Standing Stone: OS Grid Reference – NO 15361 60677
Also Known as:
- Borland Stone
- Canmore ID 29401
The Borland Stone, looking NE
From Blairgowrie, take the A93 north road, ensuring that when you reach the Bridge of Cally after 5½ miles (9km), you take the right-turn up Glenshee (the Valley of the Faerie folk) and not the A924 Strathardle road. After about 5 miles, turn right up the small lane to Blacklunans after, once you’ve weaved past the River Shee and started uphill, a few hundred yards on keep yer eyes peeled on the fields to your left. If you hit the Glenshee EcoCamp, you’ve gone too far.
Archaeology & History
Borland Stone, looking west
This small, out-of-the-way standing stone is set amidst a small mass of rounded stones—as if once part of a cairn—at the top of a small hillock that can easily be passed by if your nose isn’t working properly. Curiously isolated, the monolith seems more of an outlier to the Mount Blair hills immediately north and east; or perhaps the large settlement less than a mile south.
Very little seems to have been said about the stone, in literary terms at least. The Royal Commission (1990) lads merely told us that,
“This stone, which stands on the summit of a prominent knoll 300m SE of Borland farmhouse, measures 0.7m by 0.3m at the base and 1m in height.”
Stone aligned NNE to Tom Bealaidh
Nowt else! Although the stone was marked on the early 1900 OS-map, the small mass of loose stones at its base are more recently-worked than anything prehistoric and may simply be field clearance. The monolith itself could do with assessment to positively ensure its prehistoric veracity.
References:
- Meikle, James, Places and Place-Names around Alyth, Alexander Gardner: Paisley 1925.
- Royal Commission on the Ancient & Historical Monuments of Scotland, North-East Perth: An Archaeological Landscape, HMSO: Edinburgh 1990.
© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian