The Use and Reuse of Stone Circles

by Richard Bradley

  Trench 1. The base of the foundation trench for the outer wall (Context 5):

  SUERC-47749 Corylus charcoal. 3227±28 BP/1605–1429 BC at 95.4 % probability

  SUERC-47750 Corylus charcoal. 3245±30 BP/1609–1446 BC at 95.4% probability

  SUERC-47751 Prunus charcoal. 3080±30 BP/1421–1268 BC at 95.4% probability

  SUERC-47752 Prunus charcoal. 3052±30 BP/1410–1219 BC at 95.4% probability

  SUERC-47756 Corylus charcoal. 3189±30 BP/1513–1413 BC at 95.4% probability

  SUERC-44877 Corylus charcoal. 3161±33 BP/1503–1386 BC at 95.4% probability

  Trench 3. The lower filling of the ring ditch (Context 8):

  SUERC-47758 Corylus charcoal. 2987±30 BP/1371–1124 BC at 95.4% probability

  SUERC-44878 Alnus charcoal. 344±33 BP/AD 1464–1640 at 95.4% probability

  SUERC-47757 Alnus charcoal. 268±30 BP/AD 1515–1952 at 95.4% probability; AD 1515–1598 at 39.3% probability; and AD 1632–1665 at 42% probability

  Figure 4.21. (a) The phasing favoured by Piggott and Simpson 1971; (b) the revised phasing favoured in this study.

  SUERC-47759 Corylus charcoal. 3089±28 BP/1429–1293 BC at 95.4% probability

  Trench 4. The lower filling of the external pit (Context 6):

  SUERC-44879 Quercus charcoal. 3380±33 BP/1753–1537 BC at 95.4% probability

  Trench 1. The filling of the 1965 excavation (Context 1):

  SUERC-47157 Burnt bone. 2901±39 BP/1258–976 BC at 95.4% probability

  Comments

  It is clear that the sequence at Croftmoraig extended into the Middle and even the Late Bronze Age. When it began remains an open question for lack of any suitable samples. Four specific comments may be helpful. The six samples from the base of the foundation trench for the enclosure wall underlay the stone structure and may include residual material from earlier episodes of activity on the site. What they do provide is a terminus post quem for the building of that wall during the Middle Bronze Age. The samples from the ring ditch date from two quite different phases, the Bronze Age and the post-medieval periods respectively. The relatively recent dates suggest that the filling of the ring ditch was not as securely sealed as Piggott and Simpson reported, although the same context was associated with large and relatively fresh sherds of prehistoric pottery. The earlier dates from this feature overlap with the terminus post quem for the outer wall and for that reason the previous excavators were probably correct in assigning them to the same structural phase. This would be consistent with the chronology of ring ditch houses established by Pope (2015). The date from the external pit in Trench 4 is rather earlier, but the only charcoal from this context was of oak and, because it is a long-lived species, the result was not unexpected. Allowing for this factor, it remains a possibility that this feature was excavated after the wall had been built and located against its outer face. Lastly, the single radiocarbon date on burnt bone from Croftmoraig suggests that activity at the site continued into the Late Bronze Age.

  Figure 4.22. Stone blocks in the enclosure wall on the south-east side of the enclosure. Note how they were built over a deposit of rubble including a number of slabs. From a colour slide of the 1965 excavation now held by NMRS.

  New evidence of sequence

  The fieldwork undertaken in 2012 shows that the chronology favoured by Piggott and Simpson was incorrect (Fig. 4.21). The new excavation confirmed that the stone oval was indeed later than the filling of the ring ditch house. Indeed, it found two sherds very similar to those from the previous project. Similarly, it suggested – but could not prove – that the outer circle came so close to the wall defining the western perimeter of the monument in Trench 1 that it would have been difficult to raise that stone if the wall was already there.

  These ideas are strengthened by an examination of the photographs in the site archive. Piggott and Simpson observed that the surface from which the inner oval had been erected featured ‘flat or roughly flat stones ... in the manner of very rough or patchy paving or cobbling’ (1971, 6–7) (Fig. 4.22). They did not mention the fact that slabs of similar character were used to pack the monoliths of the inner oval and were also employed to provide a level foundation for the outer wall (Fig. 4.23). There is less information on the packing employed in the outer circle, and in the only case in which it involved similar material (Monolith 4) the photographs show that the slabs were encountered in the natural clay in the course of digging the socket (Fig. 4.24). Otherwise the contrast between the two settings of monoliths is very striking.

  That particular monolith (4) was immediately adjacent to the porch of the ‘ring ditch house’ but the photographs show that the two features did not intersect. Indeed they avoided one another so precisely that this relationship cannot have been fortuitous. It seems likely that the posts respected a monolith that was already present. The opposite relationship is improbable for it is hard to see how the position of the stone could have avoided the site of a wooden ‘porch’ if its wall had already decayed. It would have left no trace behind.

  The revised sequence is supported by 10 radiocarbon dates as well as a reassessment of the pottery found in the ring ditch in 1965. No charcoal samples were associated with the outer circle or the putative graves, but the new work suggests that that ring ditch dated from the middle of the Bronze Age and was probably contemporary with the construction of the outer wall. It seems likely that this enclosure was also associated with a decorated stone 2 m in length where the circuit of massive boulders is interrupted on its southern perimeter. Far from forming part of this wall, it overlay a layer of soil rather than the rubble foundation seen at other points around the edge of the monument. This is clear from a section drawing published in 1971 and from photographs in the excavation archive (Fig. 4.11). Perhaps it was placed across an entrance when access to the interior was closed. Chapter 7 discusses other examples of this practice.

  Figure 4.23. Stone blocks in the enclosure wall. Note how they were placed over a shallow deposit of rubble. From a colour slide of the 1965 excavation now held by NMRS.

  Figure 4.24. The relationship between Monolith 4 in the outer circle and the northern post trench for the timber porch. The socket for the standing stone was cut from a level above the surface of the clay mound. From a colour slide of the 1965 excavation now held by NMRS.

  Renewed excavation also confirmed that the deposit of quartz recorded by Piggott and Simpson overlay the position of a timber building and probably belonged to a late phase in the history of the site. It is a moot point whether this material was still accumulating during the Late Bronze Age, but a piece of cremated bone has a radiocarbon date during that period.

  Conclusions

  The results of this investigation raise some wider issues that are treated in Chapter 10. This section is concerned with the specific questions that led to the project in 2012.

  Previous discussions of the monument had raised a number of specific questions, and it is worth returning to them here:

  • Was the outer stone circle (with or without the portal stones) the original monument at Croftmoraig, or did it belong to the final phase of activity, as Piggott and Simpson suggested?

  • Was the timber circle the oldest monument on the site, and did it date from the Neolithic period or the Bronze Age? Could this structure be compared with that of a ring ditch house?

  • It was clear that the stones of the inner oval were erected after the ring ditch had been filled and that they followed the same footprint as the timber structure. When did this happen, and did it occur as part of the same reorganisation of the monument as the building of the outer enclosure?

  • What was the character of that enclosure? Was it a bank or a wall, and when was it constructed? Piggott and Simpson saw it as an early component of Croftmoraig – could it have been one of the latest?

  The first question is not easy to answer, but even without radiocarbon dates Chapter 10 will argue that the outer ring has its closest counterparts at Early Br
onze Age sites where the monoliths were graded by height. The same chronology might extend to the ‘graves’ beside each of the portal stones. The structural features that did provide scientific dates were significantly later than that estimate.

  The timber circle was integrally related to the ring ditch identified by Piggott and Simpson and the two features should be treated together as they have parallels on Scottish sites excavated since 1965. Such structures date from both the later Bronze Age and the Iron Age. That is consistent with a new study of the pottery found in the ditch at Croftmoraig, and the argument is supported by two dates for charcoal found in this feature. Two other dates are much more recent, but must be discounted since there is stratigraphic evidence that the sockets for the inner stone setting were cut through the same deposit.

  The first excavators observed that the layer of stone capping the refilled ditch extended as far as the outer boundary of the site, and archive photographs show that in places the perimeter consisted of a wall of massive stone blocks laid on top of this surface. The ‘levelling’ identified in 1965 provided a secure foundation for sections of the enclosure wall. At other points they rested on a foundation of large boulders set in a shallow trench. Radiocarbon samples taken from the base of this feature overlap with the two dates from the ring ditch and fall in the Middle Bronze Age. This seems to be when the latest structures were erected.

  It follows that the sequence postulated in 1965 must be reversed. Far from being one of the first monuments of its kind, this was one of the last. The implications of this change need to be considered in their own right. So must the distinctive character of the successive structures on the site. For both those reasons Croftmoraig is considered again in Chapter 10.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Hill of Tuach, Kintore, Aberdeenshire: the excavation of a small stone circle and henge

  Richard Bradley and Amanda Clarke

  Background to the project

  Richard Bradley, Amanda Clarke and Alison Sheridan The Hill of Tuach is an isolated granite knoll to the southeast of Kintore, in Aberdeenshire. It rises to a height of 83 m and is bounded on three sides by the Tuach Burn, a minor tributary of the River Don (Fig. 5.1).

  The hill has been the findspot of at least one Early Bronze Age grave in addition to those found in the stone circle. Charles Elphinstone Dalrymple (1884, 324) refers to the discovery, ‘some years later than our examination of [the stone circle in 1855]’, of a battle axehead very similar to the one discovered at Broomend of Crichie, associated with ‘some burnt deposit, the nature of which I was not able to ascertain’, ‘on the brow of the little hill, 100 yards north from the circle’, while the Ordnance Survey Name Book records the discovery, on the summit of the hill, of ‘urns containing ashes’ in 1863 (Canmore ID 18587; the plan included in this entry, however, appears to be that of the stone circle). Unfortunately the axehead never made its way into a museum (Roe 1966, 241), although the ‘Crichie’ type to which it belongs has been radiocarbon-dated to between the nineteenth and seventeenth centuries BC (Sheridan 2007b, 175 and figs 14.10.4 and 5). As for the ‘urns’, it is a moot point whether more than one pot was found in 1863 since, while the note of Donations to the (then-named) National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland (henceforth NMAS) for 8th February 1864 records the acquisition, through the Treasure Trove system, of ‘Portions of two small Urns of red and yellowish clay, partly ornamented with straight and zigzag lines’ (Proc Soc Antiq Scot 5, 213), the 1892 NMAS Catalogue lists only one pot (now called NMS X.EE 50) and it is clear that only one pot is represented by the sherds constituting NMS X.EE 50. This is a large accessory vessel in the form of a miniature Cordoned Urn, with a sub-rim band of decoration made using impressed twisted cord, and the red and yellowish colour of its sherds is due to the pot’s having been burnt on the funeral pyre along with the body. What the spatial relationship between the findspot of this pot and that of the battle axehead had been is impossible to tell, but if one assumes that more than one grave was involved, this means that the hill had housed two Early Bronze Age cemeteries (or at least burial places), one on its summit and one downslope, inside the stone circle.

  Parts of the area surrounding the Hill of Tuach have been investigated in advance of building and road construction and it is clear that they were occupied on a significant scale from the Neolithic period (Murray and Murray 2008). Roundhouses were constructed to the west and northwest of the Hill of Tuach from the end of the Early Bronze Age to the Late Pre-Roman Iron Age (Cook and Dunbar 2008). Four and a half kilometres to the northwest is the complex of monuments at Broomend of Crichie, investigated in 2005–2007 (Bradley 2011, chapters 1 and 2). In between them, 2 km from Tuach, was another enclosed stone circle at Fullerton (F[o]ularton), with a possible henge monument and a further stone circle at Cairnhall nearby (Dalrymple 1884, 323; Coles 1901, 217–19; Kilbride-Jones 1935). The Fullerton monument produced a central grave containing unburnt remains together with cremated remains and a pot, plus seven deposits of cremated remains around this grave, some associated with Bucket Urns (‘Flat-rimmed Ware’). A fragment of cremated bone from one such deposit was radiocarbon-dated for NMS and found to date to 2800±50 BP (GrA-23402, 1110–830 cal BC at 95.4% probability; Sheridan 2003, 169), confirming a Late Bronze Age reuse of that site comparable to that seen at a number of other monuments in north-east Scotland. (See Chapter 9 for further discussion.)

  Figure 5.1. The location of the Hill of Tuach in relation to the positions of nearby monuments.

  The excavated site (NJ 7957 1544) has been badly damaged over the last one hundred and fifty years and only parts of the original monument still survive, but successive surveys shed light on its original form (Fig. 5.2). The earliest record is a plan drawn by the first excavator, Charles Elphinstone Dalrymple, in 1855. It was published in 1901, long after he had died (Coles 1901, fig. 6). It depicts a roughly circular setting of six monoliths about 20 ft (6.1 m) in diameter, located along the inner edge of a ditch. The earliest account of the monument was published by John Stuart a year after the work took place (Stuart 1856, xx–xxi). It states that the earthwork was not broken by any causeway and that there was no evidence of a bank. When Fred Coles surveyed the site in 1901, he did identify a bank, but by then the southern part of its circuit had disappeared and only one or two possible standing stones remained (Coles 1901, 192–96). By that time a massive boulder originating from a nearby quarry filled part of the interior (Stone A), and one section of the south-western perimeter of the enclosure had been destroyed by a field wall. The next survey was undertaken by Alexander Keiller in 1927 but was never published; it exists, however, in the NMRS (AGD 536/2, confusingly listed under Canmore ID 18587). It provides more detail than Coles’s drawing but includes virtually the same elements. The most recent survey, by the Scottish Royal Commission, depicts all those features, but also identified an early field boundary which cut across the edge of the enclosure before it was truncated by the field wall (RCAHMS 2007, fig. 5.19). It was accompanied by a hollowed trackway leading uphill towards a quarry. By this stage the inner edge of the ditch on the north side of the monument seems to have been disturbed. A large granite slab in the interior may have been associated with a feature encountered in Dalrymple’s excavation (Stone B).

  Figure 5.2. A reconstruction of the original monument at Tuach, drawn from earlier surveys. Information from Bradley 2011.

  The monument is located half way down a southwest-facing slope and commands a view across the Tuach Burn towards the flank of the Midmill Neolithic long cairn (Fig. 5.3). Viewed from further downhill, it is not particularly conspicuous, but this may because the earthwork is concealed by a field wall (Fig. 5.4). From further up the slope it is easy to look into the interior which resembles a secluded arena.

  The results of Dalrymple’s excavation were never published and what little is known comes from his report on Broomend of Crichie (Dalrymple 1884) or from Stuart’s account (1856, xx–xxi); the same text appears in Alexander Watt�
�s History of Kintore, which came out nine years later (Watt 1865, 151–53). Fred Coles (1901) also published an account, but this differs in some details from the earlier versions. He locates the findspot of the urn described below as Urn 3 as being close to the stone at the NNE of the circle, whereas Stuart’s account has it as near the NNW stone; similarly, Coles claims that Urn 3 was associated with a single fragment of burnt bronze, whereas Stuart states that two fragments of burnt bronze were present. Given that Stuart was writing much closer to the time of the excavation, his version should be regarded as the more reliable.

  According to Stuart, Dalrymple found nine graves containing cremated human remains, six of them located in pits against the inner edges of the monoliths; there may have been a seventh where bones were found in a rabbit burrow. As discussed below, three of these graves were associated with cinerary urns, of which at least two (Urns 1 and 2 below) are definitely of Cordoned type. All contained cremated human remains and had been buried in an inverted position and covered with a stone slab; at least one (Urn 1, and possibly also Urn 2) rested on a second stone slab. According to Stuart’s account, Urns 1 and 3 were found close to each other beside the stone at the NNW of the circle, while Urn 2 was found near the stone at the E of the circle. (Coles’s report has Urns 1 and 2 beside each other.) All three urns are likely to have contained a copper alloy object: some of the calcined bones in Urn 1, like those in Urn 3, had been stained turquoise from contact with a copper-bearing object, while Urn 2 produced a small fragment of burnt bronze, ‘about an inch square’ (Coles 1901, 194), whose current whereabouts are unknown, and Urn 3 produced two fragments of a burnt bronze object (NMS X.EP 24), described below. In 2013, osteological identification of the remains from Urns 1 and 3 by Cecilia Medina-Pettersson, reported on below, revealed that Urn 1 had contained the remains of an individual aged 18–19, of indeterminate sex (although the small size and delicate appearance of a mandible fragment suggests that the individual may have been female), while Urn 3 had contained a younger person, aged 12–18, of indeterminate sex. (There may also have been a second individual of the same age.) The cremated remains associated with Urn 2 were not acquired by NMAS, and it is quite likely that those from Urn 3 that were acquired by the Museum represent only a small portion of the remains originally found. Medina-Pettersson’s work also revealed the presence of a calcined bone toggle of unusual form in Urn 1, plus a fragment of calcined animal longbone and an unburnt tooth, probably of a sheep; the tooth is clearly intrusive. Radiocarbon dating of single fragments of cremated bone from Urns 1 and 3 in 2014 for NMS revealed that the individual in Urn 1 dates to 3406±38 BP (SUERC-56457, 1873–1617 cal BC at 95.4% probability), while the occupant of Urn 3 dates to 3393±38 BP (SUERC-56458, 1870–1566 cal BC at 95.4% probability).