Mitton Hill

Mitton Hill NO 827 791 NO87NW 1

This cairn is situated on the top of Mitton Hill 500m NE of Cotbank of Barras farmhouse; it measures 17m in diameter over an intermittent boulder kerb, and 0.75m in height.

RCAHMS 1982, visited March 1982

(Name Book, Kincardine, No. 13, p. 17; Coles 1903, 198-9)

Situated on the summit of Mitton Hill, this robbed cairn measures about 17m in diameter over an intermittent ring of displaced kerbstones that in 1864–5 was mistaken by the OS surveyors for a stone circle (Kincardineshire 1868, xxi). The accompanying entry in the Name Book describes it as ‘set round at regular distances with fourteen large stones some of which would weigh twenty cwt’ (Kincardineshire, No. 13, p 17). Coles failed to find the cairn in the dense plantation that still clothed the hill in 1902, but published a plan drawn up by the local schoolmaster, William Duthie (1903b, 198–9, fig 5). With its initial annotation on OS maps, the inclusion of Mitton Hill in lists of stone circles has followed a well-trodden path, though both Barnatt (1989, 484, no. 6:l) and Ruggles (1999, 188 no. 93, 266 note 22) recognised that it was probably no more than the kerb of a robbed cairn. In Burl’s gazetteer, however, it is included as a possible recumbent stone circle (Burl 1976a, 360, Knc 5; 2000, 429, Knc 7), probably on the strength of Duthie’s plan, for this shows the stones disposed in two concentric circles, the inner made up of ‘smallish earthfast stones’ and the outer of four rather larger boulders, the greatest of which lay on the south-east and was considered by Coles to be a ‘prostrate pillar’ (1903b, 199). The impression they create is of a ring of orthostats enclosing an internal cairn, an interpretation that is not borne out by an examination on the ground.

Mitton Hill

Cotbank of Barras

Cairn; Stone Circle

36785

NO87NW 1

NO 8272 7911

A new plan of this grass-grown cairn was taken for comparison with that prepared by William Duthie and redrawn by Frederick Coles (Coles 1903). It is clear that Coles’ compass rose is awry, the north point being misaligned by many degrees W of its correct position. There are other errors, but although most of the kerbstones are recognisable, its main fault lies in the attempt to compress almost all the kerbstones into a template of two concentric rings with diameters of 15.8m and 18.8m, respectively. In practice, the cairn was evidently not circular on plan, although it may possibly have been polygonal. It now measures roughly 17m in diameter and up to 0.8m high, but its stony make-up has been so badly disturbed and robbed that its original profile cannot be readily reconstructed. The only large stone that could possibly have belonged to an outer ring of orthostats is a granite boulder shown by Coles as lying prone on the SE of his outer ring, although it is actually situated 2m E of the cairn’s kerb. It measures 1.4m long, 0.9m broad and 0.7m thick, but it may have been cut down. Only excavation can determine whether this is the last survivor of a ring of orthostats once enclosing the cairn, or instead an erratic gathered from elsewhere and dumped in its immediate vicinity.

Visited by HES, Survey and Recording (ATW, AMcC, KLG), 13 November 2018.

HES surveyed the cairn at Mitton Hill with plane-table and alidade on 13 November 2018 at a scale of 1:100. GNSS data was also collected to record survey control and sections across the site. The resultant plan and sections were redrawn in vector graphics software.