Montgoldrum, 'the Camp'

Montgoldrum 1 NO 816 772 NO87NW 5

(2.) About 26m SW of (NO87NW 4) there is a cairn known as 'The Camp'; it measures 17.8m in diameter over a kerb and has been reduced by robbing to a ring of cairn material up to 0.8m high. On the SSW, immediately outside the line of the kerb, lie the shattered fragments of a large boulder, which may originally have been set upright.

RCAHMS 1982, visited March 1982

(Coles 1903, 193-6; Kenworthy 1972, 24, 30, no. 6)

This recumbent stone circle, which lies within a scatter of small cairns in a patch of rough pasture and gorse (NO87NW 21–2), is set about 35m SW of the summit of Camp Hill, which is itself occupied by a large, heavily robbed cairn (NO87NW 4). The most prominent feature of the circle is the kerb of the internal cairn, so much so that opinion has varied as to whether these are the remains of a recumbent stone circle (below), but there is no doubting the character of the blasted recumbent block, and the stumps of two small orthostats on the NE (4) and W (5) respectively are probably testimony to a surrounding circle, albeit of relatively modest stones. Set about 2.5m outside the kerb of the cairn, these indicate an overall diameter of about 23m, with the recumbent (2) lying shattered into at least eleven fragments on the S. A block of black diorite with veins of white and pink quartz, one of the larger fragments remains earthfast and may well belong to the bottom of the stone’s W end. At least five of the fragments exhibit shot-holes and their fractured surfaces are sufficiently recognisable that it is clear that they can be pieced together into a single stone. The flankers are missing, if indeed they were ever present, and in addition to the two stumps there are also loose stones lying in the equivalent positions on the NW and SSE (A and B). A stone about 1.3m in length lying adjacent to the stump on the W (5) is possibly its broken top, though it is not immediately clear how they may have fitted together. The internal cairn is polygonal on plan, measuring about 18m across over a kerb that is near continuous around the SW quarter and intermittently preserved elsewhere; in all 41 kerbstones remain in place, the largest of them standing up to 0.8m high on the SW. Within the kerb the rounded cairn material forms a band up to 0.8m high; this is scarred with minor quarries and encloses a hollow 8.5m in diameter at the centre, giving the impression of a ring-cairn with an inner court. This hollow has long been a feature of the cairn, implicit in the first descriptions in the 19th century, but there is no trace of an inner kerb and if the break in the cairn material leading into it on the SE is a trackway then it is perhaps no more than another quarry; a subrectangular pit has been dug into its floor a little N of the centre.

Visited by RCAHMS (ARG and IGP) 12 April 2005

RCAHMS surveyed the remains of Montgoldrum recumbent stone circle on 12 April 2005 with plane table and alidade producing a plan and section as well as an elevation of the recumbent setting at a scale of 1:100. The plan, section 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, 403).