Torhousekie

NX35NE 025 380 565.

The Inventory describes three large pointed boulders lying prostrate with their bases apparently lying on the arc of a circle. By 1932, when the proprietors of the Torhouse Estate gave the circle (NX35NE 14) to the Guardianship of the Commissioners of Works, these stones seem to have been removed, as they are not shown on the plan which accompanied the transfer, and which includes all the other stones and cairns of Coles' plan. There is no sign of them today, unless they are among some larg e boulders heaped in the NW corner of the field. The arc of three stones is shown both on OS 1st ed. 6" (1847) and on Coles' plan. Coles saw "three great stones, all prostrate, lying very much as if they formed the sole relics of a small circle some 30 feet in diameter". It is hardly reliable to record a circle, much less its diameter, on the basis of three prostrate stones, which, of their nature, can not be in situ. Possibly the boulders were still upright at the time of the Ordnance Survey; later accounts mention stones "erected in a line" or "standing" in a group here. But even upright in their original positions, three stones can not provide conclusive evidence for the former existence of a circle. (SRO MW/1/776).

J Murray 1981; F R Coles 1897; RCAHMS 1912