife, Ann, was the niece of George Lewis Augustus Douglass (1773-1847), Sheriff-Depute of Kincardine and a former occupier of Inchmarlo House (Fordyce 1888). These earlier reports were subsequently assimilated and condensed by Frederick Coles, who glossed that the stone ‘was vouched for as the sole remnant of a circle seen by the late Sheriff Douglas’ (Coles 1900, 168). Coles is the first to mention the smaller stone, which he identified as a diorite and presumably believed could have been part of the stone circle. Although he could find no trace of the ring, he provided a plan of the stones and a sketch of them from the NE. Further, he surmised that the rectangular cavity on the N side of the larger stone might have been made for ‘one of the iron letter-boxes which are common in the district’. However, this supposition was corrected by James Watt (Watt 1914, 32-3), who reported that ‘an eccentric Provost of Banchory caused a marble slab to be inserted in this stone’ on which were engraved the following verses of doggerel:

‘Here your fathers and I once stood,

The people and the people’s God;

But years by thousands since are gone,

And now you take me for a stone.

Here still, dear friend, you see I stand,

But where, O! where now is my hand,

Learn, O! learn, I long have hinted,

Learn to live and die contented.

The brass and gold, of which you think,

Between two worlds does form a link.’

According to James Ritchie ‘the cavity was made in 1835 . . . and . . . [as] the tablet was inserted during the absence of the proprietor without his consent, . . . he had it removed, and it is now preserved at Inchmarlo’ (Ritchie 1919, 69-70). It is possible that this irritated landowner was Walter Stevenson Davidson, who sold the estate to Duncan Davidson of Tillychetly and Dess in 1838 (Pike 1966; Anderson 1845, 347). James Watt repeats the story that Sheriff Douglass remembered the stone to have been part of a circle, adding that ‘the outer stones were built into the new parish church’, leaving ‘the central stone . . . in its place’. This might suggest that whatever was left of the ring was removed about 1824, when the East Parish Church was built (Sharples et al 2015, 546). The use of the term ‘central stone’ should not be taken to imply that this putative survivor was situated in the middle of the circle, as it was not uncommon in the 19th century for antiquaries to describe a ring’s most prominent stone (or stones) in this way.

Both the stone and its location remain striking today. Its asymmetrical summit when viewed from the S is distinctive and Alexander Keiller, at least, would have had no difficulty in identifying it as a possible flanker from a recumbent stone circle (Keiller 1934, 20-1; Welfare 2011, 138).

Visited by HES Survey and Recording (ATW, AMcC) 20 November 2019

HES surveyed Inchmarlo standing stone with plane-table and alidade on 20 November 2019 at a scale of 1:100. The resultant plan was redrawn in vector graphics software.