Eslie The Lesser

RCAHMS surveyed Eslie the Lesser stone circle and cairn on 9 April 2003 with plane table and alidade producing a plan and section of the site and an elevation of stone 1 at a scale of 1:100. The plan and section were 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, 516).

A stone circle enclosing a cairn is situated on a gentle south-south-west-facing slope 560m east-south-east of Eslie, and now forms a substantial mound strewn with stones and boulders gathered from the surrounding and the spacing of the six surviving orthostats suggests that there were originally nine, the gaps between them reducing progressively from the south round to where the three missing stones stood on the north. There is no recumbent setting as such, but two slabs were set up close together on the south, and though the eastern (2) has fallen, at about 1.45m in height the western (1) would have appeared to be the tallest in the ring. The other four stones (3–6) range from 1.1m to 1.5m in height, but their tops are all roughly at the same level. The cairn within the interior of the circle is rather more irregular in shape and measures about 9.5m from east to west by 8.5m transversely over a kerb of slabs and boulders, the largest of which are in the southern quarter and over 1m in length. The centre of the cairn has been dug out, probably in 1873 by Robert Angus Smith, though he believed that it had already been disturbed and he found no evidence of an inner court (1880, 303–4). As it appears today, the internal cairn is set on a much larger flat-topped mound measuring about 17m across and rising about 0.8m above the level of the surrounding field. At least the upper portion of this mound is probably an ancient construction, forming a platform beneath the stone circle, but the addition over the years of field-cleared stones has largely obscured its original size and shape. The circle had been reduced to its present complement by 1864, when the OS surveyors described it in the Name Book as ‘a druidical circle consisting of five upright stones’ (Kincardineshire, No. 3, p 148), but a little while later Smith wrote that it comprised ‘six standing and a lying one almost exactly at the South; one standing stone being at each end of the lying one as in the others’ (1880, 303–4). This has caused no end of confusion ever since, not only alluding to the presence of an additional upright, but also identifying the prone orthostat on the south as a recumbent; the sixth upright, he seems to suggest, was a flanker at the east end of this fallen slab. Sir Henry Dryden, for example, who struggled with several of Smith’s other descriptions of stone circles around Durris, commissioned further measurements in 1880 from Archibald Crease, but the latter could find only five stones upright and the fallen slab on the south, leading Dryden to draw up a sketch plan in 1881 that shows the supposedly missing flanker with a dashed outline and a question mark (RCAHMS DC11871). More the pity that in 1884 William Lukis judged the circle too dilapidated to merit survey, though he also believed there was a recumbent stone here (1885, 309–10). The explanation of Smith’s description lies with the measurements supplied to him by William Brown, an Edinburgh surgeon, who probably visited the circle in 1868. Brown measured the distances between a total of six stones, but all are too long to relate to the narrow gap between orthostat (1) and its fallen neighbour (2). Indeed, set against the modern plan, it is reasonably clear that Brown measured anticlockwise from orthostat (1), missing out the fallen slab (2), and introducing the additional upright on the north. His heights and girths do not reconcile quite so neatly, but if they were recorded in the same sequence, this additional stone on the north was much smaller than any of the others and only 0.9m high. Possibly the OS surveyors in 1864 considered that it was simply another field-cleared boulder. Its triangulated position falls in a sector where a series of other boulders had been dumped along the edge of the mound by the time Coles prepared his plan in 1899 (1900, 166, fig 21). Smith may not even have counted the stones for himself, and the passage suggesting that there were two flankers should be seen as a misguided attempt to explain the character of the ring to his readers rather than as a description of the stones themselves. Nevertheless, Coles accepted that the two stones on the south belonged to a recumbent setting (1900, 166–7) and, with the exception of a Royal Commission survey of Kincardineshire in the 1980s (RCAHMS 1984, 10, no. 20), this interpretation has passed unchallenged (Kenworthy 1973, 29; Burl 1970, 79; 1976a, 360, Knc 9; 2000, 429, Knc 12; 2005a, 138; Thom et al 1980, 202–3; Barnatt 1989, 283, no. 6:40; Ruggles 1984, 60; 1999, 188, no. 89; Ruggles and Burl 1985, 33).The case against this slab being a recumbent rests on the apparently symmetrical spacing of the stones of the circle; if the spacing of the three stones on the west (1, 6 & 5) is reproduced on the east, the fallen slab (2) adopts the equivalent position of orthostat (1). The alternative reconstruction of a recumbent setting here, with a flanker on the east, necessarily abandons any pretence at the visual symmetry of the southern facade of the circle. Notably, this facade is not flattened. In this respect, rather than reproducing the design of the neighbouring recumbent stone circle at Eslie the Greater, Eslie the Lesser relates to the circle enclosing the ring-cairn known as Raedykes North West on Campstone Hill North, Fetteresso. There a pair of orthostats in the kerb of a ring-cairn was probably originally matched by another pair of pillars standing in front of them on the circumference of the surrounding circle. In this case the eastern of the two stones is broader and slightly shorter than its neighbour, raising the question whether the fallen stone at Eslie the Lesser was once a tall slab set up on end or a broad slab set up on its side.