Stoneyfield

RCAHMS surveyed the remains of Stoneyfield stone circle on 6 May 2005 with plane table and alidade producing a plan at a scale of 1:100. The plan was 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, 542).

Only two orthostats of this small stone circle remain in place, standing in the paddock immediately north-west of Stoneyfield. They both measure about 1.3m in height and are set a little under 12m apart, though the disposition of the stones noted by Coles in 1901 suggests that they do not stand in direct opposition to one another and that the circle is about 14m in overall diameter (1902, 575–7, fig 88). Coles probably found the circle in much the same state as the OS surveyors some 30 years earlier. They counted nine stones in all, seven of them already fallen and ‘embedded in the soil’ (Name Book, Aberdeenshire, No. 25, p 72), and the depiction on the 25-inch map shows that one of their nine was a slab on the north that Coles regarded as outcrop (Aberdeenshire 1874, xxvi). James MacDonald subsequently reported that in 1821 several others had been removed (1891, 72), which accords with Coles’ interpolated plan of twelve evenly spaced orthostats, based on the positions of those lying fallen; the three missing stones in his solution were those closest to the steading and perhaps the ones most likely to have been taken in 1821. The interior of the circle was already under plough in Coles’ day, as can be seen in James Ritchie’s photographs (RCAHMS AB2914 & AB2942), and a further stage of clearance has taken place since. Those stones already gathered around the two orthostats are still where Coles found them, but the ones that lay on the north-west quarter have now been dumped adjacent to the western upright. Continued ploughing across the interior has also driven a broad channel up to 0.4m deep through the centre of the ring. Barnatt tentatively put Stoneyfield forward as a recumbent stone circle, partly on the strength of the number of stones in the ring, but also because he thought there was evidence that they were graded in height towards the south-west (1989, 302, no. 6:90). This is not borne out by the measurements of the various stones, most of which can be recognised from Coles’ plan, even where they have been shifted into a new position. More importantly, there is no hint in either the surviving remains or the antiquarian record that there was ever a recumbent setting here. Nor, for what it is worth, is the topographical setting the typically prominent position in which recumbent stone circles are usually found, as the remains of the ring lie in the bottom of a narrow valley with rising ground on virtually every hand.