Johnston, The Ringing Stone

RCAHMS surveyed The Ringing Stone on 25 June 1999 with plane table and alidade producing a plan and elevation of at a scale of 1:100. The plan and elevation 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, 523).

The Ringing Stone is a granite slab standing in the north-east corner of a field 230m north-north-west of Johnston. It is probably the sole survivor of a stone circle enclosing a cairn. Measuring 2m in overall height, it has a claw-shaped profile and bears at least four shallow cupmarks on the lower part of its west-northwest face, the largest of them measuring 50mm in diameter; a single depression in the surface of the east-southeast face is natural. The suggestion that the Ringing Stone may be the remains of a recumbent stone circle was first made by James Ritchie, who observed that the claw-shaped profile of the stone was very like that of some flankers (1918, 111). Lying north – south, however, the axis of the stone would put it on either the east or west side of a circle, neither of which occurs in the recorded range of positions for recumbent settings. On these grounds its inclusion in the present Gazetteer of recumbent stone circles has been rejected. Nevertheless, there is a good case to be made that there was once a circle here and that this enclosed a large cairn. The evidence that the Ringing Stone was part of a larger megalithic monument is provided by an estate plan of New Leslie drawn up in 1797 by George Brown (NTS Leith Hall Ms), which depicts Stones at this location, an ambiguous attribution but one that is applied to other stone circles appearing on estate plans elsewhere in Aberdeenshire. In this case the denoting of the Stones on the estate plan confirms that there were two megalithic monuments in the parish of Leslie, the other being the recumbent stone circle at Braehead. These, therefore, are probably the two Druidical temples in the parish referred to by Rev John Harper in the Statistical Account (viii, 1793, 518). A little over 70 years later Rev James Peter identified Braehead to the OS surveyors as the only one that he knew of, thus confirming that this was the recently demolished circle he mentions in 1835 in the New Statistical Account (xii, Aberdeenshire, 1022). Peter, who had come to the parish in 1830, was also one of the authorities cited by the OS surveyors in the Name Book entry for the Ringing Stone, a ‘plain Standing Stone’, which has an appended note that ‘Mr and Mrs Skinner remember of a Cairn being here. And says that her uncle built the Cottown with the stones taken from it’ (Name Book, Aberdeenshire, No. 54, p 16). The cairn was presumably of some size to be remembered as a quarry for the building stone of this steading, which stands a short distance to the south-east (NJ 5831 2503). Presumably the circle enclosed the cairn, and we can only guess that Andrew Jervise misunderstood his informants to describe the Ringing Stone ‘formerly surrounded with a cairn of small stones’ (1879, 334). In the light of this new evidence, it is now possible to discard the unlocated stone circle in Leslie parish that Burl has listed (1976a, 352, Abn 68; 2000, 421, Abn 69), initially noting it as a possible recumbent stone circle (Burl 1970, 79).