Standing Stones (destroyed): OS Grid Reference – NN 7643 2086
Archaeology & History
Highlighted on the 1866 OS-map was an impressive cluster of standing stones that sadly met their demise sometime around at the end of the 19th century. They were mentioned to “still exist” when the local writer Samuel Carment passed them in 1882, but had been destroyed by the time the Ordnance Survey lads resurveyed here in 1899. Altogether there were at least six of them, standing aligned sharply northeast-southwest and were described in one of Fred Coles’ (1911) essays, who lamented their passing. Listed in the stone row surveys by Burl (1993) and Thom (1990), the prime description we have of them was by Cole himself, who told:
“This site has also been wantonly bereft of its group of megaliths. Up to so recent a date as 1891 there were several. These were shown on the (Ordnance Survey map) as three in one line and two in another, on a field about one furlong NE of Craggish farmhouse, close to the road coming down from Ross, and nearly a quarter-mile NW of the ford across the Ruchil at Ruchilside.”
In Finlayson’s (2010) colourful survey of the local megaliths he told that the stones,
“Stood, by the road, in what is now ‘The Whinney Strip’: a boulder-strewn strip of land 20m wide dividing up otherwise flat and even grazing land.”
References:
- Burl, Aubrey, From Carnac to Callanish, Yale University Press 1993.
- Cole, Fred, “Report on Stone Circles Surveyed in Perthshire, Principally Strathearn,” in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, Scotland, volume 45, 1911.
- Finlayson, Andrew, The Stones of Strathearn, One Tree Island: Comrie 2010.
- Thom, A., Thom, A.S. & Burl, Aubrey, Stone Rows and Standing Stones – 2 volumes, BAR: Oxford 1990.
Acknowledgments: Big thanks for use of the early edition OS-map in this site profile, Reproduced with the kind permission of the National Library of Scotland.
© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian
