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ON SOME ANTIC^UITIES
IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF
DUNECHT HOUSE ABERDEENSHIRE
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
C. F. CLAY, Manager
LONDON : FETTER LANE, B.C. 4
NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO.
BOM HA V \
CALCflTA MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
MADRAS
TORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO. OF
CANADA, Ltu. TOKYO: MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
ALL RIGHTS RRSKRVRD
ON SOME ANTIQUITIES
IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF
DUNECHT HOUSE ABERDEENSHIRE
BY ^
THE RIGHT REV. G.' F. BROWNE
D.D. (C. & O.), D.C.L., LL.D., F.S.A., Hon. F.S.A.Scot.
Honorary Fellow of the British Academy
Formerly Disney Professor of Art and Archaeology in the University of Cambridge,
Bishop of Stepney, and Bishop of Bristol
CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1921
^^^^
V^J^
Br THE SjIME JUTHOR
The Cross-shaftJ of Bcwcastle and Ruthwell. Recollections of a Bishop. King Alfred's Books. The Life and Writings of the \'cncrable Bede. The Christian Church in these Islands before Augustine. Augustine and his Comp-mions. The Conversion of the Heptarchy. Theodore and Wilfrith. St Aldhclm of Malmcsbury. Alcuin of York. Boniface of Crcditon. Importance of Women in Anglo-S.txon times, the Cultus of St Peter and St Paul, &c. Church and State in English Histor)'. Off the Mill, Holiday Essays. Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland.
Q c^ ^ U 3 3.
TO
THE BRIGHTNESS OF FRIENDSHIP
AT
DUNECHT HOUSE
PREFACE
IN the autumn of 19 19 some of the guests of Lady Cowdray at Dunecht House, on her Scottish estate of Dunecht, found marked on a large-scale Ordnance Map a Stone Circle, about 3 miles off in a direct line, quite near a main road, and about a mile further on another Stone Circle, also quite near a road. A car was called for, and Lord Cowdray and two friends, one of them an engineer, the other a person devoted to archaeology, went to look for the circles. They found the first circle in a small wood of fir trees. The archaeologist declared the principal feature of the circle to be unique in his experience, while mentioning the fact that he had never studied rude stone monuments which had neither patterns nor inscriptions to give them human interest. They went on to the next circle, and found the same apparently unique feature. Later on, they went to yet another Stone Circle marked on the map, and again found the apparently unique feature. Only the first circle was complete. The second circle had lost several of its stones. The third had lost more, but two or three of them were lying down in situ. In the autumn of 1920 Lady Cowdray and the writer visited and measured a large number of circles, unfortunately in terrible weather for the most part.
It was known to the archaeologist that there were ogam inscriptions in the district, two of them being among the most important in Caledonia ; and that within an easy motor drive there was a minuscule inscription of six lines of which no satisfactory explanation had been given. This inscription they had visited in a previous year.
Further, the quick eye of the hostess of Dunecht had caught sight of some curious sculptures on a stone by the road-side on the way to the minus- cule inscription ; and other like stones in the neighbourhood had been shewn in Stuart's two volumes of Sculptured Stones of Scotland.
The suggestion was then made that for the sake of visitors at Dunecht a sort of guide book should be prepared, giving some simple description of the several objects and their meaning and uses.
Of course the thing grew, grew beyond all original ideas of what it should be. As will be seen by any one who is good enough to glance at it, a good deal of investigation and enquiry has been involved, and the enquiry has now and then led towards scientific matters. But the book does not profess to be scientific, and has no sort of claim to be conclusive or positive or exhaustive or didactive. It is meant to quicken interest in some of the many interesting
B.D A. j,
viii Preface
objects which are still to be found between Dee and Don ; to quicken interest is to effect an insurance against neglect or destruction. It is not meant for the experts on any of the many points touched ; but the writer has done his best to avoid misleading his reader, even when he has ventured upon fields where experts will not tread. It is the work of one who knows just enough about it to know how little he knows. Unfortunately on one point of great importance in dealing with old stones, namely petrology, he knows nothing at all. How great a loss this is, both to the interest in the stone circles and to the reputa- tion of their prehistoric builders for skill and knowledge, is pointed out in the course of the book.
The largest Plates are almost all of them from photographs specially taken by the local photographer Mr R. Benzie of Dunecht. The half-size Plates are almost all of them from photographs presented by Mr James Ritchie of Hawthorn Cottage, Port Elphinstone, Inverurie, who has given learned help in all directions for which the writer is deeply grateful. His best thanks are due also, and are here tendered, to the authorities of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, for allowing him to make use of their articles on several of the stone circles of Aberdeenshire, and for putting at his disposal plans of circles from their Proceedings, and their block of the Maiden Stone, Plate LVI. The writer has been advised on Gaelic points by Dr Sinton of Dores Manse, Inverness, and has received valuable help of many kinds from many others ; to some of whom his thanks are expressed in the text. It will be obvious to the reader that Sir Norman Lockyer's investigations and theories have added greatly to the interest of the Aberdeenshire circles. The writer has quoted largely and gratefully from his important volume on Stonehenge and other stone monuments, in the second edition of which the Aberdeenshire stone circles are dealt with. But earnest gratitude does not include the accept- ance of a range of dates from 2000 B.C. to 1300 B.C. for fourteen of the circles dealt with, as shewn on page 33, depending as it does upon the supposition that fourteen great recumbent stones lie exactly in the line in which they did lie, when first placed where they now are, at the dates named. Not that the dates are in themselves even improbable. It will be seen in the concluding chapter that elaborate investigations are leading to a claim that the astronomer- priests in this country had registration-marks on their stones which enabled them to predict eclipses from 2250 b.c. to 1000 B.C.
G. F. BROWNE.
2 Campden House Road, London, W. 8. 22 June 1 92 1.
PAGE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Characteristic antiquities of this district of Aberdeenshire. — Circles, ogams, sculptures. — Uniqueness of the Circles. — Druids' Temples. — Importance of druidism. — The Magic Art. — Julius Caesar's description of the Druids. — Human sacrifices. — Comparison with Welsh and Irish Druids. — The elder Pliny's account — King Alfred's Druids. — Accounts by Tacitus. — Human sacrifice by Rhadagaisus. — By the Aztecs. — Zoroastrianism , i
CHAPTER II
Druidism the religion of a very early race in Caledonia. — Columba's contest with the Pictish Druids. — An altar essential in a Druids' Temple. — Old Testament illustrations. — Other Oriental illustrations. — The worship of stones as gods. — Meteoric stones. — Two main elements in our early heathenism. — The one Aryan, the other pre-Aryan. — The pre-Aryan Magic Art. — Christian use of pagan religious sites. — Cessation of human sacrifice. — Altars still necessary. — Continuity of religious worship at "the stones." — Earnestness of pagan worship. — Worship of gods of nature a preparation for the worship of God. — The Lord, our God. — Meaning of "religion," "pagan," "heathen," "super- stition."— Survival of the black art .......... 12
CHAPTER III
Varieties of stone circles. — The Recumbent Stone and Flankers. — The magic circle. — The south-west position. — Facing the north-east. — Sunrise and star-rise. — The magician's announcement of the passage of time by day. — By night. — The Candle Hill stones. — The Calendar. — Lunations. — The daily change of position of sunrise. — The sun and the stars in oriental climes. — Native use of the stars as clocks. — Accuracy of early astronomers. — Method and purposes of marking the point of rise of a special star. — Effect and reason of change of position of star-rise. — Egyptian and Greek star-rise temples. — Was the rise and development of stone worship due to one race of men, or common to many? — St Marnan's Chair. — .^ throned deity 22
CHAPTER IV
Stellar and solar circles. — Azimuth and Declination. — List of stellar circles with sup- posed dates. — The transport of heavy stones. — The sacred circle. — Places of assembly. — Places of incineration. — Astronomical observatories. — Denderah 3100 b.c. — Britain 2300 B.C. — Early clocks, the clepsydra. — The sun dial. — Solstitial circles. — May Year circles. — Abnormal alignments. — Beltane. — The farmer's year. — New Year's Day. — Beltane celebrations. — Eggs and egg similes. — Mystery of the circles.^Are the stones other than the Recumbent Stone and Flankers set in a fixed order? — Test applied at three of the circles 32
Contents
CHAPTER V
PAGE
Origin of the name Echt. — Description of the fortifications. — The name Barmekyn. — Barbicans. — Barbacanes at Tripoh, Tyre, Pisa. — The Crusaders. — The gold coin of Islam. — Importance of the site. — Dr John Hill Burton. — The Catertuns. — The Norman Dykes. — Professor John Stuart. — Mr James Skene. — The Old Statistical Account. — Dr J. Mitchell. — Remarkable noises "on the toppe of the hill of Duneycht." — Gavin Douglas's Bramkin of Troy. — Paper by W. Douglas Simpson. — Fortifications of Benachie. — The parish of Echt. — Its Druidical Temples. — The House of Echt and Housedale. — Successive owners .......... 45
CHAPTER VI An early Report on Aberdeenshire Circles. — Lustration by water. — The Sin Hinny Circle. — Cup-marking. — Excavations at Sin Hinny. — The Midmar Circle. — The Seat of Justice. — Standing Stones as places of assembly. — The Circle at Castle Eraser. — Outlying monoliths ............. 55
CHAPTER VII
Petrology. — The shapes of stones. — Christian sites. — Malcolm Canmore's grants. — Confirmation by Hadrian IV. — Christian districts. — Ancient spellings. — Auquhorthies, Circle and Plan. — Loanhead of Daviot, Circle and Plan. — Newcraig, Daviot, Circle and cup-marked stone. — Kirkton of Bourtie, Circle. — South Ley Lodge, Circle. — Tomnagorn, Circle and Plan. — Taurobole. — Penetralia. — South Fornet, Circle. — Cothie Muir, Circle. — Keig Parish. — Auld Keig, Circle. — Stonehead, Circle. — Candle Hill Insch, Circle. — Inschfield, Circle. — Ardlair, Circle and excavations. — A May-year Circle. — Wanton Wells, Circle. — Rothiemay, Circle and cup-marked stone. — Auld Kirk o' Tough, Circle. — Whitehill, Circle. — Braehead of Leslie, recumbent stone. — Candle Hill Oyne, Circle, Plan, and excavations. — The Esthonians .... 66
CHAPTER VIII
Dyce, Circle. — Strichen, Circle. — Old Rayne, Circle. — An early lawsuit. — Balquhain, Circle, obelisk, cup-marks. — Louden Wood, Circle. — Aikey Brae, Circle. — Culsalmond, Circle.— Backhill, Circle.— The Devil's Ninepins.— The Clava Circles, Nairn.— The Druids' Temple Farm Circle, Inverness. — The Cullaird Circle, Torbreck ... 89
CHAPTER IX
The Ogam script. — Its origin. — Secret finger-speaking. — Not veryancient. — The Aboyne ogam. — Boustrophedon reading. — The Brandsbutt stone. — Its ornament. — Its read- ing.— The Brodie ogam. — The Scoonie ogam. — A Scots bishop trained in Ireland dying among the Picts. — The talkativeness of the Irish and Brythonic Gael. — The silence of the Pict 102
CHAPTER X
( The Newton Stone) Supposed hopelessness of the inscriptions. — British Association at Cambridge 1862. — Earl of Aberdeen's letter on decay. — The Catanian inscription. — Third and sixth lines of minuscule are Greek.— The stone of St Wallach or Volocus. — His legend. — His Fair at Logie-Mar. — Coldstone. — His Bath etc. at Walakirk. — Beldorney and Insch.— Date of St Wallach. — The ogam inscription. — The other four lines of minuscules. — The Stone of King Aed or Aedh. — Burial at Inverurie 1 10
Contents xi
CHAPTER XI
PAGE
Remarkable figures incised on rude stones. — The Maiden Stone. — The Brandsbutt Stone. — Who were the Picts? — Herodotus and dog-men. — Jerome. — Sacrifice and cannibalism. — The Picts. — The name Pict. — Carvers. — Tatoo. — Among the Saxons. — Territory occupied by Picts. — Union with Scots. — Sculptures on dressed stones. — Figures transferred from tatoo. — The combination with the Christian Cross. — The several figures and symbols. — The Elephant. — The Crescent. — The Spectacles. — Origin of the three symbols. — The Pitfour Stone. — The Centaurs. — The sacred tree. — The Serpents. — Possible dates. — The Earl of Southesk's theory. — Possible origin of the combination of Christian and pagan religious symbols . . . . .125
CHAPTER XII
Topographical distribution of Pictish sculptured stones. — Rude stones and dressed stones. — The number between Dee and Don. — Distribution of the main Pictish symbols on rude and on dressed stones. — Description of several rude stones with sculpture. — Number of objects incised. — Description of six dressed stones with sculp- tures.— Guinevere's Stone. — The Maiden Stone. — The sculptures remain unique and mysterious. — The Craigmyle Stone . . .141
CHAPTER XIII
The Druids and the stars. — Charts of stars. — Knowledge of stars by savage races. — The Pleiades. — Nilsson's Primitive Time-Keepiitg. — Modern ignorance of the stars. — Instruction in the stars among savages. — The Picts likely to make charts on stone. — Their circles were astronomical. — The Dunecht Observatory. — The Sin Hinny con- stellations.— Unmistakable. — The Rothiemay Stone. — A chart of bright stars. — The names of some. — The inversion of the area of stars. — Druids' star schools. — Scandinavian cup-markings. — Many constellations recognisable. — The name-animal on stone instead of a group of cups. — Mr Mann's theories of cup-marks as scientific astronomical registrations, apart from possible exceptional cases of star-charts. — Cup-marks in the Channel Islands . . . . . . . . . -iSS
Index 167
LIST OF PLATES
I. Radial plans of three Circles.
II. The Barmekyn of Echt from above,
III. The Barmekyn of Echt from below.
IV. Pen drawings of Recumbent Stones and Flankers. V. Wester Echt. Two Stones and Flanker.
Nether Corskie Flankers. VI. The Sin Hinny Circle.
The Seat of Justice, Midmar. The Bass of Inverurie. VII. Sin Hinny, Recumbent Stone and Flankers. VIII. Sin Hinny, Cup markings. IX. Midmar, Recumbent Stone and Flankers. X. The Midmar Circle.
XI. Castle Eraser, Recumbent Stone and Flankers. XII. Auquhorthies, Recumbent Stone, Flankers, and Props.
XIII. Loanhead, Daviot, Recumbent Stone and Flankers.
XIV. Loanhead, Daviot, double Recumbent Stone.
XV. Newcraig, Daviot, Recumbent Stone and Flankers. XVI. Newcraig, Cup-marked Stone.
XVII. Kirkton of Bourtie, Recumbent Stone and Flankers. XVIII. South Ley Lodge, Recumbent Stone and Flankers. XIX. Tomnagorn, Recumbent Stone and Flanker. XX. South Fornet, Flankers.
XXI. Cothie Muir, Recumbent Stone and Flankers. XXII. Auld Keig, Recumbent Stone and Flankers.
XXIII. Stonehead, Recumbent Stone and Flankers.
XXIV. Candle Hill, Insch, Recumbent Stone and fallen Flankers. XXV. Inschfield(NetherBoddam),RecumbentStoneandFlanker.
XXVI. Ardlair, Recumbent Stone, Flankers, and Props. XXVII. Wanton Wells, Insch, Recumbent Stone and Flanker. XXVIII. The Rothiemay Circle.
ROTHIEMAY, CUP MARKED RECUMBENT STONE.
XXIX. Auld Kirk o' Tough.
Whitehill Wood, Monymusk. Recumbent Stone and Flanker.
List of Plates xiii
XXX. Braehead of Leslie. Recumbent Stone.
Candle Hill, Oyne. Recumbent Stone and Flankers. XXXI. Dyce. Recumuent Stone and Flankers.
Stricken. Recumbent Stone and Flankers. XXXII. The Old Rayne Circle.
Old Rayne. Recumbent Stone and fallen Flankers. The Dyce Circle.
XXXIII. The Cothie Muir Circle.
The Balquhain Circle and Obelisk. Balquhain. Recumbent Stone and Flankers.
XXXIV. Standing Stones of Echt.
Aikey Brae. Recumbent Stone and Flankers. Louden Wood. Recumbent Stone and Flankers. XXXV. Druids' Farm Monolith, Inverness.
Drosten, Meigle, Clonmacnois. The Aed Chronicle. XXXVI. Clava Monolith.
XXXVII. Druid.s' Temple Farm Circle, Inverness. XXXVIII. Druids' Temple Farm Circle, Inverness. XXXIX. The Cullaird Circle, Torbreck, Inverness. XL. The Newton Stones.
The Ogam script. The Newton inscriptions. The Aboyne Ogams ; The Scoonie Ogams. XLI. The Aboyne Stone.
The Brandsbutt Stone. XLI I. The Newton Ogams.
The Newton Minuscules. XLIII. The Cataman Inscription.
The Conyng Hillock, Inverurie. XLIV. Drimmies Farm. Tillytarmont, Rothiemay. XLV. Dyce, in the Old Church (TWO). The Crow Stone, Rhynie. XLVI. Kintore Church Yard (Back and Front). XLVII. Logie Elphinstone (two). XLVIII. Logie Elphinstone. Inverurie Churchyard. XLIX. Inverurie Churchyard (two).
L. Rhynie Churchyard. Newton of Mounie. LI. Broomend of Crichie. Clatt Churchyard. LI I. St WoLOCK's Stone, Logie Coldstone. Tillypronie. LI 1 1. ToFTHiLLS, Clatt. On the lawn, Dunecht. LIV. Glammis. Aberlemno. Eassie. LV. RossiE, Inchture. Meigle (two).
XIV
List of Plates
LVI. The Maiden Stone.
LVII. Legionary Tablets.
LVI 1 1. Legionary Tablets.
LIX. The Craigmyle Stone.
LX. The Rothiemay Stone.
LXI. The Rothiemay Stars.
LXII. Scandinavian Stars.
LXIII. The Northern Heavens.
FIGURES IN THE TEXT
Wester Echt from an old drawing Ground Plan, Auquhorthies .
„ „ LOANHEAD DAVIOT .
„ „ TOMNAGORN
„ Hatton OF Ardoyne
SI
69 71
74 86
CHAPTER I
Characteristic antiquities of this district of Aberdeenshire. — Circles, ogams, sculptures. — Unique- ness of the Circles. — Druids' Temples. — Importance of druidism. — The Magic Art. — Julius Cxsar's description of the Druids. — Human sacrifices. — Comparison with Welsh and Irish Druids. — The elder Pliny's account. — King Alfred's Druids. — Accounts by Tacitus. — Human sacrifice by Rhadagaisus. — By the Aztecs. — Zoroastrianism.
The district of Aberdeenshire in which the great hill fort of Echt is situ- ated has three special characteristics, each of which is redolent of antiquity. They are, (i) the presence of a large number of stone circles unique in type; (2) the presence of a number of examples of so-called Pictish sculptures on rude stones, apparently casual stones though possibly boundary or memorial stones; (3) the presence of two of the most important of the few ogam inscrip- tions found in Caledonia, and a third of less importance perhaps but not of less interest. In a class entirely by itself, quite unique, is the minuscule inscription which is found in connection with the longest of the ogam inscriptions, on a great stone now in the grounds of the Gordons of Newton by Insch.
The Aberdeenshire stone circles will occupy by far the largest part of our space. We have described them as unique, because, so far as we are informed, no one as yet has found and published any example elsewhere of a striking feature common to all of them. This is, a great Recumbent Stone, lying tangentially on the circumference of the circle, weighing many tons; with two high pillar stones standing on the circumference of the circle one at each end of the Recumbent Stone, as Flankers or supporters ; not as props, not of necessity even in contact with the ends of the Recumbent Stone. It is evident, on the face of it, that this curious and striking feature presents a series of problems of great interest, and presumably of at least considerable importance. What race of men set them up ? Where did they learn the plan ? What was their purpose ? How did they use the stones, when they had set them up ? What sort of date can we assign to them ? How did they fall into disuse ? The sight of them tends to set the archaeologist imagination running riot.
It is natural to ask the question, why should there be this curious difference between the stone circles of this one district of Aberdeenshire and the circles of other parts of Pictish Caledonia?
One answer is, that there are other examples of curious differences in regard to the use and arrangement of rude stones in districts bordering upon one another. Thus the late Dr Tristram, in his Land of Moab, pages 300-302, speaks of "the three classes of primaeval monuments in Moab," the stone circles, the dolmens, and the cairns. They all exist, he says, in great abundance.
B. D. A. I
2 Dunecht Antiquities
They exist in three different parts of the country, but never side by side. The cairns are exclusively in the east, on the spurs of the Arabian range; the stone circles south of the Callirrhoe; the dolmens north of that valley. His surmise is that this fact may indicate three neighbouring tribes, co-existent in the pre- historic period, each with different funeral or religious customs.
We find a curious parallel to this in Devon and Cornwall. Stone rows, called avenues, are common on Dartmoor and almost unknown in Cornwall. Cromlechs are common in West Cornwall and only one genuine example is mentioned on Dartmoor.
Similarly it is said that in the Morbihan while stone rows and cromlechs are common, and there are stone circles in connection with stone rows, circles independent of stone rows are all but unknown there.
But while that is so, the difference with which we are concerned is deeper and more subtle. It is a racial— or rather a tribal — difference, and that in regard to deep-seated feelings and views of the manner of approaching the gods of nature. The Aberdonians might fairly say that their predecessors, if not in blood at least in locality, were religious — or superstitious — beyond other Picts. Looked at more closely, we may say that the traditional division of Pictland into seven provinces, and the actual differences in the stone records of religious worship in adjoining parts of the same province, indicate the inherence in the race of disruptive tendencies, tendencies of isolation, of having no superiors, indeed of having no equals. This is shewn perhaps in its clearest and most recent development, the clan jealousies of the Highlanders, which came to a head in comparatively modern history when the ancient race of the Caledonian kings died out, and shewed itself fatally when their immediate descendants ceased to reign over North Britain and South Britain combined.
The Roman grammarian Festus, writing on the Latin word sacellum about A.D. 150, tells us that sacella are small places, consecrated to gods, without a roof Hence the Latin dictionary gives as the meaning of sacellum (literally the diminutive of sacrum a shrine), " a small uncovered place consecrated to a divinity." That we may take to have been the original root idea of a stone circle ; with the correlative idea of the exclusion of hostile powers from the area, — "without are dogs." This does not at all imply that there was a con- tinuous fence all round. The twelve stones, or some such number, set on the circumference of the circle, were the adequate symbol of exclusion. Mystery can be stronger than a continuous wall of stones. Tacitus tells us {Germania, c. ix) that the Germans think it derogatory to the majesty of the heavenly beings to enclose them within walls.
We have said "the twelve stones or some such number." We find in the book of Joshua, chapter iv, two special mentions of twelve stones, as representing the twelve tribes of Israel. " Take you twelve men, out of every
Drtiidism 3
tribe a man, and command them, Take you out of the midst of Jordan, where the priests' feet stand firm, twelve stones upon your shoulders, and carry them over Jordan. And they carried them over to the place where they lodged and laid them down there; and those twelve stones did Joshua pitch in Gilgal.... And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of Jordan where the feet of the priests stood firm, and they are there to this day." Is it a mere coincidence that the only circles of those now under consideration which are complete, Sin Hinny and Auchorthies, have twelve stones each ?
One result of rather careful enquiry on the spot and in such records as are available stands out clearly. It is impossible to laugh at traditions of Druids and Druidism, as some learned folk have been accustomed to laugh. As we shall see when we come to descriptions of the circles, the regular name for the circles of Aberdeenshire, recurring in parish after parish, was " Druids' Temples," in the great collection of parochial records and descriptions known as the Old Statistical Account of Scotland, published in and about 1794. It is out of the question to imagine that some one had set to work to invent the idea of " Druids' Temples," and had persuaded the common folk to create in a whole large district a new name for a very old and very prominent feature in their everyday life, which certainly had an old name of some kind among them. And this remark by no means applies only to the district under con- sideration. A short drive out of Inverness, the spot on which Broichan the arch-druid of the Pictish king Brude, and Saint Columba the arch-saint of the Lord and Saviour, fought out their stand-up fight, brings you to Glendruid. If you push on, you come to Druids' Temple Farm, and in a wood near by you find the Temple, three concentric rings of stones, respectively 12 ft, 43 ft., and -]"] ft. in circumference. Not very far from that, about a mile from Ness Castle and near Cullaird, there is a curious little " Druids' Temple " of nine stones, about 22 ft. in diameter, with two large stones 6 ft. apart looking very like the Flankers of our Aberdeenshire Recumbent Stone but with no surviving indication of the presence of such a stone. At Clava, on the Nairn, there is a large group of Druids' Temples. Thus the designation " Druids' Temple " in the land of the northern Picts of Caledonia is far too general to have been a comparatively late invention. We must take it that the inhabitants have through the ages retained the true tradition that these were the sacred places of worship when Druidism, or art magic, was the national religion. It is not easy to imagine a later origin for this long series of " Temples." So long ago as 1692, Dr Gordon of Aberdeen wrote that the general tradition throughout the district was that they were used as places of worship in heathen times. As we shall see, " heathen worship " in those districts certainly meant Druidism, or by its other name the practice of magical art, "Druid" and "magician" being convertible terms.
4 DiDiecht Autiqmties '■
We shall make a very great mistake if we ridicule or under-rate the power of the pagan priests whom our Christiafi predecessors found everywhere in possession. Classical mythology treats the gods of Greece and Rome as intensely important beings; and their priests were dominant. We must assign a like position to the gods and the priests of our pagan predecessors. When Apollo was consulted in Diocletian's presence (about a.d. 290), an answer w^as given in a hollow voice, not by the priest but by Apollo himself, that the oracles were restrained from answering truly ; and the priests said this pointed to the Christians. And when the entrails of victims were examined in augury on another of Diocletian's expeditions, and found not to present the wonted marks, the chief soothsayer declared that the presence of Christians caused the failure. Just such scenes were enacted, with at least as much of tragic earnest- ness, when Patrick worsted the Druid Lochra in the hall of Tara, or when Columba baffled the devices of Broichan, the arch-druid of Brude the Pictish king.
We have a very curious and instructive use of the word drui in a prayer attributed to Columba at a critical turning-point of his life. " J/y drui," he is made to say in a very early account of his doings on a great occasion, "My drui is the Son of God." He evidently regarded the drui diS meaning one that worked wonders. It is yet another argument that the system of druidism was in itself not only the development of astronomy and natural philosophy, but also a preparation for the acceptance of the loftiest idea of the one Supreme Almighty God.
It seems to be practically impossible to resist the conviction that a sacri- ficial altar was a main part oi the religious worship of our pagan predecessors in this island. Nor can it be doubted that human sacrifices were the sacrifices most highly regarded by them. Nor again can it be doubted that human sacrifices were frequent. If a man felt seriously ill, or found himself in sudden danger in war, the recognised course of procedure was to sacrifice a human being, or if that could not be conveniently eftected, to vow that a human sacrifice should be offered as soon as it could be arranged. Criminals were the natural victims ; but if such could not be had, an innocent victim must be pro- •cured. Not only was this true of our predecessors in this island, but it was specially true of them. Ca?sar, writing a generation before the birth of Christ, tells us that any one who wished really to study the magic art with its human sacrifices went to Britain to study it. The elder Pliny, writing two generations after the birth of Christ, tells us that the people of Britain carried the magic art and its human sacrifices so far and with so great ceremonial, that it mii^ht have been supposed that the Britons had taught its practice to the Persians, though it was well known that the Persians learned it from Zoroaster in prehistoric times. Caesar and Pliny call the priests of these magic arts and sacrifices Druids.
Driiidism 5
To shew the full force of what these two very careful observers and recorders say, it will be well to give the whole of their record, including that which affects our special point, the practice of human sacrifice'.
Julius Cresar, de Bcllo Gallico, vi. 13, 14, 15.
Throughout Gaul there are two classes of persons of definite account and dignity.... One consists of Druids, the other of Knights.
The Druids are concerned with divine worship, the due performance of public and private sacrifices, and the interpretation of reh'gious matters ; a great number of young men gather about them for the sake of instruction and hold them in great honour. They decide in almost all disputes, public and private. If any crime has been committed, if murder has been done (caedes facta), if there is any dispute about succession or boundaries, they decide it. They determine rewards and penalties. If any individual person, or any bod\' of people, will not abide by their decision, they interdict them from sacrifices : this is their heaviest penalty. Those who are under interdict are counted among the impious and profane. All men avoid them, flee their presence and discourse, lest they get harm from their contact. Neither justice nor honour is open to them.
Among the druids one is chief, who has the highest authority among them. At his death, if any be pre-eminent he succeeds. If there are several with equal claim, they strive for the position as chief, appealing to the votes of the druids, sometimes resorting to armed force.
At a certain time of the year the druids meet in the territory of the Carnutes, which is reckoned to be the centre of the whole of Gaul, and hold session in a con- secrated spot. Thither assemble from all sides all that have disputes, and they abide by the decisions and judgments of the druids.
It is believed that their discipline was found in Britain and brought thence into Gaul, and to this day those who wish to go more fully into the matter for the most part go to Britain for information.
It is the custom of the druids to abstain from war, and they do not pay war-taxes {tributa) as others do. They are exempt from military service and all public duties. Tempted by these advantages, many young men join them of their own accord to receive their training, many are sent by parents and relatives. They are said to learn a great number of verses in their schools, and some are said to remain under instruction for twenty years. It is a duty not to commit to writing the things that are taught, though in most other matters, and in their public and private accounts {rationibus), they make use of Greek letters.
This rule of not committing their teaching to writing I think they have instituted for two reasons. They do not wi.sh that their teaching should become common property, and they do not wish the learners to rely upon writing and so neglect the cultivation of the memory. It does in fact usually happen that the assistance of writing tends to relax the attention of the student and the action of the memory.
The main doctrine which they seek to teach is that souls do not die, but after death
' We quote the passages which include Britain in their reference. Diodorus tells of the horrid cruelty and the large scale of human sacrifice among the Gauls by the Saronidae (Chaldaeans). Strabo gives further detail. Suetonius tells of horrid cruelties. Dion Chrysostom tells that the druid priests exercised royal authority and the Celtic kings were their servants.
6 Dunecht Antiquities
pass from one to another. This belief they hold to be the greatest incentive to valour, as the fear of death is thereby cast aside.
Besides this, they have many discussions touching the stars and their motion, the size of the universe and of the earth, the nature of things, the force and power of the immortal gods ; and these they hand on to the young men.
The whole nature of the Gauls is greatly devoted to religious observances. On this account, those who are smitten with grievous maladies or are engaged in the perils of battle, either offer human sacrifices, homines immolant, or vow that they will do so. They employ the druids as the ministers of these sacrifices, believing that unless for a man's life a man's life be paid, the majesty of the immortal gods may not be appeased ; and like sacrifices of a public character are performed. Others have simulacra of immense size, whose members, woven with twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame. They believe that the execution of those who have been caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is more pleasing to the immortal gods ; but when the supply of malefactors fails, they resort to the sacrifice of the innocent,
Julius Caesar's account of the functions of the druids does not agree with what we know of the druids of Ireland and the druids of Wales. He tells us that there were only two classes of persons that really counted, druids and knights. The druids conducted public worship and public and private sacrifices, and interpreted religious matters. But that was very far from being their one function. They decided in almost all disputes, public and private. We cannot say whether Caesar meant that they decided all disputes except those which went to the arbitration of war, or whether he was thinking of the rules of classical times, where the head of the state could settle cases which might arise, with a few special e.xceptions which went before a general council. On the whole the former of those two explanations seems the more probable. The penalty of disobedience to the decision of the druids was excommunication, " interdiction from sacrifices," a very telling idea, evidencing the primary importance of sacrifices in their religion.
Further, they were the repositories of bardic knowledge. Great numbers of verses were taught in their schools. These verses must not be committed to writing. They were so numerous that the full teaching sometimes occupied twenty years.
We might have supposed that the young men who desired not to rank among the warrior class and resorted to this instruction as an e.xemption from war tax and war service, would form a separate class. But it seems quite clear from Caesar's account that this was not so. There was no such separate class. They all counted as druids.
This would appear not to have been the case in Wales and in Ireland. In Ireland there were druid priests and there were judges, brehons, as a separate class. In Wales there were druid priests and there were bards, apparently as a separate class.
Dniidisin 7
On these points we may quote a passage from Mr J. W. Willis Bund's The Celtic Church in IVa/es^;
"One instance of the difference between Wales and Ireland will be seen in the position of the Druids and Bards in Wales, as compared with the Druids and Brehons in Ireland, after the establishment of Christianity. In both Ireland and Wales the Druid and Brehon, or Druid and Bard, lost part of the power which the Christian priest acquired. But the Welsh Druid never took the place that the Irish Druid did after the establish- ment of Christianity. In Ireland, both Druid and Brehon continued for some time to exercise their restricted rights; the Brehon lingered on to a comparatively modern date. But in Wales, while the Bards continued, the Druid dropped at once into the position of a second rate magician, and gradually lost all power and influence."
Pliny's statement is contained in the 30th book of his Natural History, where he writes of religion and its connections with the art of medicine, with science, with magic. He appears to be chiefly concerned with magic. This art he says undoubtedly arose in Persia, derived from Zoroaster. The Roman historian Orosius says {King Alfred's Books, Orosius, page 96) that Ninus the king of Assyria began to reign one thousand three hundred years before the building of Rome, that is, 2053 years before Christ. Clinton's calculations give the date as 2182 b.c. As one of the great events of the reign of Ninus, Orosius relates that he slew Zoroaster the king of the Bactrians, who was reported to be the first discoverer of the magic art". It may seem unnecessary to say that the historic Zoroaster is placed some fifteen or sixteen hundred years later, about the time of the prophet Daniel. We return to this on page 1 1.
In connection with our main contention regarding druidism, it is very interesting to find that King Alfred uses the Anglo-Saxon dry for sorcerer or magician. The y would be written in rune as a u enclosing an i. Thus the king uses the same word as drui, for druidh, to describe a magician. Later on in his " Orosius" the king uses mid dry -crcsf turn for "with sorceries."
Pliny proceeds to describe the spread of the art magic. He does not mention human sacrifices, but he suddenly names them as a matter of course, as if they were the pith and chief feature of the whole thing. ' At length, he says, in the 657th year of the City, the Senate made a decree " that there be no sacrifice of a man," ne homo immolaretur\ It — apparently the magical art including human sacrifice — held the Galliae also, and that to our own time. For the reign of Tiberius did away with their Druids and that class of sooth- sayers and medicine men. It crossed the sea also, and at the present time Britain celebrates it with astonishing zeal, with so great ceremonies that Britain
' London, D. Nutt, 1897, page 137. ' Magicae, ut ferunt, artis repertorem. Or. i. 4. 3.
8 DiDiccJit Antiquities
might seem to have taught it to the Persians. It is impossible to estimate how much is owed to the Romans, who destroyed the monstrous forms in which it was held a most religious act to slaughter men, and most salutary to be ordered.' These last words no doubt refer to Caesar's remarks on the " figures " in which men were enclosed for slaughter, and to the custom of ordering a human sacrifice if you didn't feel well or were greatly afraid.
Julius Cxsar himself, by the way, violated the decree nc homo i))n)iola)-etiir, for we are told in Dio that he ordered two men to be slaughtered on the Campus Martius, as a religious ceremony.
Pliny has referred to the action of Tiberius. We learn from Tacitus' that in the time of Tiberius, a.d. 15-3S, soothsayers and sorcerers had become a public danger. Libo Drusus, a member of an exalted family, w'as accused of encouraging Chaldaean soothsayers, the rites of the magicians, luxury, and lust. He put an end to himself. The Senate passed a decree for the expulsion of mathematicians (the astronomers and astrologers) and magicians from Italy. Two oi the number were put to death, Lucius Pituanius being cast down from the rock, Publius Marcius being put to death " in the ancient manner" by the consuls at the Esquiline gate on sound of trumpet. Some years later, an illus- trious man of great wealth was got rid of by a charge of magic arts ; he put himself to death.
The late Dean Liddell set out the passages from Greek and Latin writers which speak of human sacrifices', and argued that they did not prove "that human sacrifices were in use among the Romans, " " human sacrifices " meeming with him " innocent victims offered to appease the wrath of the gods." He took Pliny's statement that in 97 B.C. a decree was made by the Senate ne homo imtnolaretur to have reference to certain barbarous practices connected with the introduction of magic arts of foreign origin.
That explanation suits our general argument very well.
Of self-sacrifice among the Romans Suetonius (iv. 27) tells a quaint stor)-. The Emperor Caligula was a general favourite on his accession. He had a serious illness, and his friends oft'ered to expose their lives in the Arena for his recover)-, while others of them vowed their lives to the infernal deities in exchange for the Emperor's life. Caligula recovered ; and, being a stickler in such things, he compelled his friends to fulfil their vows.
Both in his Annals and in his Histories Tacitus* makes special mention of Druidae as the leaders of the people in war and in politics in Britain. The Roman governor Paulinus Suetonius, having had to deal in the east of Britain with an outraged British queen, had next to deal with very violent British women in the west. In each case the women were almost too much for him.
' Tacitus, Annals, ii. 37. ii. 32, xii. 59. ' Archnologia, xl. 242-256.
' Tacitus, Annals, xiv. 30, //is/, iv. 54.
DniiiUsni
9
Suetonius had found that the island Mona, which we English call by our own name Anglesey, was the resort of turbulent fugitives. He made prepara- tions for attacking it. Ships landed his foot soldiers ; his horsemen swam the straits. But Britons met them on the shore, excited to resistance by maenad women, Fury-like, rushing about among them with blazing torches, streaming hair, and vehement gestures and incantations, the Druidae, hands raised to heaven, uttering dire prayers. The Roman soldiery were arrested in their advance. The leader himself had to call upon them not to be afraid of a pack of women and fanatics. They nerved themselves to advance, bore down the resistance of the Britons, and burned them with their own torches. He did what he could to stamp out druidism, with its cruel superstitions, for its priests held it a sacred duty to offer sacrifice by pouring the blood of captives on their altars' and to seek omens from their gods on the entrails of men. This evidence of blood-stained druid altars must not be left out of our consideration. In the Histories we learn from Tacitus, who accompanied his father-in-law Agricola in his difficult task of governing Britain a.d. 78-84, a period which included the great invasion of Caledonia, that when news reached Britain of successes against Rome by various tribes, the Druidae, with their vain superstitions, chanted hymns of the coming time when the Transalpine peoples should possess the world. We find women druids in Ireland, the ban-dt-ui.
We find also that in a.u. TfjT) the Roman emperor Valens committed great excesses at Antioch under the plea of suppressing magic art. It may safely be said that Paganism put all its strength in its conflict with Christianity into the claim of mysterious power of divination and command of the processes of nature. The struggle for dominance between Columba and Broichan was in little the real struggle between Christianity and Paganism.
We must not pass without notice the difficulties attaching to the idea of magic and magician. But, equally, w^ must not dwell upon them. It has been said by a recent writer that the problem of the definition of magic constitutes a veritable storm-centre in the anthropological literature of the present day'. That — with which we venture to agree — is a fair indication of the difficulties to which we have referred.
The word Magic comes of course from the Magi of the Persians, and it has been taken to refer to the religion, learning, and occult practices, of the sect of Zoroaster. Hence the word was from the first used in an unfavourable sense in the various languages in which we find it, and this unfavourable sense of witchcraft it has never lost in European languages. Bacon endeavoured to attach to it, as its natural meaning, the force of natural science in practical operation ; and when in this present book we speak of magicians and medicine
' Thus the "altar" was not the "slaughter stone."
' R. R. Marett, in Hastings' Encyclopnedia of Religion and Ethics, under the heading Magic.
B. D. A. 2
lo Dunecht Antiquities
men, we are not really going beyond that idea, however much of imposture there may have been in their manner of working upon the ignorant minds of those who looked to them as their guides. A writer of the highest discretion and distinction' holding the view that the analogy between the magical and the scientific conception of the world is close, has developed the interesting summary that magic is next of kin to science but is a bastard sister. One of his humblest admirers is inclined to doubt the illegitimacy of origin, while allowing the fundamental differences between the sisters in their methods of operation. The further, and fascinating, question of the similarities and the dissimilarities of claim, as between the magician and the Christian priest, is clearly outside the modest aim of this book.
We have an appropriate example of the late continuance of human sacrifices in the History of Orosius against the Pagans. Orosius was writing of events in his own time and under his own observation in Rome. His Histoty ended with A.D. 41 7. He is telling of the two brother-kings of the Goths, and of the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410. We may note that about the time of the con- clusion of Orosius's History, Ninian was preparing his mission to that branch of the Southern Picts that was seated in the parts of Galloway ; and we are not aware of any former mission that should have put an end to the worst features of their old established discipline of sacrifices. The same Roman commander who had fought against Alaric was the commander who invaded Caledonia and fought against the Northern Picts as recorded by his companion the poet Claudian'. This is what Orosius wrote^ : —
Shortly afterwards, Alaric became a Christian. Rhadagaisus remained a heathen, and daily sacrificed to idols by slaying men ; and he was always most pleased if they were Romans.
A curious and instructive development of the practice and meaning of human sacrifice is to be found in the remarkable manuscript and pictorial histories of the Aztecs which form part of Lord Cowdray's Mexican treasures, and are now being catalogued and indexed by Mr T. A. Joyce at the British Museum. Mr Joyce's book on Mexico is well known, but should be much better known. His clear and full knowledge was so kindly put at the disposal of this present writer that a few main facts can be simply stated.
The Aztec development was very late, about 1400 A.r>. They were wandering hunters, and they came upon an agricultural people and took pos- session. They appear to have brought with them the cult of stellar deities; but the Sun God was the centre of their highly developed system of human sacrifice. The Sun God needed perpetual sacrifice of human heart and blood, to keep him strong enough to perform his daily labour of heating and fructifying the world.
' Sir J. G. Frazer. ^ See page izS.
' vii. 37. See my King Alfred's Books, 1920, page 129.
Druidism 1 1
Hence it came that war was with them only a factor in their rehgious rites, the perpetual sacrificial offerings of human blood and life. They fought, not to kill, though that would mean the shedding of human blood, the destroy- ing of human life, but to take prisoners, that the shedding of blood and the slaughtering might be a religious act, ceremonially performed by the priest. The victim was painted the proper death colours and tufted with bits of eagle down. He was laid on his back, stretched out on the Sacrificial Stone. Four priests held his feet and his hands. The chief priest gashed him across the chest with an obsidian knife, tore out his heart, and flung it and the life-blood on the ground.
On page 7 we have referred to the date of Zoroaster, and on page 9 to his supposed responsibility for the more evil of the occult practices of the magicians.
The recent studies of Dr Rendel Harris and Dr James Hope Moulton, both of Cambridge, have brought illumination upon the date and history of their religious hero Zarathushtra, whose name is classicalised into Zoroaster'. The tradition of mediaeval Persia gave his date as 660-583 u.c, about Daniel's time, but his era was probably some four or five centuries earlier. The most recent view is that he was the earliest religious teacher whose name is known to us among the Aryan-speaking peoples. As to his responsibility for the evil practices of black magic, the probability seems to be that he came as a reformer to a people holding the ancient nature-worship, whose gods were Sky and Earth, Sun and Moon, Fire, Rivers, Winds, and their priests were as the medicine-men and .sorcerers of the savages of New Guinea, except that in New Guinea they take no risks; they have two clans of sorcerers, the one to give rain and produce fruitful crops, the other to give poison and impose slow- working curses. In our view, when we deal with the worst features of the druids of Caesar and Pliny in this island of ours, whether the British or the Caledonian parts, we are dealing with pre-Aryan practices, naturally bound up with the nature-worship of savages in all ages, indigenous in savage lands, not needing importation from Persia or elsewhere. The magicians who presided over the horrid rites here were as far off" from the rites of Zoroastrianism with its ultimate triumph of the Good as they were from the spirit of the Three whose incessant study of the heavens and of the records of the ages enabled them by some means mysterious to us to offer gold and frankincense and myrrh at the cradle of the Infant Saviour.
' See Dr Moulton's Hibbert Lectures for 191 2 on Early Zoroastrianism, and his posthumous work The Treasure of the Magi, Oxford University Press.
CHAPTER II
Druidism the religion of a very early race in Caledonia. — Coluraba's contest with the Pictish Druids. — An altar essential in a Druids' Temple. — Old Testament illustrations. — Other Oriental illustrations. — The worship of stones as gods. — Meteoric stones. — Two main ele- ments in our early heathenism. — The one Aryan, the other pre-Aryan. — The pre-Aryan Magic Art. — Christian use of pagan religious sites. — Cessation of human sacrifice. — Altars still necessary. — Continuity of religious worship at "the stones." — Earnestness of pagan worship. — Worship of gods of nature a preparation for the worship of God. — The Lord, our God. — Meaning of " religion," " pagan," " heathen," " superstition." — Survival of the black art.
The greater part of the Britons with whom Caesar came in contact were comparatively recent immigrants from Belgic Gaul. His description, and Pliny's description, of the great ceremonial worship of the Druids in this island must be supposed to apply to the earlier races of occupation of the land, those who had not as yet been dispossessed by the later comers and driven off to further parts. There is every reason to suppose that Druidism was the form of worship among those mysterious people the Picts, with whom we shall have so much to do in our enquiry into the Antiquities of our special part of Aber- deenshire. We can carry the history of dominant Druidism among the Northern Picts down to the later part of the sixth century.
Adamnan, Abbot of lona, was the first cousin four times removed of his predecessor St Columba. He was the ninth Abbot, a.d. 679-704, Columba the first Abbot having held that ofifice from 593 to 597, in which year Augustine came to Kent.
In the first chapter of his Life of Columba Adamnan brings on to his canvas both Picts and Magi, that is, Druids. Columba had apparently come by sea to spend a few days among the Picts to the east of Inverness where he had established himself, and miraculously sailed back against a contrary wind to confound the magi.
On another occasion (i. ^sl) Columba's magnificent voice was used to defeat the Druids. His voice was so remarkable that hearers a thousand paces off could distinguish by the separate syllables what verse he was singing. We can practically locate the spot where the power of his voice defeated the Druids. The Saint and a few brethren were singing the evening praises of God outside the king's fortress, close to the fortress, and the Druids came upon them and made as much noise as they could, to prevent the Divine praise being heard by the gentile people. We may fairly place the Saint on the south of the Castle Hill, and bring the disturbing Druids from their neigh- bouring head-quarters among the noble stones of the Druids' Temple, still standing some two miles off. When the Saint found what they were doing, he
Pagan Worship 13
began to sing the forty-fifth Psalm, "My heart is inditing of a good matter"; and in a marvellous manner his voice was so lifted up in the air that it sounded like dreadful thunder, and the king and the people were stricken with intoler- able fear.
Adamnan has two long chapters on Columba's dealings with Broichan, the chief Druid, the foster-father of Brude the king reigning at Inverness. In each case the Saint had the better of the Druid, and in the end Brude was converted. According to Bede, it was this Brude king of the Picts who gave the island Hy to Columba. An Irish record, less early, makes the gift come from the king of the Dalriad Scots, which is locally more probable, but Dr Reeves maintained the other view, Brude having recently inflicted a severe check upon the king of the Dalriad Scots. We have to notice at a later period the continual strife between the eastern Picts and the western Scots who were called the Scots of Dalriada.
The strife between Columba and Broichan may serve to remind us that in our wonderful treasure-house of detailed records of Egypt in early times, in the books we call Genesis and Exodus, we have this very same picture of the strife between the servants of the true God and the servants of the false gods, with the eventual discomfiture of the false. The chief officers of Pharaoh's household, and later on Pharaoh himself, dreamed remarkable dreams. They had official interpreters of dreams, but they lost confidence in them by reason of their failure to interpret. Joseph had in charge the chief officers of the household, and finding them troubled by dreams he interpreted their dreams, and his interpretation of life to the one and death to the other came true. Pharaoh, much troubled in turn by a dream, sought interpretation from Joseph with such great success that he put it to his chief men, " Can we find such an one as this, in whom the spirit of God is.-*"; and he set him over the kingdom.
In course of time oppression came, and Moses arose. He demanded relief for his oppressed fellow-countrymen and it was denied. In the course of time, Pharaoh determined to put a stop to his importunity, and demanded as credentials that Moses should perform a miracle. Moses cast down his rod and it became a serpent. The magicians did the like, but Moses' serpent swallowed theirs. Moses turned the waters of the rivers and lakes into blood ; the sorcerers and magicians did the like. Moses brought forth frogs ; so did the magicians. And so it went on till Moses did that which, when once done, could not be done again. All the first born were slain. The magicians were completely beaten and Pharaoh gave in. The art magic of the pagan gods could not prevail against Jehovah, Israel's God.
We have noted the necessity of an altar in the places of worship of the Druids, and its difference from the slaughter stone, a difference which appears to be frequently overlooked by opponents of the "sacrificial stone" theory.
14 Dunecht Antiquities
It has been suggested that if the Aberdeenshire Recumbent Stones really had been intended for altars, more shapely stones would have been selected, and there would at least have been some signs of the removal of irregularities of surface. But here, as so often, the Old Testament comes to our help. In Exodus XX. 25 we read : — "And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone ; for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it." Further, the altar was to be a Recumbent Stone, the surface of which could be reached by a man standing on the ground (xx. 26).
It is tempting to suggest that the two supporters which in every case the Recumbent Stone has or has had, are the representatives of the sacred tree which stood by the Recumbent Sacrificial Stone in early Israel. It was rather the symbol of a tree than a tree itself. A tree could not always be found where it was wished to have an altar, and a pole was used, placed by the Recumbent Stone, to represent the sacred tree. When Deborah judged Israel and was the head priestess, she had a real sacred tree, a prominent tree.
The word which occurs and recurs in the Old Testament among idolatrous objects, the " groves," is a mistranslation of Asherah. The Asherah were sacred poles.
The Syrians and Phoenicians commonly erected such pillars in front of their temples. They stood for deity, and they are supposed to have been a feature of the phallic (sexual) worship of which there is more and more evidence in the ancient world. The Syrian god Melkart was represented by two such pillars in front of his temple at Tyre\ Before the temples at Paphos and Hierapolis there were two pillars. It has been suggested that Hiram set up Jachin (he shall establish) and Boaz (in it is strength) as an ornamental adjunct to the temple of Jehovah, because the pagan temples he had studied had such pairs of pillars in front of them.
When we adduce parallelisms between our surviving stone-circles and the paganism which preceded and survived alongside of Jehovah-worship, it is not at all necessary to imagine that our stone-circle ancestors were the far-off representatives of the stone- worship peoples of Palestine. It is quite likely that they were contemporaries, and that the world was a stone-worship world over vast areas of its surface. In other words, the outward expression of fear and love of the sun deities and the star deities and the nature deities took the same form in the mind of man in at least many of the habitable areas of the world ; and set, by transmigration of tribes, an example that was grasped at in regions where it had not been spontaneously developed. There must have been spaces set apart as sacred to the several deities. They must by some outward mark have been set apart, so that all could recognise them. The one perfect form and shape for such purpose was a circle. The one natural manner ' Herodotus, ii. 44. Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, under Boaz.
Pagan H^orship 15
of setting apart a circle was by setting stones on its circumference. Either at its centre, or much more probably at the point furthest from the place of entry, there must have been an altar stone.
Sir J. G. Frazer mentions a point which is illustrated by a local tradition connected with at least one stone circle ; it is "the place where the people used to pray to the stones." The idea, he says, of a stone tenanted by a god or a powerful spirit was not peculiar to ancient Israel. It has been shared in many lands. Arabs and Greeks worshipped stones. In the older time all the Greeks worshipped unwrought stones instead of images. In the market place of Pharae in Achaia there were thirty square stones to each of which the people gave the name of a god'. In the temple at Olmones in Boeotia the god was represented not by an image but in the old fashion by an unwrought stone. At Thespiae in Boeotia, Love was honoured above all gods, and Lysippus and Praxiteles wrought glorious images of the deity in bronze and marble ; but the people paid their devotions to an uncouth idol of the god in the shape of a rough stone^ On a hill in Radnorshire there are two standing stones, 6 feet high, called " the gods," and the farm is called in Welsh the gods-hill farm.
The worship of rude stones, as representing or containing a deity is supposed to have come from the fall of meteoric stones, which the ancients naturally regarded with deep wonder, and imagined to be representations of deities sent down from heaven to man.
Among the many remarkable facts we find recorded in the mine of rare information which we call the Acts of the Apostles, we have the town clerk of Ephesus reminding his fellow-citizens that every one knew their city to be " the temple-keeper of the great Artemis and of the heaven-sent " ; the image that had fallen from the gods, or from Jupiter, a stone of grotesque character. The worship paid to this heaven-sent stone had no doubt more to do with the worship of the oriental Astarte, Ashtoreth, the chief female divinity of the Phoenicians, than with a goddess of the Romans.
Is it permissible, in connection with the idea of stones with in-dwelling life or power of life, to wonder whither John Baptist took up his quarters in the wilderness at some well-known circle of great stones, and made reference to ancient tradition when he said, "God is able of these stones — de lapidibus isiis, iK Toiv \id<Dv TovToiv — ^to raise up children unto Abraham ".■* We may ask a like question at a much earlier time, when Jacob after his great vision took the stone and set it up as a pillar, and anointed it, and declared it to be " the house of God."
It has been suggested that the chance resemblance of a rough stone or a trunk of wood to a human being was the origin of sculpture and of idols. The late Sir Henry James made a picture of the stones of Stennis as a group of ' Pausanias, vii. 22. 4. - Pausanias, ix. 27. 1-3.
i6 Dimecht Antiquities
sailors in white duck trowsers, the trowsers being the light colour of the lower part of the stones after the removal of the soil that had gradually grown up around the bases of the stones.
Sir E. A. Wallis Budge has put on record' an opinion of the eminent Oriental scholar Dr Birch in connection with the religious beliefs of the various races of men of the East and of the West : — " He thought that each race in the world possessed beliefs peculiar to itself, and that, owing to differences in physical constitution and in mental characteristics and linguistic difficulties, no one race could ever be brought to understand thoroughly and completely the beliefs of the other." But this would not militate asfainst the idea that various races of men may develop the same outward manner of expressing their various beliefs. The varieties of mind are endless. The methods of giving outward expression to the varieties of mind are fairly numerous, but they are soon exhausted, and recurrence of method is necessary.
In his two remarkable volumes on the Lives of the Saints of Hibernia^ Dr Charles Plummer draws an illuminating distinction between two main elements in Celtic heathenism, and notes a far-reaching difference between their respective racial origins.
The two elements were, (i) a system of nature- worship with departmental gods, of whom the sun and fire god was the chief, and (2) a system of magic, or druidism. The former of these was a development of the religion which the Celts brought with them from the original home of the Aryans, wherever that may have been ; the latter was the religion of the pre- Aryans whom they found occupying the lands w^hich they invaded, and whom they largely absorbed. The literature shews that the latter element was the more permanent ; indeed in a sense it may be said never to have died out. The Christian teachers never took the line of denying the reality of its existence. It was gentile or diabolic knowledge, powerfully ranged against themselves.
In the Scandinavian world, the Finns, a pre-Aryan race, were the chief professors of magic, so that Finn and sorcerer are practically synonymous. The Irish race the Tuatha De Danann were said to have learned their magic arts in the north. They went to the northern islands of the world to learn druidism and gentilism and diabolic science, so that they were knowing in respect of every craft. The Irish went to Scotland (Alba) to learn the poetry so closely connected with druidism. Druids of Alba visited Ireland.
In the legends of the introduction of Christianity into Ireland, the druids meet us at ever)' turn, as the chief if not the only opponents of the new faith. Whether the druids were themselves of Celtic descent or not, druidism itself is now generally accepted as pre-Aryan, part of the great magical system of
' By Xik and Tigris, i. 49. John Murray, 1920.
* Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniat, Oxford, 1910, i. cxxxiii, clviii, etc.
Pagan IVorship 17
thought which spread westward from some Eastern centre, possibly Babylonia. The craft was frequently hereditary in our islands ; it was freely exercised by women. The bandrui (woman-druid) frequently appears.
The Irish lejjends of the introduction of Christianity are late, dating from a time when the dominance of Christianity was and had long been an accom- plished fact. If they had been earlier, we should no doubt have heard much more of the up-hill fight than we do hear, much more of the adoption by the new faith of places and details of the old.
We do not find evidence that the practice of human sacrifice was continued by the priests of the art magic down to St Columba's time. Adamnan, abbot of lona, of Columba's own family, who wrote the e.xceedingly valuable Life of his predecessor and relative, must have known of it if it had been so. He would certainly have given it a prominent place in his careful record of the testing strife between Columba and the arch-druid of the Pictish king seated at Inverness. King Aldfrith of Northumbria, who was educated in Ireland his mother's home and brought thence to succeed his step-brother, would certainly have made it known at Wearmouth and J arrow. Bede would certainly have made much of it in his lengthy account of Adamnan's visit to king Aldfrith in Bede's own time and of the contents of Adamnan's writings. Human sacrifice did not continue to exist, did not stand in the way of reconciliation between the old and the new, was not an element of difiiculty in the way of the Christian priest who took possession of the sacred place of the old faith. So far as a tradition of the black past survived, it would serve as a help to the priest when he taught the efficacy of the Saving Victim.
It is an interesting fact that we have in England a direct and general example of the continuity of sacredness attached to particular places of worship when the religion which had made them sacred was done away. Gregory, the Bishop of Rome who sent the first effective mission to our pagan ancestors, advised the destruction of the pagan temples. But almost immediately after, he wrote to the chief of his mission that where the temples were of a solid character he should retain them, consecrate them, and use them as Christian churches. His reason was, that the people were accustomed to go to those places for their pagan worship, and habit and custom would tend to bring them to the same places for the new worship. In the same spirit he advised that the old pagan seasons of festival should be retained at their appointed times, and converted into Christian festivals. It is a matter of common knowledge that our Christmas festivities of three generations ago were based in detail upon the old pagan practices. We still rejoice that the sun is coming back.
The disappearance of human sacrifices from the heathen worship, so far as it did occur, did not at all mean the disappearance of sacrificial shedding of blood. Animals and birds were sacrificed, and omens were taken. There were
B.D.A. 3
1 8 Dunecht Antiquities
the traditional sacrificial feasts. In Christian England a chief early difficulty was the determined continuance of feasting on the horse, the remnant of pagan sacrifice.
While the worshippers of nature shed blood to propitiate the more danger- ous forces of nature, they made floral offerings in token of their affection for and trust in the gentler powers of nature. For these, too, an altar was naturally required. From whatever point of view we look at the religious worship of the pagan world we have to postulate an altar, a sacrificial stone. Surely those of us who regard our own altar as the holiest stone of our stone rectangle ; who offer there the commemoration of the one great Sacrifice once offered ; who offer there our choicest floral offerings ; we should be the last to question the sacrificial character of the Aberdeenshire Recumbent Stones.
Of the continuity of religious worship at these dedicated spots, through all the developments of paganism and through the greatest development of all, from paganism to Christianity, there cannot really be any valid doubt. The continuity is somewhat obscured by the fact that the gaelic clachan, the ordinary name for a church, means "stones," and it is supposed that the kirk was so called because it was the one stone building in the neighbourhood. But local enquiries shew that in many parts the question "are you going to kirk ?" is put in the form " are you going to the stones ?," and this form we may regard as primaeval, ages before the Christian era. We are told in Ryland's History of Waterford, p. 263, that " the Irish expression for going to worship literally signifies going to a stone." In the district with which we are dealing, we have two of our circles called locally "the old kirk o' Keig," "the old kirk o' Tough." The Recumbent Stone and Flankers of one of these circles and parts of the other are shewn on Plates XXII and XXIX.
The pagan religions, based upon observed nature, were so satisfying to the natural man that they were — and are — eradicated with great difficulty and with very imperfect success. The need for careful propitiation of hostile elements was very deeply felt when the people in the woods were exposed to dangers from wild beasts by day as they sought their food and by night as they slept. Civilisation, with the practical disappearance of the dangers which haunted the primaeval man has driven out the idea of propitiating natural powers of evil, and almost equally the idea of winning the favour of natural powers of good. That is, the two main bases of paganism have disappeared, and man has ceased to be naturally religious in the old pagan sense where his religion was the practical safety to which he trusted.
And there were of course positive attractions in their ceremonies which appealed to them very strongly in their state of nature. Such were the inter- course of the sexes at some of their annual feasts, and the great excesses of eating and drinking.
i
Pagan Worship 19
But the worship of the gods of nature was a useful preparation for the worship of God the Creator of nature. We have dear hints in this direction at the most critical period of paganism, when it was first brought face to face with Christianity.
St Paul was at Lystra, in the great plain of Lycaonia, where there was a tradition, prettily used by Ovid', that the great gods Jupiter and Mercury had once come down in the person of men. Lystra itself was under the special protection of Jupiter. The chief temple and its priest were his.
St Paul did there a mighty work. The people were so full of religion, and so earnest in it, that they immediately assumed that the same gods had once again visited the earth. At some cost, the two kinds of sacrifice were prepared, the propitiatory shedding of blood with its feast, and the floral offerings of loving worship.
Paul assured them that this kind of sacrifice and worship were empty of force and value, and the whole idea of such gods as they worshipped was wrong. But he recognised the propriety of their worshipping the Maker of heaven and earth and sea, whose witness was that He did good, gave them rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and glad- ness. That God, it was religious to worship. Not to worship Him, with all that evidence of His works, would be irreligious.
The great case was of course St Paul's experience at Athens, the city of pagan temples.
Seeing there an altar on which there was inscribed the dedication " To an Unknown God," our Authorised Version represents him as telling them they were "too superstitious," as if a moderate amount of superstition was right. The Revised Version reads " rather superstitious," but gives in a marginal note " rather religious." This last comes nearest to the sen.se. Rather religiously inclined, is the character St Paul read in what he saw at Athens. The Greek word is "gods-fearing," and St Paul, using that word, urged them to be "god- fearing," worshipping one only God.
There is the same phenomenon when we examine the circumstances attendant upon the passing of men's minds from polytheism to monotheism in early Israel.
We have the transition from nature-worship very clearly noted in the book Deuteronomy. The constantly recurring phrase "the Lord our God " is usually read as one phrase. It is very much more than that. The children of Israel had been taught and had accepted the transfer of their worship from the gods of the people around them to the one spiritual Lord, whom they had come to regard as the only true God. " The Lord, our God " ; " Jehovah, our God " ; that was their perpetual utterance, that was their creed. Their God they
' Metam. viii. 626.
3—2
20 Dunecht Antiquities
contrasted with "all the gods of the heathen," which were but idols. It was in that frame of mind that the few early Christian visitors to the crowds of little stone- circle temples, one for each little community, regarded their position among the heathen of early Caledonia. The circles were idolatry, the worship was superstitious, the priests were magicians. And yet, when they found how deeply implanted in the minds of the people was the reverential idea of "going to the stones," it is evident that their mission-method was to invite them to "the stones " to hear the great good news from on high, the Gospel of Christ, which no doubt they introduced as St Paul introduced it at Lystra.
There is one inheritance from druidism which goes very deep in our religious thought and has a prominent place in our religious worship. We refer to the practice of singing the praises of the Lord, our God, in bardic hymn, the Psalms of David, the War Songs of the Prince of Peace. We call them the Psalms of David. But neither the practice of bardic hymn nor the actual matter of the bardic hymns of David was the creation of that king. The practice went vastly further back than that ; we cannot doubt that David learned much from the hymns of previous generations, going back in some cases to pre-Jehovistic times; retained much of many of them, and re-moulded many others; besides responding to the productive force of creative imagination. Equally no doubt, the practice and the gift and the inspiration flowed down through the centuries that followed David.
It may fairly be argued that religion played a larger part in the pagan mind and life than it plays consciously in the Christian mind and life. The word 'religion' is a difficult word. It appears to have implied in the pagan times mindfulness of the gods, especially in connection with rites and cere- monies. It is regarded as coming from the same root as 'neglect,' and as being the opposite of neglect. When the gods were the powers of nature, the providers of everything man or woman needed, the producers of the flowers and the fruits, the fosterers of the animal pleasures of the body ; and when the rites and ceremonies of their worship all made direct appeal to those same passions, and encouraged their full gratification ; it was natural and easy and very pleasant to be a good pagan. It is not as easy to be a good Christian. Anyone could be a good pagan, free from the "Thou shalt ! " "Thou shalt not!" Comparatively, fewer are equal to being good Christians. It is in that sort of sense that we use the idea of the pagans of the stone circles being as a mass more religious than the Christians of to-day as a mass.
We call the pagans superstitious ; their religion, superstition. Superstition is another difficult word. It appears to mean standing over a thing with rapt gaze, with reverential awe. Lost in the wonders of nature, wonders many of which we in our day do not even notice, fearful of sights and scenes of nature's powers which do not stir our bodily or mental pulse in the faintest degree, their
Pagan Worship 21
superstition was a desperately earnest reality. We cannot at all subscribe to a definition of superstition to be found in a modern book. " Superstition is the belief in something that is ugly and bad and unmeaning. That is the differ- ence between superstition and religion. Religion is the belief in something that is beautiful and good and significant, something that throws light into the dark places of life, that helps us to see and live." Similarly Lactantius, a Christian writer of a.d. 300, says bluntly that religion is the worship of the true God, superstition of the false gods.
Nor can we subscribe to the correctness of the usage of the words " pagan " and " heathen " as the description of unbelievers. " Pagan " means a villager, a country man, as contrasted with a man of town, of city. " Heathen " means a man who lives out on the moors, in the heath-lands. The ordinary expla- nation of the use of these words is, that the Christian teachers found these people so much more difficult to convert than the townsmen. That may have been true. If it was, it was of high credit to them. They were more religious than the townsmen, and less inclined to run after " some new thing." The townsmen lived among the works of men. Of the countrymen it might be said, as of the sailors, " these men see the works of the Lord." They were in the highest sense superstitious, they stood in reverential awe in presence of their mysteries. On the other hand, the Londoners of thirteen hundred years ago rather lightly accepted Christianity; gave it a trial for a few years; then resolved that they preferred the idolatrous priests; and then came back again, to be in the fashion. It is rather quaint that "city men" are the Christian antithesis to "pagans," and "the men and the women on the streets" are the Christian antithesis to the "heathen" on the moors.
The condition of affairs among the Celtic populations of some parts of Ireland at the time of writing (Easter 1921) may be to some extent explained on the theory that druidism has not really disappeared there, nor has the belief in the art magic, nor the e.\ercise of the blacker sides of that magic. The magician of to-day is the priest who threatens to turn into a stone' the girl who seems to be not going straight. The threatened stone is the lineal descendant of the occupied stones of two and three thousand years ago. The ruthless murders of to-day are the lineal descendants of the crowds of human sacrifices offered to devils in our own island in Caesar's time. We have felt and have loved the magical charm— the white magic — of the Irish eyes, the Irish smile, the Irish grace of manner. We are now learning what the black magic is.
' A more serious threat is to turn her into a hare, with the dread of being hunted by dogs.
CHAPTER III
Varieties of stone circles. — The Recumbent Stone and Flankers. — The magic circle. — The south- west position. — Facing the north-east. — Sunrise and star-rise.— The magician's announcement of the passage of time by day. — By night. — The Candle Hill stones. — The Calendar. — Lunations. — The daily change of position of sunrise. — The sun and the stars in oriental climes. — Native use of the stars as clocks. — Accuracy of early astronomers. — Method and purposes of marking the point of rise of a special star. — Effect and reason of change of position of star- rise. — Egyptian and Greek star-rise temples. — Was the rise and development of stone worship due to one race of men, or common to many? — St Marnan's Chair. — A throned deity.
It is of course extremely curious and remarkable, and eloquent of mystery, that we should have in this one not extensive district, and so far as is known nowhere else, a collection of circles with Recumbent Stone and Flankers. There are, however, other examples of divergent uses of prominent stones in other areas of no very great size and at no great distance from one another, as we have shewn at page 2. But those examples do not nearly equal in interest or in nearness of locality the divergences of southern Aberdeen, Nairn, and Inverness. The Aberdeen circles have the Recumbent Stone and Flankers ; the Nairn circles enclose enormous cairns of great stones ; the Inverness circles, such as the present writer has visited, have no enormous cairn and no Recumbent Stone and Flankers, but they have south-west entrances.
Very careful attention has been given in the present century to the remains of stone circles in Aberdeenshire which retain the characteristic feature we have described. It is no wonder that this has been so ; for besides the evident interest of these remarkable monuments in themselves, they offer many prob- lems for those who see them and note them. It is probable that even all the care that has been bestowed upon them has not exhausted the problems or solved them all correctly.
There is a sense of completeness and perfectness in a circle which no other plane figure possesses. Of figures not in one plane, the sense of com- pleteness and perfectness attaches itself to the sphere alone, and that because it is carrying the idea of the circle into three dimensions. Plato in the Timaeus takes it as certain that the creator of the universe gave to it a figure every extreme point of which was equidistant from a central point. A square and a cube have their charm of symmetry; but they lack the completeness of unbroken lines and of equidistance.
The circle is specially connected with magical rites in all parts of the world. The mediaeval sorcerer sat in the centre of a circle described on the ground by him with his sword or staff. The usual diameter was nine feet.
The Circles as Clocks 23
It isolated him from outward things; and the ban or barrier which it created enabled him to commune with his spirits without their suffering violation by contact with the common herd. A writer in Hastings' Encyclopaedia credits the Semites with being the origin of the magical circle of mediaeval Europe, with a considerable body of astrological magic. The figure known as "Solomon's Seal" is a circle with six points on its circumference at equal distances, the chords joining which form two equilateral triangles. This was a very potent figure. We cannot look upon the stone circle otherwise than as a symbol of the magic art which was the religion of our far off ancestors. The space occupied by the discussion of the Magic Circle in Hastings' Encyclopaedia and in the Encyclopaedia Britannica is in itself an eloquent evidence of the far reaching interest of the subjects on which we have stumbled in our considera- tion of the Aberdeenshire Recumbent Stones and their colleagues.
Among the many problems to which reference has been made, the most important in its possible results is this, — Why is it that in by far the largest number of cases the Recumbent Stone and the Flankers are between the south and the west points of the circle? Although, as has already been said, we regard the special feature of these three stones as unique, the fact of this south- west arrangement is far from being in itself unique. On the contrary, it is not even unusual in stone circles elsewhere to have some special attention called to the south-west part of the circle. The principal recent investigator of the Inverness and Nairn circles remarks that the largest stone and the entrance to the circle are as a rule on the south-west. In Devon and Cornwall there is in many cases a single stone standing outside the circle, some little distance off, to the south-west ; as though it were a guide to one of the uses of the circle, so that a man standing there and looking across the centre of the circle would be in a position to note something of importance. He would be practi- cally at the same point of vantage, or, rather, on the same line of vantage, as the magician standing at the middle point of his Recumbent Stone and looking across the centre of the circle.
There is apparently only one answer to the question what is this arrange- ment for? If the outlying stone is due south-west, and if the normal line from the centre of the Recumbent Stone is due north-east, the magician looking along that line will see the sun rise at Midsummer, whether he stands at the outlying stone or at the middle of the Recumbent Stone. It would be more natural and it would be simpler to speak of the magician standing at the central point of the Recumbent Stone and looking across the centre of the circle. But experience shews that it is in some cases impossible to say with precision what is the central point, even if the circle is a true circle which is far from being always the case. On the other hand we may probably assume that a flat stone marked a central point across which the magician's gaze must pass.
24 Dunecht Antiquities
If the outlier in the one case and the middle of the Recumbent Stone in the other is further to the west than due south-west, the magician looking across the centre of the circle will look east of north-east. He will see the sun rise earlier or later than Midsummer, it may be in May, it may be in July.
On the other hand, if the outlier and the centre of the Recumbent Stone are a little further to the south than due south-west, the magician will look a little north of north-east. The sun does not rise north of north-east. If the magician is on the look-out for something in the heavens to rise above the horizon, it can only be a star that he is looking for.
As the rising of the sun each day starts the day, and the rising of a suitable star is taken to start the night, we seem to get hold of an idea that the circles where the magician watches for the rising of a star were used somehow for night purposes, and the other circles for day purposes.
We can in imagination carry these points further.
For instance, a skilled druid priest, call him by any of the bad names which records attach to him, magician, astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, would not be much of a druid if he did not know by experience that if he stood at the centre of his circle and watched the sun rise on any day, and noted which of his stones most nearly marked the place, he could say safely what part of the year he was at. He would know that if the sun rose halfway between a given two of his stones, it was time for oats or barley to be sown. He would know that as the sun each successive day got nearer and nearer to rising directly behind a particular one of his stones, the day of a great village feast was coming very near. He would know by the changing angles of the shadows of his stones as the day went on, exactly how much of the day was gone. If he didn't, he was not worth his place. In other words, he had in his hands an annual calendar and a day clock. Naturally, he would convey this knowledge to his people, and the less he said about how he knew it, the greater the respect the mystery would create and foster.
In this way we can realise the ordinary daily and nightly course of events in connection with these circles, quite apart from the special occasions when the pagan peoples had their special feasts and ceremonies. For the present we will regard them as astronomical observatories, not as churches.
The custodian of the art of magic fulfilled a very useful practical function in the daily and nightly life of the community. Take first the day. He noted the sunrise. By some ordinary megaphonic method he announced it to the community, though of course they could as a rule see it for themselves. The circles that still remain are in several cases near one another. In the Old Statistical Account of Scotland we read time after time that in i 794 there were three "temples" or remains of "temples" in a parish, and centuries before that there must have been many more. Thus no very great noise
The Circles as Clocks 25
might be necessary. If blowing a horn was not adequate, some such instru- ment as a "bull-roarer," a flat piece of wood whirled round by a string, or a gong, a flat resonant board beaten by a drum-stick, would convey to the community the note of the hour.
Whatever the alignment of the recumbent stone might be, whether the circle was a sunrise circle or a star-rise circle, the magician would be able, as we have suggested, by his complete knowledge of the directions of the shadows of the several stones on the east side of his circle, to make announcements say in the middle time between sunrise and mid-day. He could announce noon. Turning towards the west, he could by the shadows of the western stones announce mid-afternoon. He could announce sunset. We may be quite sure that if there was a fog he had rules which would enable him to make his announcements without seeing the sun, not with the accuracy of a bright day, but with sufficient accuracy to maintain his reputation as a magician. He could make his announcements hourly, an hour probably meaning the twelfth part of the daylight, however long or short the daylight might be.
The same process could go on during the flight of the night. His an- nouncements would not be based on any question of shadows, for the question of the shadows cast by the moon is so vastly more complicated than the corresponding question in the case of the sun that we may well doubt whether even the arch-magician himself could have systematised it. The magician would have his clock star. He would announce its arrival, and also, by practised ocular observation with the clear sight of the man whose eyes had not been spoiled by civilisation, the main periods of its journey, as in the day time for the sun, or at longer intervals if his flock desired less broken slumbers. If the stars were clouded and could not be read, it is conceivable, but to our narrowed natural intelligence it seems very improbable, that the magician might have something to guide him. It seems safer to suppose that if there was a fog the village clock did not strike at night, much as we experienced with our clocks in London at the time when air raids were possible. We have already pointed out that Tacitus, who visited Britain with his father-in-law Agricola, tells us {Agricola, 12) that while the days were disgusting in Britain because of rain and clouds, the nights were clear.
It may well have been — for we are bound to credit the circle-builders and the circle-workers with remarkable ingenuity and skill — that the magician had his way of making his announcements of the passage of time by night without making any noise or waking any one of his community. Fire is a natural idea, the burning of a few tufts of grass, say in the middle of the night, the night, like the day, having different lengths according as the day was short or long. Here it is possible that we have an actual evidence of the probability of this gfuess in a local name. Three of the circles in our district are on ground called
B. D. A. 4
26 Diinecht Antiquities
by tradition a Candle Hill. We have the Candle Hill of Insch, the Candle Hill of Oyne, and the Candle Hill of Rayne. I am told that a burning handful of dry grass would now be called in gaelic a coinneal, and that the gaelic coinneal is pronounced cannel. These heights should be called Cannel Hills.
Besides announcing the passage of time, the magician of course would announce in some special manner the times at which his sacrifices were held, just as our village clocks strike the hour, and the bells toll or ring for Divine Service.
It is natural to suppose that in the earliest times of observation of the movements in the heavens, in the infancy of man, the moon would be the basis of the calculations of the flight of time. The daily appearance and disappear- ance of the sun formed the basis of the calculation of the flight of time during each day; but to keep count of the number of sunsettings very soon became practically impossible. - The moon, on the other hand, used up quite a large number of sunsettings in completing its course, and it was much less difficult to keep count of the moon's changes from new to new, from full to full, than of the sun's daily disappearances and re-appearances. Counting up the new moons in a man's life or in a chieftain's dominance was within the bounds of possibility. Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven "years" and begat Lamech ; and after that he lived seven hundred eighty and two "years"; in all nine hundred sixty and nine "years." If we read "moons" for "years," Methuselah was between fourteen and fifteen of our years old when his first child was born, a usual age in those climes, and he was seventy-four and a half of our years old when he died, evidently an unusual age in those early times. Long after those early times, four score years were labour and sorrow.
But even so, that was very cumbrous record-keeping. Further observation of the motions of the heavenly bodies brought into special prominence the fact that the sun changed continuously and regularly the precise point of his daily re-appearance. The point of daily re-appearance travelled steadily day by day along the horizon till it suddenly ceased its advance, paused, and began to travel back again, after a time ceasing to retire and advancing again to exactly the same extreme point as before, so far as they could determine. The time between its two re-appearances at that extreme point meant a large number of daily appearances of the sun and a considerable number of complete courses of the moon, and it appears to have become usual to take that large period as the basis of calculation of the flight of time. A period closely resembling our present year had thus become fixed and known. That was the June — December year. On what day the year was counted to begin is quite another question. Our New Year's Day is several days after the winter solstice; our Midsummer Day is at the summer solstice\
' See further on page 39.
The Circles as Clocks 27
We have spoken, so far, of observations of the sun, that is, of daylight hours. With us, the night hours are roughly speaking about as many in the course of a year as the day hours. Towards the end of June, the sun is up about four and a half hours more than twelve ; towards the end of December, about four and a quarter hours less than twelve. In our latitudes the warmth and light of the sun naturally render the daylight hours more important and more available for work and business than the night hours. As a rule, we cannot have too much of the sun. We are about and alert all day.
In tropical lands, they have too much of the sun ; too much of his blaze, too much of his heat. They have to protect themselves against his too much power. The shadow of a great rock is the sun-weary world's continual desire. Their eyes cannot watch the course of the sun. They sleep through the hottest hours. When Isaiah was telling of the crowning mercies of the Lord, and rose to the very height of inspired imagination, he cried, " They shall not hunger nor thirst, neither shall the heat nor sun smite them."
With us the night is a time of cessation of business. We sleep as much as we can. We too often toss about, longing for daylight. We see very little of the stars as a rule, because we are shut up in a room. We are delighted with their beauty when we happen to see them at their best, and we probably deter- mine to enjoy and to observe that beauty much more frequently and fully than has been our wont. But as a rule that does not last long.
To the orientals, starlight is the cream of the twenty-four hours. Much of their business is done when the sun is down. They know intimately, by constant natural observation, the majestic motion of the stars. They can watch them closely in their revolving course. They can read the flight of time by them as by a night clock. Colonel Tilney taught our soldiers to find their way at night by the motions of marked stars'. He tells us that Australian bushmen, Basutos, Arabs, wherever you go, steer their course by the stars, and that men out at night for big game whisper to the shikari how goes the time.-', knowing that they need not look at their watch. And in our own lands, we may feel quite sure that keen observers of nature, as our far-off predecessors in common with all other early human beings certainly were, could not but have marked by the stars, almost certainly by some one specially conspicuous star, how the time of darkness was passing on. The sun by day, the stars or the special star by night, told of the passing of time.
The earliest recorded example of the measurement of time by noting the altitudes of any heavenly body is an Arab record of a.d. 829, which states that when a certain solar eclipse began, the sun's altitude was 7° ; when the eclipse ended it was 24°; as observed at Bagdad by Ahmed ibn Abdallah, called Habash. This method became usual among the Arabians, who measured the ' Marching or flying by night without compass, London, Hugh Rees.
4—2
28 Diuiecht Antiquities
time of lunar eclipses by measuring the altitude of some bright star at the beginning and the end of the eclipse.
But those dates are modern, as compared with the astonishing observation and precision of a Greek astronomer who flourished about 150 b.c. This was Hipparchus, who probably observed at Alexandria. He marked among the revolving stars forty-four prominent stars, at such positions in the heavens that one or more would be straight over-head, in his country, at the beginning of each sidereal hour of the night. Modern science has calculated back from the present places and motions of the stars to what would be their places in 140 B.C. They only differ by one minute of time from the position assigned to them by Hipparchus 2060 years ago.
Of course Hipparchus had his predecessors. Precision such as that does not come in a year or two. How far back we may carry it in Greece we cannot say.
It may be asked, what has this to do with Pictish stone circles ? Well, deep down in Mycenae, Schliemann found sculptured on stones the very stag- hunts which the Picts sculptured on so many of the stones in Caledonia ; and he found gold buttons with six-leg devices which no one could distinguish from the Pictish circular discs with six-leg devices at Aberlemno and elsewhere. If such links as this with Greece exist on Caledonian sculptured stones, it is surely reasonable to suppose that Greek observations of the heavens were not unknown to those early Caledonians, who with some very set purpose arranged the circles of rude stones which as we shall see speak to us so definitely of astronomical connections.
In times of religious worship connected with stars, the followers of the cult of each of the gods associated their deity with some particular star, and it was only natural that their priests should watch and wait with minute care for the moment at which the bright symbol of their god or goddess should appear above the horizon. It followed that they must have permanent and accurate marks which should fix their eyes upon the exact spot of the eagerly awaited emergence of brilliancy. We have the methods on record.
The following passage is quoted from a hieroglyphical relation of the rebuilding of a temple in the time of Seti I, about 1445 b.c'
"The living god, the magnificent son of Asti [a name of Thoth], nourished by the sublime goddess in the temple of the sovereign of the country, stretches the rope with joy. With his glance at Ak (.'*the middle) of the Bull's Thigh constellation, he establishes the temple-house of the mistress of Denderah, as took place before." And again, "Looking to the sky at the course of the rising stars, recognising the Ak of the Bull's Thigh constellation, I establish the corners of the temple of her majesty."
' See more in Nature, June 18, 1892.
The Circles as Clocks 29
In another Egyptian record we find the king and the priest going out with two stakes fastened to the two ends of a rope of some length. One of the stakes is driven in to the ground, and the king waits till the moment when the desired star is rising. The other stake is then driven in at a point which fixes the stretched rope in the exact line pointing to the star. The rope is then used to define the line on the surface of the ground which is to be the axis of the temple to be built, so that the priests at the innermost recess can see the star rise by looking along the axis.
We gather that in Egyptian latitudes there were two special purposes in marking the e.xact spot on the horizon at which a certain star would rise. The late Mr F. C. Penrose, the architect in charge of St Paul's Cathedral Church towards the close of last century, who had studied the whole subject carefully, and had examined the alignments of temples not in Egypt only but also — and especially — in Greece, described the salient points in the question. We may summarise briefly his description, though some parts of our summary are in fact repetition of what has already been said.
The astronomer-priests in those countries used certain very bright stars as " warning stars," to warn them that after some space of time well known to them the sun would begin to appear on the horizon. The star must be the bright star nearest to the sun ; just not so near as to be rendered invisible by the glow which precedes the first appearance of the disc of the sun. When the bright star rose on the horizon, the priests knew exactly how long they had got to make ready for the ceremonies of the sunrise. The star served the function which the church clock serves when it strikes three-quarters and the service is at the hour. Beyond the passing interest of knowing the use of warning stars, we may for our present purpose leave them without further mention.
The case is very different with the other purpose of observing the rise of a certain star. This is, to provide a clock for the night, as the sun provides a clock for the day. The priest noted the rise of the star, and announced it to the neighbourhood by lighting a little fire or sounding some one of the several kinds of megaphone in use in various countries, the horn, or the flat sounding board struck with a stick, or the bull-roarer. The people knew the star, and at any time of the night they knew what portion of the night still remained by seeing how far it had got on its way from the horizon of rising to the horizon of setting. The star was a "clock-star."
For this purpose it was advisable to have some bright star whose journey from rise to setting was long, so that it rose very early in the evening and set very late in the morning ; that is, it must be as near to the pole as might be, but not so near that it never went below the horizon. In our latitudes there are very few stars indeed which have fulfilled those restricted conditions. The most notable, indeed the only really notable for us, are Arcturus and Capella.
30 Dunecht Antiquities
Such were the purposes of the ancients in their careful watch for the rise of some bright particular star. For us the records we have of their watch have a striking interest. If we know from the axis of an old temple or by any other indication precisely where a bright star rose on the horizon when the temple was built, and observe the point on the horizon at which the same star now rises, we can calculate the number of years which have passed between the two observations. The pole of the ecliptic maintains a nearly fixed position among the stars : but the pole of the Earth's diurnal rotation, at present near the Pole Star, moves round the pole of the ecliptic in a period of about twenty-six thousand years. The recurrence of the equinox is thus accelerated by about the seventieth of a degree annually. From this and other causes there is from year to year a slight change in the spot at which a star rises. The amount of this change for each star is known; and if the distance of the spot at one period from the spot at another period is ascertained, the number of years that have passed in the interval is known. Hence the clock-star not only told the passage of the hours of the night to our far-off predecessors ; it tells us, their far-off successors, how long ago they made their record.
By the side of ancient temples apparently aligned to a particular star, there are in several cases seen the foundations of a previous temple whose axis is inclined at an acute angle to the axis of the temple still standing. That shews that when the rising of the special star could no longer be seen by the priests standing at the innermost point and looking along the narrow tunnel- like passage opening upon the horizon, a new temple was built, aligned to the point where the star at the time rose. No doubt experience had taught them to build it so that hundreds of years must pass before the rising-point of the star again passed out of sight. In one case, no doubt at a period of anti-waste feeling, they knocked down the jamb of the opening on one side of the entrance, and thus enabled the priests to get along without a new temple for a few decades of years more.
We shall see that Sir Norman Lockyer suggested corresponding changes in the alignment of some of the Aberdeenshire Recumbent Stones.
It may be well to mention in passing another problem which it would be interesting to discuss, though its discussion would lead us off our simple points.
It is this: — Did the stone-circle worship, or, to speak more broadly the stone-worship, develop naturally in the mind of early man as a whole, or of some one far-spread race of early man, or was it developed in some race- centre or tribe-centre, and carried say to our shores by migration of the race that developed it, or a race that had learned it.-*
Whichever or whatever view may be taken of these and such-like points, it seems clear that we must postulate for Caledonia many centuries of develop- ment and spread before Rome set foot on this land of ours. Imagination runs
I
The Circles as Clocks 31
riot when one tries to realise the conditions and the date when first it was said in Devon or twixt Don and Dee, " Let us have a stone circle!"
Again, the stone circle did not spring complete and fully thought out from some one's brain. You must postulate ages of development from the first handling of stones with religious intent to the stone circle constructed with physical power and skill and astronomical thought and observation far beyond that possessed by the average country priest and the average country people of the Dartmoor or the Caledonia of to-day. Dean Inge might well have pointed to the contrast in these respects between the sinews and thought of the average Briton of to-day and the sinews and thought of the corresponding people of 1920 B.C.; while in religiousness, there is not progress of which we can be proud but there is relapse of which we should be ashamed.
We have had much to say on pagan worship, its earnestness, its ceremonial, its temples. In dealing with races whom we regard as savage, whether con- temporary races or races prehistoric, it is uncertain how far we can credit them with imagination, especially in their thoughts of the unseen powers who played so large a part in their lives. To a Christian of to-day who had to do with the mosaic setting of the great White Christ in the eastern apse of St Paul's, the Recumbent Stone and its Flankers in many cases call to the mind the idea of a great deity of the pagan worship, seated invisible on the Recumbent Stone in awful majesty, as on a vast armed throne. The whole energy of the tribe had been devoted to procuring at great labour — the greater the labour the more its acceptability to the deity — the noblest stone within their reach for the seat of the god, invisible but real, whose wrath they appeased or whose good-will they evoked by the shedding of human blood. The "props" might in this conception be stools for the feet of the deity.
This idea appears to have been translated into Christian language in a churchyard on the boundary of Aberdeenshire towards Banffshire. The Church of St Marnoch — the affectionate diminutive of Marnan — is guarded and sur- rounded by the beautiful stream of the Deveron" ; so the old legend tells of the church where St Marnan was buried, and where his head was shewn and washed every Sunday in the year. The church lies within the area of an ancient stone circle, of which two stones are still in situ, on opposite sides of the church. One of these, a fine pillar towards the south-west, is called St Marnan's Chair, certainly not a name of recent or of late mediaeval creation. Anything less like a chair it would be difficult to imagine. But give it a companion some twelve feet or more away, and a great Recumbent Stone like the one at Cothie Muir lying between the two, and you have the majestic representation oi an armed throne worthy of some great Power in the pagan hierarchy, worthy even of being re-named St Marnan's Chair by the Christian.
' Pulcherrimo Duverne fluvio munita et vallata.
! in. St*
« >^ f.' J. J.
h
30 Diinecht Antiquities
Such were the purposes of the ancients in their careful watch for the rise of some brio-ht particular star. For us the records we have of their watch have a striking interest. If we know from the axis of an old temple or by any other indication precisely where a bright star rose on the horizon when the temple was built, and observe the point on the horizon at which the same star now rises, we can calculate the number of years which have passed between the two observations. The pole of the ecliptic maintains a nearly fixed position among the stars : but the pole of the Earth's diurnal rotation, at present near the Pole Star, moves round the pole of the ecliptic in a period of about twenty-six thousand years. The recurrence of the equinox is thus accelerated by about the seventieth of a degree annually. From this and other causes there is from year to year a slight change in the spot at which a star rises. The amount of this change for each star is known; and if the distance of the spot at one period from the spot at another period is ascertained, the number of years that have passed in the interval is known. Hence the clock-star not only told the passage of the hours of the night to our far-off predecessors ; it tells us, their far-off successors, how long ago they made their record.
By the side of ancient temples apparently aligned to a particular star, there are in several cases seen the foundations of a previous temple whose axis is inclined at an acute angle to the axis of the temple still standing. That shews that when the rising of the special star could no longer be seen by the priests standing at the innermost point and looking along the narrow tunnel- like passage opening upon the horizon, a new temple was built, aligned to the point where the star at the time rose. No doubt experience had taught them to build it so that hundreds of years must pass before the rising-point of the star again passed out of sight. In one case, no doubt at a period of anti-waste feeling, they knocked down the jamb of the opening on one side of the entrance, and thus enabled the priests to get along without a new temple for a few decades of years more.
We shall see that Sir Norman Lockyer suggested corresponding changes in the alignment of some of the Aberdeenshire Recumbent Stones.
It may be well to mention in passing another problem which it would be interesting to discuss, though its discussion would lead us off our simple points.
It is this: — Did the stone-circle worship, or, to speak more broadly the stone-worship, develop naturally in the mind of early man as a whole, or of some one far-spread race of early man, or was it developed in some race- centre or tribe-centre, and carried say to our shores by migration of the race that developed it, or a race that had learned it?
Whichever or whatever view may be taken of these and such-like points, it seems clear that we must postulate for Caledonia many centuries of develop- ment and spread before Rome set foot on this land of ours. Imagination runs
i^>l'
. T_ - "
4J '4t
T/te Circles as Clocks
31
riot when one tries to realise the conditions and the date when first it was said in Devon or twixt Don and Dee, " Let us have a stone circle!"
Again, the stone circle did not spring complete and fully thought out from some one's brain. You must postulate ages of development from the first handling of stones with religious intent to the stone circle constructed with physical power and skill and astronomical thought and observation far beyond that possessed by the average country priest and the average country people of the Dartmoor or the Caledonia of to-day. Dean Inge might well have pointed to the contrast in these respects between the sinews and thought of the average Briton of to-day and the sinews and thought of the corresponding people of 1920 B.C.; while in religiousness, there is not progress of which we can be proud but there is relapse of which we should be ashamed.
We have had much to say on pagan worship, its earnestness, its ceremonial, its temples. In dealing with races whom we regard as savage, whether con- temporary races or races prehistoric, it is uncertain how far we can credit them with imagination, especially in their thoughts of the unseen powers who played so large a part in their lives. To a Christian of to-day who had to do with the mosaic setting of the great White Christ in the eastern apse of St Paul's, the Recumbent Stone and its Flankers in many cases call to the mind the idea of a great deity of the pagan worship, seated invisible on the Recumbent Stone in awful majesty, as on a vast armed throne. The whole energy of the tribe had been devoted to procuring at great labour — the greater the labour the more its acceptability to the deity — the noblest stone within their reach for the seat of the god, invisible but real, whose wrath they appeased or whose good-will they evoked by the shedding of human blood. The "props" might in this conception be stools for the feet of the deity.
This idea appears to have been translated into Christian language in a churchyard on the boundary of Aberdeenshire towards Banffshire. The Church of St Marnoch — the affectionate diminutive of Marnan — is guarded and sur- rounded by the beautiful stream of the Deveron' ; so the old legend tells of the church where St Marnan was buried, and where his head was shewn and washed every Sunday in the year. The church lies within the area of an ancient stone circle, of which two stones are still in situ, on opposite sides of the church. One of these, a fine pillar towards the south-west, is called St Marnan's Chair, certainly not a name of recent or of late mediaeval creation. Anything less like a chair it would be difficult to imagine. But give it a companion some twelve feet or more away, and a great Recumbent Stone like the one at Cothie Muir lying between the two, and you have the majestic representation of an armed throne worthy of some great Power in the pagan hierarchy, worthy even of being re-named St Marnan's Chair by the Christian.
' Pulchcrrimo Duvcrne fluvio munita et vallata.
M
» -•
'r'
CHAPTER IV
Stellar and solar circles, — Aamuth and Declination. — List of stellar circles with supposed dates. — The transport of heav^- stones. — The sacred circle. — Places of assembly. — Places of incinera- tion.— .\stronomical obser^-atories. — Denderah 3100 B.C. — Britain 2300 E.C — Early clocks, the clepsydra. — The sun dial. — Solstitial circles. — May Year circles. — Abnormal alignments. — Beltane,— The farmer's year. — New Year's Day. — Beltane celebrations. — Eggs and e^ similes. — Mysterj- of the circles. — Are the stones other than the Recumbent Stone and Flankers set in a' fixed order ? — Test appUed at three of the circles.
Of 29 Aberdeenshire circles examined by Sir Norman Lockyer, he classes 15 as dock-star circles, 2 as May Year circles, and 3 as solstitial. That is. 15 were built for obser\-ing the rising of stars, and 5 for observing the rising of the sun. Five others he describes as abnormal ; that is. they do not fall into either of the two astronomical classes, stellar and solar. Of others it is known that the stones have been moved, so that no argument can be based upon them.
With regiird to the 15 in the stellar class, it is clear that if the recumbent stones remain as they were originally placed, and if they were originally placed to note the rise of a particular star, so that we know how lar ofl the original place of rising of the star is from the place where that same star now rises, we can fix the date of their original laying down in position, for we know the rate at which the place of rising changes in consequence of the precession of the equinoxes. It must be confessed that it is a high call on our imagination to ask us to believe that great stones weighing many tons, mostly lying on the surface not embedded in the soil, have remained so fixed in their places that thev have not chanired their bearing in four thousand vears. And vet we are only called upon to believe that the central portion of the stone has not shifted longitudinally; and that is not nearly the same thing as believing a general statement that the stone has not shifted its position in any respect. It may have sunk into the ground, though it is curious to note how little that appears to have been the case. It may have leaned forward, or leaned backward. None of those three obvious kinds of change need aft'ect the position of the central part of the stone. Further, if all of the stones which now appear to have marked a star-rise were originally set to mark the place of sunrise on some important festival day, and have since shifted, it is ver)- remarkable that thev should in such a larsfe number of cases have so shifted that thev now point so far towards the north that the sun never rises where they point. If shifting of the stones had really taken place, we should have had them pointing indiscriminately to places where the sun does rise and to places where the sun does not rise.
TJic Cin/es as Astronomical Observatories
33
However that may be, Sir Norman Lockyer proceeded on the supposition that the normal hne from the centre of the stone to the centre of the circle remains as it was when first the stone was placed in position. On that sup- position he calculates the dates of such placing in position from the present places of rising of the two possible or probable stars of observation, Arcturus and Capella, and we may take his most interesting list with gratitude. We have special permission to use this list, our application for such permission being presumably the last communication on any scientific subject addressed to him before his death. It should be remembered that the alignment is in each case clearly to the north of north-east, and therefore, if the stone has stood fairly firm, stellar and not solar.
The names given to the circles by Sir Norman are not in all cases easy to locate, the local names varying in some cases.
It may be explained that the azimuth is the angle between a line drawn from the place of observation to the true North and the line drawn towards the point of rising of the star named. Azimuth N. 23 35' E. means that the angle in this case is 23° 35' from due North, and the E. shews that the place of rising is in the North- East. The declination is the distance of a star, in degrees, from the celestial equator. Like so many of our technical terms in science, azimuth is a word taken from the Arabs, our masters and in- structors in science.
|
Dates |
B.C. |
|||||
|
True azimuth at right angles |
Elevation |
Declina- |
||||
|
If |
If |
|||||
|
across the circle |
of horizon |
tion N. |
Arcturus |
Capella |
||
|
Braehead Leslie ... |
N.23° |
35' E. |
iF |
30° 5S' |
250 |
2000 |
|
Ley Lodge |
14 |
15 |
0 |
31 i8 |
7,1° |
1940 |
|
Louden Wood |
11 |
55 |
0 |
31 38 |
370 |
1890 |
|
Tomnagorn |
»S |
•5 |
i? |
31 42 |
390 |
i860 |
|
Wanton Wells |
31 |
45 |
2 |
31 52 |
420 |
1830 |
|
Old Keig |
29 |
15 |
4 |
31 55 |
430 |
1S20 |
|
South Fornet |
8 |
3 |
0 |
32 4 |
450 |
i8oo |
|
Nether Boddam ... |
21 |
IS |
2 |
32 8 |
460 |
1790 |
|
Aikey Brae |
4 |
15 |
0 |
32 18 |
500 |
1760 |
|
Castle Fraser |
20 |
5t |
4 |
32 42 |
570 |
1680 |
|
Newcraig |
20 |
49 |
4 |
32 43 |
570 |
1680 |
|
Loanhead Daviot ... |
8 |
0 |
I |
33 14 |
660 |
1580 |
|
Bourtie |
14 |
45 |
2i |
33 57 |
770 |
1460 |
|
Cothie Muir |
18 |
55 . |
4 |
li 42 |
920 |
1300 |
While we give this list exactly as Sir Norman gives it, we must confess to feeling grave doubts as to the rigid series of dates given by accurate calculations. They appear to postulate too long a continuance of one special practice, which seems not to have come from any known district and not to have spread to any known district. See further remarks in the Preface.
5
B.D. A.
24 Dunecht Antiqttities
Whichever of the two stars was the clock-star, these fourteen Recumbent Stones were set in position at intervals extending in all to 700 years. To take two in the same parish, Old Keig was set in position 490 years after its neigh- bour, the Cothie Muir circle, or it was set 500 years before it. It is only fair to say that the Cothie Muir Recumbent Stone and Flankers are very different from those at Old Keig. To judge by appearances, Old Keig has suffered more from the centuries than Cothie Muir has; and if either star tells its age, it is Capella. Loanhead Daviot and Bourtie are exceedingly unlike one another; Sir Norman makes them 1 10 years apart. Bourtie is much the ruder of the two, which points to Arcturus as the star.
In four cases, Dyce, Whitehill Wood, Raes of Clune, and Candle Hill Insch, Sir Norman finds the alignment due north. He does not know of any very obvious counterparts in Britain. He thinks they may possibly be held to indicate an advance in the manner of determining time at night, in which case their erection has been at a more recent date.
To imagine that in an age when cranes and screw-jacks appear to have been unknown, and there was no motive power other than human muscles and cattle-hauling, the massive Recumbent Stones of our Aberdeenshire circles were not put in position for any very special purpose or use is practically impossible. The great lintel of the Lion Gate at Mycenae is calculated to weigh 10 tons, a weight small in comparison with many of the Recumbent Stones, one of which is estimated at 25 tons. As we have mentioned Mycenae, it may be well to say that the enormous inner lintel of the Treasury of Atreus there is put as high as 120 tons. Mycenae was being remodelled when some of the Aberdeenshire circles, according to Sir Norman Lockyer, were being set in position, and was burned before many of them, according to him, had been erected, about 1 200 b.c.
A sacrificial purpose and use does not seem to need a south-west position, apart from questions of sun worship. Astronomical purposes and uses do not specially demand that enormous pains and labour shall be bestowed upon the erection of a massively expressive combination of stones at one particular spot, and that the south-west. For purposes of public meetings no such arrange- ment is necessary, or specially useful.
Mr A. H. Allcroft, in his paper on The Celtic Circle-Moot in the Tran- sactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, Session 1918-19, pages i to 29, calls attention to a passage in the Iliad of Homer, xviii. 503, 504. The passage occurs in the well-known description of the shield of Achilles. The scene represented is a trial of a special nature, which was beyond the sole juris- diction of the head of the state, and required the intervention of the Council, the Elders. They are described as sitting on polished stones in a sacred circle.
01 8e y€povT£<i elar iwl feaTotcrt Xi^ots le/ow evl kvkKco.
The Circles as A strononiical Observatories 35
It may have been the case that stone circles were used as places for folk-moots, as Mr Allcroft ari^ues, but in this case the public were outside, kept back by heralds. And if the Recumbent Stone was the seat of the presiding officer, it would in most cases have been so uncomfortable a seat that the meeting would not last long. Certainly the rude stones in our sacred circles were impossible for use of the same character as in the case of the polished stones of the Iliad.
For burial places, or places of incineration, we should not expect the arrangement in question as the one and only natural feature. We cannot understand the probability — it is almost safe to say the possibility — of this locally universal practice without some known and acknowledged practical reason. It may be added that a magician who knew his business could work out his sunrise and star-rise, and calendar and clock arrangements, with any circle of stones with a known centre, after a year's experience of them. He would know to which stone, or between which stones, he must look for his various daily and nightly marks on the horizon. But in that case each new magician would have to learn his circle, and meanwhile all the gods of nature might be in ferment.
On the whole, we cannot escape from the conviction that there is one fixed set purpose of primary importance in this south-west position ; and we cannot suggest any purpose of primary importance that can compare with the astronomical, astrological, purpose of specially noting something in the north- east.
We therefore seem bound to consider the arrangements of the several circles with our minds distinctly leaning towards Sir Norman Lockyer's care- fully worked out contention. Many, probably, will accept that view without accepting the further view that the Recumbent Stone is of the nature of a sacrificial stone. We have noted that the idea of sacrifice does not demand a south-west position for an altar, but enough has been said to indicate the opinion that the stone which for astronomical purposes is set in the south-west is in fact the sacrificial altar which on religious grounds we may be sure was somewhere in the circle. While, then, we hold that these huge stones are altars, not slaughter stones, we prefer to call them Recumbent Stones.
Sir Norman's observations of British circles and avenues in the south- west, Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, had led him to believe that the practice so long employed in Egypt, of determining the time at night by the revolution of a star round the pole, was almost universally followed in the British circles of the south-west. The practice was, to watch a first-magnitude star which only just dips below the northern horizon and thus is visible for almost the whole of its nightly revolution round the pole. Doubtless, he says, this method was employed in Babylonia, but there all the temples — or in other words the
5—2
36 Dimecht Antiquities
astronomical observatories — are said to have disappeared, and it is only the Egyptian practice that is left for us to study.
The earliest example is at Denderah. The star observed there was a Ursae Majoris, which only dipped 5° below the northern horizon about 4950 B.C. as is shewn by inscriptions. In course of time this star ceased to dip below the horizon, and another marked star had to be found that fulfilled the conditions. The gradual changes which had brought a of the Great Bear out of the list of stars that dipped had brought y Draconis into that list for the latitude of Denderah. This star could be observed about 3100 B.C. from the axis of the old temple which had pointed to a of the Great Bear, and Pepi restored the temple when he found that it pointed to the new star. These two dates entirely agree with the most recent views of Egyptian chronology. The same was done, and for the same star, by the rebuilding of the temple at Annu by Usertsen 2433 B.C.
Sir Norman believed, as the result of his enquiries, that clock-star observations came into our British islands about 2300 B.C., when Arcturus just did not rise and set in the sea horizon, being too near the pole. In order that it might appear to rise and set, and so might serve as a clock-star, sites were chosen for the stone circles where the north-east horizon was high ; in some cases hills made the horizon as much as 3° and 4° above the sea horizon. The star Capella appears to have been the clock-star in a few cases, although it was below the horizon for a comparatively long time and so did not serve as a star for the observation of the passage of time during the night for so large a part of the night as was desirable.
Sir Norman had based his theory on the fact, as observed by him, that there was usually a standing stone outside a British circle, a little way off, usually towards the west of south. Drawing an imaginary line from that stone through the centre of the circle to the horizon, you would come to a point on the horizon a little to the east of north. This could not have been to mark the spot where the sun rose at some particular time, for the point of sunrise never gets northwards beyond due north-east. If, then, the intention was to mark the rise of a celestial body, that body must have been some particular bright star, and the purpose of the arrangement would naturally have been to note the moment of its rise, and to count from that time, by noting the passage of the star on its course to its setting in the west, the passing of the hours of darkness. As the sun served as a day clock, the star served as a night clock.
It may be remarked in passing that we cannot credit our predecessors in early Britain with having the clock of the period. That clock was the water clock, known by its Greek name as the clepsydra, or water-stealer ; a glass instrument used to check the length of speeches. There were small holes in the bottom, by which the water was "stolen," like the sand running out in an
The Circles as Astrouoniical Observatories 37
hour glass. Hence to waste time when making a speech was called aquam pcrdere, to allow more time aquam dare. It is said to have been used for clock purposes by the Egyptians. Plato is said to have invented compensa- tions which made it more accurate. In the hydraulic clock of Ctesibius of Alexandria, about 2<X) B.C., the movement of water-wheels brought a little figure gradually up to point out the hour with a little stick on an index.
Reference has been made to the natural probability that the magician made full note of the directions of the shadows cast by the several stones during the day at various times of the year. Any of us who have had to depend upon something other than a compass for guiding our way among unknown mountains will understand such use of the stones. With us, the time on our watch has enabled us to read the lesson of the shadow ; with the magician, the shadow of his stone enabled him to tell the time.
Of course the sun-dial comes into our mind in this connection. We might take it that the stone circle is the parent of the sun-dial'. It has been supposed that there is mention of a sun-dial in a letter from the Ostrogoth king Theodoric to the Roman philosopher Boethius about a.d. 520, asking him to send "an instrument marked by the illumination of the sun " to the Burgundian king who had asked Theodoric for such a thing. By a curious and probably unintentional coincidence, the phrases used by Theodoric remind us of the magic art of earlier times. He appeals to Boethius as astronomer, arithmetician, geometer, mechanician ; and he tells him' that "it will be a great gain that the Burgundians shall daily look upon something sent by us which will appear to them little short of miraculous."
In regard to circles arranged for watching sunrise. Sir Norman divides them into those which are solstitial, that is, are aligned to the midsummer sunrise, and those which are aligned to suit the May year, that is, to point well east of north-east. Of the solstitial circles nothing need be said in detail. They are the three circles of Midmar, Sin Hinny, and Stonehead, which have been left intact'. The so called " May Year " circles ask for special remark.
Sir Norman finds solar alignments for the May year in the Recumbent Stones at Berry Brae and Hatton of Ardoyne ; the remains of a May year
' The " dial " of Ahaz, 2 Kings xx. g, is an error. Anaximander of Miletus is credited with the invention of the gnomon or index of the sun-dial, about 580 b.c. Herodotus, writing about 450 B.C., says the Greeks learned it and the division of the day into twelve hours from the Baby- lonians. The early dials were not at all like ours. The Chaldtean Berosus invented about 250 b.c. the hemispherical dial which was in use for centuries. Dials were not "equal-hour" before the 13th century.
' See my King Alfred''! Books, pages 265, 266.
* But see remarks on Midmar and Castle Fraser at page 44.
38 Dunecht Antiquities
avenue at Ardlair, and another marked on the map near Kirkton of Clatt'. It is, however, a serious fact that in those cases the Recumbent Stone, or the Flankers, or both, have been disturbed. This, he remarks, "suggests a practice acted on by the Egyptian priests in regard to the worship of any other sun- or star-god than the one to which they were specially attached." The bearing of that does not seem very clear, but he draws the conclusion that the fact of the disturbance is an argument in favour of the erection of the May-year circles before the solstitial circles of Midniar, Sin Hinny, and Stonehead.
At Ardlair, mentioned above, the Recumbent Stone is in the S. E. quad- rant. That is completely abnormal. But, Sir Norman says, " there are indications that this was not the original position. It is unlike any other recum- bent stone I have seen : I believe its many sharp angles and cracks are due to the action of fire, and the angles and cracks are all the more striking since both supporters are rounded and crackless."
As we have mentioned this abnormal position of a Recumbent Stone, we had better digress into a mention of another abnormal case, that of Old Bour- tree Bush, where the Recumbent Stone is due east of the centre of the circle, "to define the place of the equinoctial sunsets," Sir Norman says. He adds that these are the only cases where the Stone is not in the south-west quadrant. Mr Ritchie, who has visited and photographed all in our district, informed him that he only knew of one exception, and in that case he knew that the farmer, having moved the sume, replaced it wrongly when he was compelled to restore it.
It seems quite natural in the abstract to suppose that a May alignment was earlier than a solstitial alignment, except for the fact that in the one case the place of the sunrise goes on northwards whereas in the other case it remains stationary for a time and then recedes. But the e.xception may be slightly discounted by the fact that to the careful observer of those early days the place of the solstitial sunrise could be detected by the absence of change the next day.
We shall have to speak ^ of the importance of the May sunrise at the beginning of the month as ushering in the Beltane celebrations. But from the agricultural point of view there is another important consideration. Our four periods of the year, beginning with January, April, July, October, do not fall in with the processes of agriculture and nature as well as the periods of what is called the May year. May, August, November, February. Hence a May- year circle would serve as the farmer's calendar.
It is important to keep quite clear the two ideas of a stone circle being set to mark the beginning of a calendar year and being set to mark the time
' Sir Norman gives the true azimuths of tlie May sunrise as follows : at the sea horizon, N. 57° 50' E.: with a hill hori/on one degree higher, N. 60° E. : two degrees higher, N. 61° 30' E. ' Page 40.
The Circles as Astyotionical Observatories 39
when the spring work of the farmer must be in full swing. The year of nature is fixed; the year of the calendar, the beginning of which marks the beginning of yet another year to be counted among the years of history, can be said to begin at any date the people choose to fix. We are told that the ancient Egyptians, the Phoenicians, and the Persians, began their year at the autumnal equinox. September 21. The Greeks until 432 h.c, began the year at the winter solstice, December 21 ; at the date mentioned the Greeks made the summer solstice, June 21, their New Year's Day. The ancient Romans began the year at the winter solstice, December 21, until the Julian Calendar trans- ferred it to the first day of January.
The usual day in mediaeval Christianity was March 25 ; but in Anglo- Saxon England it was December 25. William the Conqueror's coronation is said to have fixed it at January i.
Sir Norman Lockyer holds that counting the year as beginning in or with May was an earlier practice than counting it as beginning with the solstice, June 21. As a matter of astronomical observation, there are great advantages in the solstitial year, for the sun rises at the same point of the horizon for three successive days, which is of course not the case with the first or any other day of May. He would therefore regard a circle with a solstitial alignment of its axis as later in time than a circle in the same neighbourhood with what we may call a Beltane alignment. At the same time he points out that the earlier method had an advantage of its own which the other lacked ; it fixed two intermediate days in the year, the one the day on which the sunrise reached that point when its progress was northward, the other the day on which it reached that point on its recession southwards. He is of opinion, as we have seen, that he has found in Aberdeenshire evidence of an intentional alteration of the alignment, to convert a circle from a May-year circle to a solstitial circle.
The farmer's year began with the full flush of vegetation which opened at the beginning of May. This was in pagan times naturally ushered in by worship specially concerned with flowers. These May Day celebrations go very far back in time. We still deck our cart-horses and dray-horses with gay ribbons on May Day; and up to a few years ago, drivers still continued to have flowers on their whip handles on that day. Our name of the month May is taken from the Romans, who offered sacrifice on the first day of the month to Maia, the mother of Mercury, and went in procession to the grotto of Egeria. F"rom the 28th of April to the 2nd of May they kept the festival of Flora, the goddess of flowers. To marry in the spring time would naturally be taken as propitious to the fruitfulness of the union ; but the festival of the wandering ghosts of the unhappy dead, the Lemuria, was observed on the 9th, I ith and 13th of May, whence presumably we have Ovid's warning "'tis ill to
40 Duneclit Antiquities
wed in month of May." Few of the pagan " superstitions " are more alive in the present day than this.
A very learned Frenchman, M. Ruelle, has published lists of the divisions of the year according to the farmer's year, divisions corresponding to the principal processes of agriculture, in ancient Greece and ancient Rome. The two countries agreed in the main, differing only by a day or two. The com- mencement of summer, autumn, winter, and spring, was marked by the Greeks by May 6, August 1 1, November lo, and February 7 ; by the Latins by May 9, August 8, November 9, and February 7.
There would appear to be some rivalry in importance in those early times between May Day with its special ceremonies and May 6 or May 9 as the beginning of summer and of the year. We have a very curious hint which appears to have reference to this rivalry. Jamieson in his four-volume Scottish Dictionary has a large collection of records and traditions under the general heading of "Beltane." He gives the following early Scottish proverb: — "You have skill of man and beast, you was born between the Beltans," that is, he adds, the first and eighth of May. The Gaelic name for Beltane is bealltainn. It is now known not to have any connection with Baal, Bel, or Belus, nor with the Gaelic tcini\ fire. Its origin and its primary meaning appear to be beyond the skilled etymologists. The Scottish quarter days were Beltane, Hallowmas, Candlemas, and Lammas. In this connection. Beltane is the first day of May.
The most complete account Jamieson records of the modern survivals of Beltane observance is taken from the Beltane proceedings at Callendar in Perthshire. There the company of holiday makers marked a little trench round a portion of the moor sufficient to hold the party. The beltane cake was cooked at the beltane fire and was cut into as many pieces as there were persons present. One piece was daubed with charcoal. They then drew the pieces as lots, and the one who drew the daubed piece was called the beltane carlin. He was made to jump over the fire ; was pelted with the shells of the eggs which had formed the beltane feast ; and for some weeks after was spoken of as one dead.
Eggs always formed part of the rural feast of Beltein. It is said that the Gauls called the sun Bel or Belus in consequence of their communication with the Phoenicians. The symbol of the egg might also be borrowed from them, for they represented the heavenly bodies as oviform, and worshipped an ^^v in the orgies of Bacchus, as an image of the world. The Persians celebrated the day by presents of eggs. Plato in the Timaeus, that strange collection of queernesses, speaks of the universe — not the world — as egg-shaped. Our own King Alfred, in his translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, where the Timaeus is summarised so far as the creation of the universe is concerned, introduces in his metrical Lay the idea of the ^%%-, which Boethius had not
The Circles as Astronomical Observatories
41
included in his summary. Alfred applies the simile of the t.^^ to the universe with our earth as the yolk, and gives it thus in his rugged verse': —
Tliou hast established King of war-hosts, The earth so firmly Naught to one side ; This way nor that way By naught upheld It is equally easy For this earth of men This is most like The yolk in the middle, Around outside. Still in its station. The stirring floods, While the gleaming shell Every day,
through Thy strong might,
in wondrous wise
that she inclineth
nor may she sink
more than was wont,
of earthly nature.
upward or downward
to move at will.
to an egg, where lieth
yet the shell moveth
So standeth the world
with the streams round it,
the air and stars,
round all glideth
and long hath done so.
We, Christians, rightly congratulate ourselves on our emancipation from the superstitions of paganism. The more thoughtless among us make light of the pagan methods or supposed methods of marking the flight of time. The more careless among us are inclined to be amused at the earnestness or supposed earnestness of our far off predecessors in their endeavours to make very sure of the right day for their special worships in each year. We have our almanacs, which tell us in each year which of the possible days is Easter Day, and not one in ten thousand even thinks of any anxiety as to the correctness of the day fixed. We have our wrist watches by day, our repeaters at night. It is well for all of us now and then to imagine all such helps completely swept away; to imagine ourselves feeling that our daily food, our life itself, absolutely depends upon the punctuality of our propitiation of the powers of nature, whether malevolent or beneficent. In such a frame of mind, we cannot without a feeling of mystery, of solemnity, gaze upon, meditate upon, the configurations of collected masses of stones, set with precision in regular order, with marked characteristics varying in various districts, all telling we know not in its fulness what of the many purposes of those who set them up. We cannot but feel that very much of the thoughtful parts of natural religion which the collocation of the stones represents has passed away and eludes our attempts at reali.sation. The mind that dwells long and seriously on such questions becomes inclined to hold that no suggestion of purpose is too abstruse for possible acceptance. It is wholesome to set before ourselves, for careful comparison, the druid priest
' See King Alfred's version of Boethius, by Ur \V. F. Sedgefield, Oxford University Press, page 213; and King Alfred's Books, by Bishop G. F. Browne, S.P.C.K., page 342.
B. D. A. 6
42 Dunecht Antiquities
working his circle with infallible certainty to determine times and seasons, and to mark the flight of time by day and night, and Alfred the Christian King burning his candles.
Among the many questions which force themselves upon the mind when these Aberdeenshire circles are visited on a large scale is this : — Are the stones, other than the Recumbent Stone and Flankers, set round the circle on a uniform plan, or are they dotted about here and there on the circumference in a rough and ready way ? It will have been seen from previous remarks that so far as practical results are concerned this question does not matter much, for the magician would soon learn the astronomical bearings of his stones even if they were casually placed. But it would be of great importance to the general question of traditional placing if it could be shewn that the stones are placed by rule. The rough observations and measurements we had made were decidedly in favour of some general rule of placing, a rule probably not carried out with mathematical accuracy. For " probably " the general effect of our observations would be to suggest " certainly."
We ventured to enter into communication with the Principal of the University of Aberdeen, of which Lord Cowdray was Lord Rector, with a view to obtaining some scientific evidence on this important point. Sir George Adam Smith most kindly entered into the suggestion and communicated with the Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dr Niven. Two of the assistant members of the staff of that Faculty, Dr Fyvie and Dr Geddes, came out to Dunecht and made a rough survey of the three nearest circles. They came again a few days later and made accurate surveys, drawing out the three plans which are re-produced on smaller scale in Plate L The circles were Midmar, Sin Hinny, and Castle Fraser.
The method of testing the orderliness of the placing which was suggested was kindly accepted by them. It was, to regard the Recumbent Stone and Flankers as lying in a tangential line, the middle point of the Recumbent Stone being the point of touch. From that point, as closely as it could be identified, measured lines were taken to the several stones of the circle, and the angle of each line to the tangential base line was taken accurately. That seemed a simple plan of determining the answer to the main question of placing by rule. An astronomical question of high importance was involved, obviously, and therefore the line of true north was added. In this connection we may state here what has already been stated, that Sir Norman Lockyer rates two of these three circles, Midmar and Sin Hinny, as unaltered solstitial circles, with a normal line to the north-east, and the third. Castle Fraser, as a stellar circle, with an azimuth N. 20° 51' E., and a date either B.C. 1680 or B.C. 570. Thus Midmar and Sin Hinny should be alike in the placing of the stones, if a general rule was in use, while the placing of Castle Fraser might perhaps be e.xpected
The Circles as A stronomical Observatories 43
to differ from the others. As a fact, however, Castle Fraser and Sin Hinny are much more alike on our scientific plan than either is with Midmar.
It should be noted that though Sir Norman describes the Midmar circle as preserved intact, that remark can only apply strictly to the Recumbent Stone and Flankers. The circle was evidently completely tidied up when its area was included in the new kirkyard. The ground was completely levelled and laid in gravel. The stones are for the most part of no great size. The distances from one another are of such character that one cannot say with precision how many there were on the circumference of the circle. It is quite possible that some of them were lying down, as in other cases, and were removed while the ground was being levelled and set up again rather by guess as to where they originally were, presumably without any idea that important astronomical questions might depend upon the correctness of their replacement.
Looking at the plans for Sin Hinny and Castle Fraser, we see that the tangent lines are practically equally inclined to the true north ; a difference of one degree under such rough conditions being negligible. The first stone on the left has fallen at Castle Fraser and the place where it stood is not certain ; there is a difference of 7 degrees between the alignment of its supposed place and that of the standing stone at Sin Hinny. The second stone is missing at Castle Fraser, and here as at Midmar we have no comparison with the Sin Hinny stone.
The third stone is present in all three circles, and the angles 113°, 114°, 1 15°, may be taken as unmistakably the same angle.
The next stone is missing at Midmar. The angles 96° and 97° at the other circles may be taken as the same angle.
The next stone is missing at Castle Fraser. The other angles are 88° and 80°. The angles as between one stone and another are so much alike as to suggest a general rule. I suspect a wrong replacing of the Midmar stone.
The next stone is present in all the circles. The angles 69", 66°, 62°, are at least interestingly alike.
There remain three stones at Sin Hinny, two at Castle Fraser and two at Midmar. Again the placing at Midmar seems doubtful ; its 40° is curiously like the Castle Fraser 41° for the last stone but one, but its 10° for the last of the stones is too far off the Castle Fraser 19° to be regarded as roughly on the same plan. The Sin Hinny 12° may fairly be equated with 10° at Midmar. The two Sin Hinny 51° and 31° take the place of the one Midmar 40° and the one Castle Fraser 41°. That is, the Midmar stone and the Castle Fraser practi- cally bisect the angle between the 51° and the 31° of the two Sin Hinny stones. Inasmuch as we can scarcely — if at all — fit in twelve stones in all at Midmar and Castle Fraser, this looks like a rule that if there are eleven in all, the last
6—2
44 Dimecht Antiquities
but one, the tenth stone, shall bisect the angle between the tenth and the eleventh in a twelve-stone circle.
These three plans thus raise very interesting questions, the solution of which may serve to raise the opinion of the skill and knowledge of our pre- decessors even higher than we have on other grounds put it.
Is it too much to suggest that a learned University might make similar plans of some of the other circles which have some of their stones remaining besides the Recumbent Stone and Flankers? Of those which we have ourselves visited and measured, Tomnagorn, Cothie Muir, and Loanhead of Daviot, suggest themselves as the most suitable. When that has been done, the question of the astronomical uses of the placing, by a magician standing at the centre of the Recumbent Stone, or more probably at a fixed point at the centre of the circle as is suggested by a flat stone there, could be entered upon, or, possibly, dismissed from consideration.
We have seen that Sir Norman Lockyer rates Sin Hinny and Midmar as solstitial circles, which means that the normal line points to the north-east, and rates Castle Fraser as a stellar circle, with azimuth N. 20° 51' E. There is on the face of it a decided difference between these conclusions and the evidence of the plans which we give. In those plans we are faced with the fact that the base line is at practically the same angle with the true north line at Castle Fraser and Sin Hinny. That gives the same alignment to these two circles, whereas Sir Norman makes one of the two solstitial and the other stellar. The plans give the two azimuths N. 35° E. and N. 34° E., both stellar. The plan gives the Midmar azimuth N. 49° E., which is solar and nearly solstitial.
These differences are a cautionary indication of the difficulty of accurate measurement with the best modern instruments and the best modern calcula- tions. They may serve to warn us of the difficulties our far off ancestors must have had in erecting the stones in exact accordance with the plans which we are now fairly entitled to assume that they had.
Since these four chapters were written and paged we hav^e received a curious confirmation of our views from Colonel Tilney, whom we quoted on page 27 and shall quote again in connection with cup-marking on our stones. He writes: — "When I was working out the problem of how to read the heavens at night as an accurate compass, the first step I took was to find out how natives, Indians, Arabs, backwoods-men, know their way and time at night. In the course of my investigations I came across a half-caste who was in the feather trade, and who had spent many years of his life in Western and Central Africa. He told me of ' native circles ' of trees, not stones, by whose aid the priests could tell the time at night, the date, the time of the year, as well as give true bearings. This statement has since been confirmed to me personally by travellers and natives."
CHAPTER V Dun Echt, or The Barmekyn of Edit.
Origin of the name Echt. — Description of the fortifications.^The name Barmekyn. — Barbicans. — Barbacanes at Tripoli, Tyre, Pisa. — The Crusaders. — The gold coin of Islam. — Importance of the site. — Dr John Hill Burton. — The Catertuns. — The Norman Dykes. — Professor John Stuart. — Mr James Skene. — The Old Statistical Account. — Dr J. Mitchell. — Remarkable noises " on the toppe of the hill of Duneycht." — Gavin Douglas's Bramkin of Troy.— Paper by VV. Douglas Simpson. — Fortifications of Benachie. — The parish of Echt. — Its Druidical Temples. — The House of Echt and Housedale. — Successive owners.
Before we enter upon a description of the Stone Circles in the neighbour- hood of Dunecht, it will be well to say something of the outstanding feature of the neighbourhood, the Barmekyn of Echt.
Taking Echt to be a great chieftain's name, possibly an early form of the name we know as Hugh, we may take Dun- Echt as the original name of the almost royal fortress which we call usually by its later, and as we shall see oriental name, the Barmekyn of Echt. A different derivation of the name Echt will be found at page 50.
Our Plate II shews the condition of one of the stone walls as seen from above; Plate III shews or endeavours to shew the tops of the concentric stone walls and turf walls, as seen from below.
The large area enclosed by the innermost stone wall was planted with trees long ago, and some time ago the trees were cut down. The trunks had to be brought down through the several walls. It is needless to say that almost irreparable mischief was of necessity wrought by this forced passage through skilfully contrived fortifications. But after spending some hours of intent study of the principle of the fortifications, there is no difficulty in describing their main features.
There have evidently been three to five chief gateways in each wall, 9 ft. or 9 ft. 6 in. in width, and smaller entrances of about 4 ft. 6 in. When you get through the outer gate, you are in a sunk trench with the next wall blocking your way, with no gate in sight. You turn to the left or the right along the sunk way between the two walls to look for a gate. You find here and there a low stone wall along the middle of the ditch, which would force an enemy to go in single file, the full breadth of the ditch from top of wall to top of wall being 15 ft. Here and there, too, there are stone projections on one side or the other, all preventing a rush of a mass of men. Finally you come to a gate in the inner wall, its approach from the ditch being hampered as before. Having got through this second gate you proceed as before to look for a third gate, your way hampered as before. When you get to the stone walls, you see on one side or on both sides of the front of the gateway, the
46 Dimecht Antiquities
remains of a semi-circular recess, in which a man could stand as guard by day or by night. This specially interesting feature does not appear to be mentioned in any of the printed accounts. After further zigzaggings you get through the fourth wall, and then after one more voyage you find one of the final gates of entrance to the great central area, which is rather elliptical than circular. The distance between the fourth and the fifth walls is 36 ft. from top of wall to top of wall, in place of the 15 ft. between the other walls. The innermost wall shews a height of about 9 ft., the next to it 6 ft.
We made the distance between the inner base of the innermost wall and the outer base of the outermost to be 100 ft., and the dimensions of the interior space about 300 ft. from north to south and rather less from east to west. But the dimensions of the interior space were not carefully taken'.
The word Barmekyn, variously spelled, is said to be derived from " the Norman Barbican." To those of us who know the gates of the City of York, two at least of which, the Walm Gate and the Mickle Gate, still retain their Barbicans, anything less like a Barbican than the Barmekyn of Echt cannot well be imagined. Those Barbicans are long narrow battlemented porches to the main gate, themselves having portcullis gates at their entrance. The besiegers had to fight their way through the outer gate and through the long straight stone approach before they could get at the gate of the city.
But the name and the idea of "barbican" go much further back than any such buildings as the York Barbicans. It is understood to have been an arab name, or moorish. One Willebrand of Oldenborg, who wrote an Itinerary of the Holy Land in the year 1211, gives a description of the Barbicans of Tripoli and the Barbicans of Tyre. The Barbicans (in the plural) of Tripoli are described thus : — " Certain special sinuous barbicans make the approaches to the gates intricate." Of Tyre Willebrand tells us this: — "There are five various gates disposed here and there by which is the entrance to the city. Those who enter by them find the way so intricate that they seem to be wandering about in the labyrinth of Daedalus." It would be difficult to find a better description of the way in to the central portion of the Barmekyn of Echt. Still earlier, in 1 156, the History of Pisa tells us that in that year they made barbacanes round the city. We may fairly take it that in the sinuous Barmekyn of Echt we have the oriental name brought back by the Crusaders of 1096 or 1 147. No doubt its idea and its construction were earlier than its name, and are an evidence of real skill in fortification among our primaeval Scottish folk. It is an interesting coincidence that at Tripoli, as at Echt, there were five gates to be got through before you came to the real entry of the city.
' In the careful paper mentioned on page 49, the roughly circular space is given a diameter of 340 feet.^
The Barmekyn 47
There is another coincidence, of an unusually remarkable character. We have suggested that Crusaders may have brought the knowledge of the oriental barbacanes to Scotland, and applied the name to the fortifications of the Dun of Echt. We should naturally not expect to find in our time any definite evidence in favour of the presence in this part of Aberdeenshire of travellers from oriental lands in the times of the Crusades. The first important Crusade set out in 1096 and failed in four or five years. In 1823 there was dug up at Monymusk', about six miles north-west of the Barmekyn, a coin of Islam, struck at Marakash (Morocco) in the year 491 of the Hegira, that is, a.d. 1097, the year of the arrival of the Crusade.
Dr John Hill Burton, in his History of Scotland (1867), describes in his first volume, pages 94, 95, the difficulties, natural and constructive, which the Roman invaders of Caledonia had to face and overcome in their progress northward, after leaving the great strath through which the Isla flows to meet the Tay.
Having pushed past the vitrified fort which guards the entrance to Glen- Isla, they found themselves in the north part of Forfarshire, at the entrance to the Grampians. This, the only entrance, was strongly guarded by two fortified conical detached hills, the two Catertuns, the one called the White Catertun, because the concentric fortifications on it are of stone, the other the Black Catertun, because its concentric fortifications are of turf. The White Catertun has four concentric rings of stones, the innermost with a diameter of about 80 paces. The external ring is composed of large loose stones, 100 feet thick at bottom and at least 25 at top. It is surrounded by a ditch, and a single earthen breastwork surrounds the ditch.
When this entrance was forced, and the Romans got through and over the mountains, they had passed, as Bede tells us (H. E. iii. 4), the boundary which divided the Southern from the Northern Picts. They had reached the territory now known as Kincardine and the Mearns. Professor John Stuart, writing in 1822 on the progress of the Romans to the Moray Firth, takes them on to Stonehaven, and thence across the Dee to the Norman Dykes, which he regards as a corruption of Roman Dykes. He found there a great camp of 80 Scots acres. He takes them up by way of Inverurie, in the neigh- bourhood of which they must have made a great camp, and there were facing the great fortifications on the top of an insulated hill, eight or nine miles from the Norman Dykes — the Barmekyn of Echt.
Dr Burton, in his account, passes straight from the Catertuns to the Barmekyn. Some 40 miles north from the Catertuns, he says, at Echt in Aberdeenshire, the detached conical hill called Barmekin is crowned by a fortress of five concentric ramparts, in some respects the rival of the Catertun.
' New Statistical Account, Monymusk.
48 Dunecht Antiquities
The ramparts are not so vast, but they are in a higher state of preservation. There are some remnants of a face of masonry, built of course without cement, as if the ramparts had been not mere heaps of stones but regularly built. The device for covering the entrance by zigzagging it through the several ramparts is still visible.
When Professor Stuart wrote of the Barmekyn in 1822, as stated above, Mr James Skene proceeded to examine in detail this "very interesting remnant of antiquity, of which no plan or notice has been hitherto laid before the public." His paper follows Professor Stuart's paper in Arch. Scot. ii. Some of its details will be found on page 52.
Curiously enough, a long notice of the Barmekyn had appeared more than twenty years before James Skene said that no notice had been laid before the public. The account appears in the description of the Parish of Echt in the Old Statistical Account of Scotland, about the year 1798, written by Mr Henderson, the Minister of Echt. We must take Mr Henderson's remarks, in text and notes, on the Barmekin of Echt in full, being glad to have an account of its condition 1 20 years ago, especially as he says definitely that tradition is silent on this remarkable series of works.
The remains, he says, of two dry stone walls, and of three ditches without these, are distinctly visible. The walls and the ditches are all circular.
The inner wall appears to have been about 12 ft. thick, the outer only five or six. The circumference of the inner wall is about 330 yards, that of the outer ditch about 500. The distance between the inner wall and the inner ditch is about 16 yards ; between the inner wall and the outer ditch about 36. There are five different entrances into the area enclosed within the inner wall ; one on the E., one on the S., one on the S.W., one on the W., one on the N. All the entrances are in an oblique direction. The outer wall is said to be of more modern erection than the inner, and to have been made by stones taken from the inner wall, as a fence for trees which one of the proprietors of the estate of Echt planted in the last [17th] century on the summit of the hill, but of which there are now no vestiges remaining. This seems not improbable, as it is much more entire than the inner wall, and besides there is no entrance left through it into the inner area, although all the five entrances above men- tioned are very perceptible through the ditches and the inner wall. On the S. of the Barmekin, and at a distance of about two furlongs from the foot of it, Mr Henderson states that there is one cairn, or large heap of stones ; and another on the N. at the like distance.
Dr J. Mitchell of the University of Aberdeen carefully e.xamined the Barmekyn in 1825, and reported on it. At that time the five concentric walls were in a better state of preservation than now. No cement had been used, but where the walls were best preserved, they were found to exhibit a regular
The Barmekyn 49
structure of masonry, squared and fitted with skill, particularly at the gateways, of which there appeared to have been three on the south side and two on the north. Dr Mitchell found that while "the general breadth of the access was nine feet, it was narrowed by the enclosing walls of the traverses to three feet only, and was commanded by the rampart above." The inner rampart shewed greater care and strength in its structure, being at least 12 ft. thick at base, and several feet of its height remained entire. The interior enclosure was nearly circular, 300 ft. in diameter, about one acre in area. This must evidently mean an acre Scots, for a circle with radius of 50 yards is not far off 8000 square yards, and the English acre is 4840 square yards. Miss Maclagan gives on Plate XI of her book' a considerably larger area of enclosure than this. She gives to each of the four ditches a width of 15 ft., to the innermost stone wall a base 1 2 ft. thick, and to the other walls only about half that thickness at base.
There is a very interesting account of remarkable noises heard " upon the toppe of the hill of Duneycht, or to write truly Dun Picte," where were "to be seen old ruined walles and trenshes which the people by a receaved tradition affirm to have been built at such tyme as the Pictes wer maisters of Marre." The noises were "the beating of drumms, the taptoos giving first the Scottish marche, then the Irish march, then the English marche." Those who had been "much of ther lyves abroad in the German warres affirmed that they could discerne by ther hearing upon the drumme the marches of French, Dutch, Danes &c." "The Laird of Skeene and his lady, the Laird of Echt, &c., and my owne wife then living ther in Skeene all that winter" heard the noises frequently. The full account is to be found in Gordon's History of Scots Affairs, vol. i. pp. 56-58, Aberdeen, 1841.
We find a very interesting use of the word which we call Barmekyn in Gavin Douglas's translation of the .^neid. At the point where the Greeks breached the defences of Troy to admit the wooden horse,
Quhat will 36 more? The bramkin down we rent, And walles of our ciete we maid patent.
That is, they got through the outer defences, and came in view of the actual city walls. We owe this reference to Professor R. A. S. Macalister.
Since this account was passed for press, I have been favoured by Mr W. Douglas Simpson, M.A., F.S.A. Scot., with a reprint of a paper by him on the Barmekyn of Echt in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (vol. vi. Fifth Series, 1919-20, pages 45 to 50) of which Society I was for many years a Fellow.
Mr Douglas Simpson's paper is full of interest. His measurements are very careful, and his plans most helpful.
1 Hill Forts, Stone Circles, etc. Edinburgh, Edmonston and Douglas, 1875. B. D. A. 7
50 Dunecht Antiquities
The fortifications on Benachie are outside the purpose of this present book. But Benachie is so marked a feature of our district, and the fortifications are of such extraordinary interest in themselves, and present so many curious problems, that it seems right to direct the attention of any one who is con- sidering the general antiquities of the district to Miss Maclagan's full and valuable account on pages 32-38, and that lady's remarkable illustrations on her Frontispiece and Plates I, II, III, and IV.
The parish of Echt.
The Reverend Alexander Henderson tells us in the Old Statistical Account that
" The parish is nearly square, 4 miles each way. The Forbeses sold the estate of Echt about 1730 to the late Earl of Fife, who settled it on his second son the Hon. Alexander Duff the present (a.d. 1794) proprietor. He removed his place of residence in the year i 768 from the old house at Echt to House- dale, about two English miles off, where he built a commodious house and offices and made out a garden of two acres, a great part of which is surrounded with a stone and lime wall of about 12 feet high. He also enclosed and culti- vated about 80 Scotch acres of moor, and planted 1 50 acres of hill ground with Scotch fir, pine, larix, oak, beech, mountain ash, &c., and they are all at present in a thriving condition."
"There are in the parish the remains of three Druidical temples." In connection with the existence of these three Druidical temples in the parish, it is well to note the concluding sentence of Mr Henderson's report 126 years ago. "Little of the parish is enclosed, except Mr Duff's farm at Housedale above mentioned." Enclosure means stone walls, and stone walls mean Druidical temples broken up to build walls.
Echt, as we saw in our account of the Barmekyn, is supposed to have been a personal name. The Minister who wrote the New Statistical Account of the parish remarks that its name is said to be from Each, a horse, because when a Caledonian army was in great straits for water, a horse pawed at a particular place, and they dug there and found water.
The actual spot where this is said to have happened is within one of the walls of the Barmek)n, where the ground is still wet. Lord Cowdray had the place excavated but nothing was found. The stones of the wall are specially well laid just there, as though it was a well-known source of water in the times when the Barmekyn was used as a fortress.
We have remains of the three Temples in the parish of Echt. But there is little left of two of them, and the third appears to have been of a type unlike the others in the neio;hbourhood.
Temples in Edit Parish
51
Plate V shews three fine stones on the farm of Wester Echt. They are evidently on the circumference of a very large circle. Taking normal lines from the centre of the chord between each pair, the point of intersection, which gives the centre of the original circle, is at least as far from the three stones as the whole diameter of many of the circles.
The tallest stone is 9 ft. high, a massive stone, evidently a flanker reft of its companion and the precious charge they used to guard. In a collection of stones at its inner base there are two, of two feet each, set against it as the props — if they be merely props — are set against recumbent stones, as we shall see at Auquhorthies. These three stones are survivals of a great monument, which must have been very fine, shewing up on a magnificent plateau. Even as only three standing stones, they shew up well from the Echt Lodge of Dunecht House. When all the stones were there, the effect must have been noble. It is on record that there used to be nine of them, the other six being
Figure i. Recumbent Stone and Flanker, Wester Echt (from an old drawing)
removed some 80 years ago, according to an old man who in 1900 re- membered them as a boy.
But, fortunately, we have a drawing of the stones shewing them as they were in 1822. From this it appears that the missing stones were not there a hundred years ago. The drawing was published by James Skene in his article on the "hill-fort of Barmekyn of Echt," in Archceologia Scotica, ii. 324, Plate 8. It is reproduced in Figure i. Our view of the three stones was meant to be taken from the same end as Skene's drawing. As it is, the different positions of the middle stone have a puzzling effect. In Skene's time the recumbent stone was still in existence, and a marvellous great block it must have been. The two stones lying near are presumably the two props which an unusually wholesome instinct induced the stone-breakers to preserve on the spot. Mr Skene gives the diameter of the circle as 96 ft., and the dimensions of the stone we now call the recumbent stone and he calls the Altar Stone as "10 ft. by 6 ft., above ground."
2 2 Dunecht Antiquities
Mr Skene records that "on the skirts of the Barmekyne itself there are three Druidical circles still existing, two on the south side and one on the north, which last has the misfortune to encumber a cultivated field, a situation it has little chance of enjoying long. That on the south side of the hill, being the largest and most entire, is so successfully buried under a clump of trees as to have rendered any examination of it perfectly unsatisfactory." We must be careful not to confuse these three Druidical Temples near the Barmekyn with the remains of three Druidical Temples with which the Old Statistical Account credits the parish of Echt. Mr Skene's three appear to be Wester Echt, on the north of Barmekyn, and Sin Hinny and Midmar on the south. Mr Henderson's appear to be Wester Echt, Nether Corskie, and Garlogie.
Mr Skene's three Druidical circles on the skirts of the Barmekyn puzzled Mr Stuart, the author of the Sculptured Stones. Writing of the original site of the stone at Dunecht, shewn in our Plate LI 1 1, in his Plate 124 in his second volume, page 69, he says, " I was desirous of examining these stone circles in connection with the site of this stone. But a personal search which I made, and a more thorough one made by order of Lord Lindsay among the wooded slopes was unsuccessful."
The second relic of a Druidical circle is at Nether Corskie.
The two stones shewn on Plate V stand in a field on the left side of the road leading from Waterton of Echt to Castle Eraser. The local interpretation of the name makes it mean the lower end of the " crossing " by which people went up the hill towards the Don. The farm house at which the passer up the hill emerges on to the Castle Eraser road is called Upper Corskie.
They are handsome stones, the one over 12 ft. high, the other 7^ ft. They are only 10 ft. apart, and they are clearly the flankers of a recumbent stone which has completely disappeared, as have all the other stones of the circle. The alignment of the normal line would be at least considerably to the north of north-east. There is a large cup on one of the stones, but the most remarkable feature is a pair of large mirrors, a foot across, or a mirror and its case, one with the usual two-ringed handle, and with a comb. It is unnecessary to emphasise this very curious fact of the incision of one of the regular Pictish figures upon a pillar of a stone circle, of which we shall have much to say later on. The advanced stage of decay of the surface of the stone may be taken as evidence of a very early date for the incision of the mirrors.
The third Druidical Temple in the parish of Echt is presumably the "Standing Stones of Echt" at the eastern extremity of the parish, south of Garlogie. There is not a recumbent stone, and the tallest stones of the eight are to the north. Mr Ritchie has enabled us to give a representation of this circle, Plate XXXIV.
Former owners of Echt 53
We can add something to the passage quoted on page 50 from the Old Statistical Account.
An Alexander Forbes of Echt had a daughter married to Alexander Burnet of Leys about 1455. In April 1469 we have a charter by John Earl of Marr and Garviach to John Forbes, grandson and apparent heir of Marjory Stewart, Lady of Echt, of the lands of Echt released by her in his favour. She was a granddaughter of the Wolf of Badenoch.
The only relic left of the old House of Echt, at Old Echt a short half mile west of the cross roads in Echt, is a doorway in a garden wall. The Forbeses appear to have built Housedale, the present gardener's house of Dunecht, and made the gardens. Above the door of entrance in the garden wall, in immediate connection with the house, there is inscribed on a dressed stone tablet
A.F. K.M. 1705
This was 90 years before the Old Statistical Account, and 63 years before the Duff proprietor is said to have moved from the old house of Echt to Housedale. The initials are those of Alexander Forbes and Katharine Melville his wife, married at Edinburgh 21 February 1696. She had been the wife of Thomas Dunbar of Grange and thus by Scottish custom was designated Lady Grange, a title well known in Scottish history. The Forbeses sold Housedale in 1726 to William Duff of Braco, the great money-lender of the century in that part of Caledonia. His career was remarkable. He was born in 1697, married Jean Grant of Grant in 1728, two years after his purchase of Housedale or its transfer to him in connection with his money-lending. In 1735 he became Baron Braco, and in 1759 Earl of Fife, both in the peerage of Ireland, and in September 1763 he died. Jean his widow wrote a letter from Housedale, apparently her dower house, on June 6, 1787, signing herself "J. Fife." She died half a year later, January 16, 1788, aged 82. She was the mother of the second and third Earls. Her son Alexander, the third Earl, on whom her husband had settled Echt, married a daughter of a neighbour, George Skene of Skene, and his grandson James, the fifth Earl, succeeded to the estate of Skene, and was created Baron Skene of Skene in the United Kingdom. His son Alexander William George, the three leading family names, was sixth and last Earl of Fife and first Duke. He married Royalty.
Echt and Housedale and Dunecht House passed away from Forbeses and Duffs, and after a time came to the Premier Earl of Scotland, the 19th Earl of Crawford, who made Dunecht House a magnificent structure, with a lovely Italian Church as the Chapel of the House. From a vault under the Chapel the Earl's body was stolen, and was not recovered till the second year after the death. A monument has been erected at the spot in the grounds,
54 Dunecht Antiquities
near the house, where the body was eventually found buried. The inscription, dated 1882, runs thus :
Astra Castra
Numen Lumen
Munimen
[Heaven my stronghold
The Lord my light
My defence.]
The Forbeses, too, could write or quote Latin. Under the initials and date given on the previous page there are incised the words
Haec corpiis sidera mentem
The verb which should have begun the next line, stating the effect of the gardens or the fruits on the body and of the stars on the mind, is not given.
CHAPTER VI
An early Report on Aberdeenshire Circles. — Lustration by water. — The Sin Hinny Circle. — Cup-marking. — Excavations at Sin Hinny. — The Midmar Circle. — The Seat of Justice. — Standing Stones as places of assembly. — The Circle at Castle Fraser. — Outlying monoliths.
We may fitly begin our descriptions of Aberdeenshire Circles by giving a copy of an early paper in Archceologia Scotica i. 314, by Dr James Garden, Professor of Theology, King's College, Aberdeen, on the Circular Stone Monuments in Scotland. Read Dec. 4, 1766. The mention of "the broad stone toward the south " should be specially noted. The second of the circles mentioned appears to be Old Bourtree Bush.
" Two of the largest and most remarkable of these monuments that ever I saw are yet to be seen at a place called Auchincorthie, in the shire of Mernes, five miles distant from Aberdeen.
" One has two circles of stones ; whereof the exterior circle consists of 1 3 great stones, besides two that are fallen and the broad stone towards the south, about three yards high above ground and 7 or 8 paces distant one from another, the diameter being 24 large paces. The interior circle is about 3 paces distant from the other, and the stones thereof 3 feet above ground. Towards the East of this monument, at 26 paces distance, there is a big stone fast in the ground and level with it, in which is a cavity partly natural and partly artificial, that will contain I should guess, no less than a Scotch gallon of water.
" The other monument, which is full as large if not larger than that which I have already described and distant from it about a bow-shot of ground, consists of 3 circles having the same common centre. The stones of the greatest circle are about 3 yards and those of the lesser circles about 3 feet high above ground, the innermost circle 3 paces diameter and the stones standing close together.
" Such stones are called Standing Stones, Law Stones, Temple Stones."
It may be as well to state here that we do not propose to deal with the questions raised by Dr Garden's special description of a cavity which would hold a large quantity of water. It must suffice to say that lustration by water was a very wide spread feature of initiation into pagan religions, and may have been a regular practice of the pagan priests before entering upon their sacri- ficial functions. The thought of the laver of the Tabernacle and the Temple naturally occurs as an illustration. At Preasmaree, St Maelrubha's Grove, near Contin Church and in the grounds of the Mackenzies of Coul who use it as
56 Ditnechi Antiquities
their burial place, there are three circular basins on the upper edge of a great stone forming one side of an enclosure which has evidently been the Saint's sanctuary. The Minister of Contin has most kindly sent the dimensions of these basins. The stone itself is 5 ft. 8 in. long. 2 ft. 10 in. high, and i ft. 5 in. broad. The dimensions of the three basins, which lie on the narrow top in a straight line west to east are as follows,
(i) 10 in. wide, 5 in. deep,
(2) 1 1 in. wide, 4f in. deep,
(3) 10 in. wide, 2\ in. deep.
We may further preface our description of the circles by reproducing a sheet of drawings of "Altar Stones" and Flankers (Plate IV) in ten of the circles we are to mention, and ground plans of two others. For this plate we are indebted to Mr A. L. Lewis and the authorities of the Anthropological Institute, in whose Journal, vol. xx.\. New Series in. 1900, pages 56-73, a paper by Mr Lewis appeared on The Stone Circles of Scotland. At pages 67-70 Mr Lewis deals with a special type in Aberdeenshire, not found elsewhere so far as he knows, with a " so-called altar stone." He remarks obiter that it never could have been an Altar Stone ; why, he does not make clear.
Description of the Circles at Sin Hinny, Midninr, and Castle Fraser.
The Circle at Sin Hinny. Plates VI and VII.
We take first the unusually complete circle in a small wood on the farm of Sun Honey, some three miles from Dunecht. No circle has been more discussed than this. Its name of Sun Honey is the phonetic spelling of the pronunciation of Sin Hinny; which is itself corrected by an official archaeo- logist into Sean Hinny. This Gaelic correction has not the authority of Colonel Forbes Leslie, who knew the circle and the locality intimately. We shall write it Sin Hinny. After our visit to this circle, we found an excellent description of it by Mr F. R. Coles, Assistant Keeper of the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, in their Proceedings for 1899- 1900, vol. xxxiv. pages 1S1-187.
To reach the circle you go about a mile and a half from the Kirk of Echt towards Midmar, and turn up a farm road to the right, which brings you very near a little wood on your left, containing the circle. It is about three-quarters of a mile from Midmar Castle.
The recumbent stone and its supporters are shewn on Plate VII. and the whole circle on Plate \'I. A careful e.xamination of Plate VI is required
Silt Hinny, Midmar, Castle Fraser 57
to discover the recumbent stone and supporters or flankers among the trunks of the trees on the right hand, and such of the nine other stones of the circle as are not hid by trees or stones. Sir Norman Lockyer makes the aHgnment solstitial, that is, north-east. Some remarks on the placing of the stones in this and other circles will be found at pages 42-44.
Colonel Forbes Leslie gives a drawing of the recumbent stone and flankers and three others of the stones in his Early Races of Scotland, vol. i. p. 2 1 5, A tinted drawing preserves the mystery of the stones better than a photograph does. Colonel Forbes Leslie has rather exaggerated the relative heights of the three pillars other than the flankers.
The recumbent stone is given by Mr Coles as 17 ft. 4 in. long, four and a half feet broad and two and a quarter thick, and as weighing 12 tons'. The theory is that it formerly stood on edge, and has long ago fallen forwards. On many accounts this is probable. A large piece has broken away from the right-hand corner of the top, and now lies on the ground in front. The stone is of unusual quality, close-grained grey granite, all of the standing stones of the circle being of the ordinary red granite of the district. The flanking pillars are very fine. The measurement of their height depends very much on where one stands. Mr Coles gives their height as 7 ft. 6 in. and 6 ft. 8 in. As at Midmar, from one position they appear to approximate to 9 ft.
The nine standing stones other than the supporters of the recumbent stone are set on a bank, so that you rise as you approach the ring of stones, and descend again when you enter the circle. The features of the interior space are noted in the description of excavations which follows this account.
There are gradations of height in these nine stones which cannot be accidental. As always, the flanking pillars are the tallest. The two stones to west of them are 6 ft. and 5 ft. 10 in. high, the two to the east are 6 ft. 9 in. and 6 ft. 8 in. high. Of the five others, three are 5 ft. 3 in., one is 4 ft. 6 in. and one 4 ft. 5 in. The stone to the east of the recumbent stone and its flankers is square and flat topped. The distances of the nine stones from one another vary from 25 ft. 6 in. to 20 ft. 4 in. The stones nearest to one another are the shorter stones ; it is worthy of note that the shortest lie from north to east.
The circumference is not an exact circle. Its longer axis is from the northernmost to the southernmost stone, 87 ft. 6 in. The shorter axis is from north-west to a little south of east, 81 ft. 6 in. The recumbent stone and its flankers face towards the north-east, that is, towards the sunrise on Midsummer Day. We shall see as we go on what very wide bearing that fact probably has. The fact that this, like many of the circles, is not an exact circle, renders our use of the phrase " the centre of the circle " doubtful.
' As we shall see, Stuart gives the dimensions as upwards of i6 ft. long, 4^ broad, 3 thick. My own note of length is 15 ft.
B. D. A. 8
58 Ditnecht Antiquities
In vol. xxii. of Archcrologia, Soc. Ant. Lend., at pages 198-203, there is a communication from Mr James Logan, F.S.A. Edinburgh, to the Society of Antiquaries of London, " On several Circles of Stones in Scotland." Among other circles which we shall have to mention, Mr Logan describes and gives a drawing of the circle at Sin Hinny. His drawing is very clear. It shews all of the twelve stones. His measurements should be compared with those of later times. They are as follows. The "altar" is 16 ft. 4 in. long, 4 ft. 6 in. broad where broadest, and 2 ft. 9 in. high; the flankers 7 ft. 6 in. and 6 ft. 7 in. high. The average distance of the stones from one another is 19 ft. Part of the "altar" has been broken off, and lies beside it. The date of the paper is 1827 ; it was published in 1829.
One feature of the recumbent stone is very marked: it has some very bold cup-markings. I had a rubbing taken of these in the autumn of 19 19, from which our Plate VIII is made. As we shall see, this Plate introduces a question of high interest which deserves a chapter to itself, Chapter XIII.
This is not the place for a discussion on the many possible meanings and uses and occasions of the cup-marking of stones upright as well as recumbent, for which we find no conceivable connection with any Christian rite. But inasmuch as we are specially interested in the antiquities of this district, it is of interest to state that when my valued colleague, the late Romilly Allen, published his important paper on cup-markings on Scottish stones, while he recorded large numbers of cases in Inverness and other neighbouring counties, he only recorded six cases in Aberdeen, of which this was not one. Since that time many other e.xamples have been found. Mr Ritchie of Port E^lphinstone has photographed a considerable number in the district under consideration. In a few cases they look very much like charts of a constellation, in one case with a ring round prominent stars. I mentioned this astronomical resemblance in a lecture at Dunecht House in the autumn of 1920 in connection with this stone at Sin Hinny and the rubbing I had had made. Colonel Tilney, who has been quoted on pages 27 and 44, was one of the house party and went the next day to examine the stone. He reported on his return that he had found the Great Bear on the stone. It will be seen that our Plate VIII, which was being made at the time from the rubbing of the year before, has stellar resemblances. This point is carried further in Chapter XIII.
Mr Coles attributes the cups at Sin Hinny to the weathering of the stone, not to artificial production. He points out that there are not the marks of instruments, as in some cases he tells us there are. But the rapid rotation ot a hard round-pointed piece of stone, helped by the application of sharp sand, would not leave any mark of instruments. Mr Coles very justly points out that if the recumbent stone once stood on its edge, almost all of the hollows would be under ground. It may be replied that that would have protected
Sin Hinny, Midmay, Castle Fraser 59
the stone from being cup-marked by weathering. But it is a more substantial reply that we do not find the recumbent stones of these circles embedded in the ground; they have been laid on the hard surface, often hardened by a bedding of stones, keeping their upright place by their own great weight.
Another objection by Mr Coles is that there are no rings round the cups. But that would be fatal to a vast majority of our cup-markings. On this point, the 31 stones shewn in Mr Romilly Allen's paper lead to very conclusive results. Sixteen of the stones have no ring, some of them with crowds of cups. Fifteen have one ring or more. Three of those with a single ring have crowds of cups without rings; and on the whole there is an immense preponderance of ringless cups over ringed cups on stones that have any ring at all. We may safely dismiss the absence of a ring as any suggestion of the cup being due to weathering.
Curiously enough I find in the same volume of the Proceedings of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries, of which I was for many years of my active work a member, an article by myself on the cup-markings of the Saj di Gorone, with an illustration from a photograph by one of my daughters. The Saj [saxum) di Gorone means the Stone of the Heel. It is a micaceous boulder, lying on the moor near Gignese, above Stresa, in the neighbourhood of Mottarone. The peasant girl who told me its patois name shewed me that the lower lip of very many of the countless cups on the sloping sides of the boulder had been partially worn away in the course of long time, leaving the appearance of a little amphitheatre into which a small heel would fit. It may be noted that in Inverness-shire the cups are known as " Fairies Foot- marks." There were no rings round the cups, and there was no sign of tool marks.
We can carry the idea of a heel a little further. There is a horizontal flat slab of mica schist near Zmutt in the Zermatt valley, 10 ft. by 7^ ft., about 2^ ft. thicks The stone is called the Heidenplatte, "the flat stone of the heathen." It has about 100 circular hollows on its surface, from 8 in. to 2 in. across, and from 3 in. to half an inch deep. The tradition in Valais is that the Heidenplatte was the stone on which the pagan orators stood to address the assembly round them, and the rotation of the orators' heels produced in the course of time these hollows ! It must be added that in a large pro- portion of the ringed cups shewn in Romilly Allen's paper, the ring is only carried half round the hole. This produces exactly the appearance of the print of a heel shod with iron.
We may now extract from the first volume of Stuart's monumental work on the Sculptured Stones of Scotland (Spalding Club) an account of excavations at Sin Hinny some seventy years ago.
' Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London, 8 December 1898.
8—2
6o Dioiecht Antiquities
Circle at Simhoney, Stuart i. xxi.
Tliis circle, in the parish of Midmar, is situated on a coinnianding eminence, from which tlic tjround falls away on all sides. The British Hill-fort of the BarmekjMi of Echt is about a mile distant towards the north-east. The circle is entire, and appears to be slisjhtly raised above the surrounding ground, and consists of twelve stones of the red granite of the district, except a long recumbent stone placed between two upright pillars on the south side, which is of a small-grained grey granite. The pillars are from five to seven feet in height, and the recumbent stone is upwards of sixteen feet in length, about four and a half feet in breadth, and three feet in thickness.
Within the circle there is a flat cairn, about sixt\-four feet in diameter, of stones, rai.sed ncarl_\- a foot above the rest of the area, and going down to the subsoil. In the centre of this cairn, through a part of it eight feet in diameter, were found deposits of incinerated bones, with some charcoal and black mould, but in no great quantity. This part of the cairn differed slighth' in construction from the rest, as the stones were not quite so closel}- packed, and were mostly marked with fire. At the outer circumference of the cairn, on the south side, was found what seemed to have been a deposit of some kind, as concave stones were placed so as to form a circular cist ; and some fragments, apparentl)' of a rude stone vessel, were found forming part of the enclosure ; but everj-- thing of animal substance had entirelj- disappeared. At the foot of several of the pillars, at a depth of from eighteen inches to two feet, flat stones appeared, similar to those which arc generally found placed above and under the cinerar}' urns ; but any deposits which may have been inserted had entirely ilisappeared. The richness of the soil, a deep black loam, might partly account for this. All the soil appeared to have been brought into the circle, and, except in front of the pillars, seemed almost everywhere to cover quantities of stones, thougli these, except in the centre, were not disposed in a regular cairn. The soil seemed also to differ from that on the outside of the circle, in which stones onl\- occur occasionall\'. At the base of the pillars the ground seemed, in various cases, to have been dug down into the subsoil, so as to form a pit about two and a half feet in depth. A ridge of loose stones, like the foundations of a dyke, runs round between the standing stones. Some of the latter had a small semicircular pavement of stones in front of them, and thej- all stood on deposits of middle-sized boulder stones.
Th£ Circle at Midmar N^eiu Kirk. Platks IX .\ND X.
We \\\\\ take next the neighbouring circle of Midmar, which Hes in the churchyard o{ the present parish church.
The Kirk of Midmar was formerly in its natural place, near the Seat of Justice and near the ancient (and modern) site of the commanding fortress oi Midmar Castle. The Seat of Justice is shewn on Plate V^I. It is a re- markable mound or bass, of large dimensions, hollowed at top to such an extent that a large number of people could sit round the sides of the hollow. The sandy nature of the mound makes it uncertain whether the seat of the great man was in the centre or at one extremity of the hollow. The great mound is called in the immediate neighbourhood the "conygar," a name very
Sin Hinny, Midmar, Castle Fraser 6i
well known in many parts of England as meaning a rabbit warren. The first half of the word is obviously open to a larger meaning, the Coney Street in York meaning probably the King Street. There is another conygar in the neighbourhood of Midmar. On the Conyng Hillock at Inverurie, see page 122.
The Old Statistical Account, dating a few years before 1800, tells us (vol. ii. ch. 46, pages 516-526) that "all that part of Scotland which lies between Dee and Don was originally named Marr. The three divisions were Brae-marr, Cro-marr, and Mid-marr. The first name denoted the highest part, the second the lower and more cultivated, the third was probably due to its central position between the rivers, the church of Mid-marr being six miles from each of the rivers" Dee and Don. The account continues: — "There are three Druidical fanes in the parish. One of them, near the new church', is remarkably large. There is also an artificial mount, of considerable magnitude, which is now a part of the glebe. This mount is obviously a work of art. A ditch or trench that is cast round it is now covered with grass. From the bottom of the trench to the summit the perpendicular height is about 30 feet. The acclivity is gentle at the entrance, but steep in every other part. The middle part of the summit contains a cavity, with a small circular rising in the centre. Here, tradition reports, criminals were tried and justice was administered."
The presence of artificial or natural mounds of this character, in various parts of Caledonia in which stone circles are found, must tend to make us doubt whether the stone circle was really the universal place of community resort. A conspicuous mound, with the traditional name of a Seat of Justice, very near three prominent stone circles, tends to suggest that the circles there were not used as the seat of judicial proceedings, or had ceased to be so used. The Gaelic names for other mounds of this character tend in the same direction. Tom a' Mhoid is "the hill of the Court." Another name is Cnoc na h-eireachd, "the hill of the Assembly." These are local names in a district which has stone circles.
It does not appear probable that the same people set up at the same time both cnocs and circles. If they were not set up at the same time, the laws of evolution suggest that the separate judicial seat is later than the circle at which the drtii had originally done justice among men as well as conducted the worship of the gods. Civil functions had in course of time been separated from ecclesiastical functions.
In a country comparatively bare of trees, as the parts of Caledonia now under consideration apparently were in early mediaeval times, these large erect stones would form a conspicuous mark. They were thus convenient meeting-
' The church thus described was built in 1787. The old church was inconvenient, the side walls being disproportionately low.
62 Dunecht Antiquities
places, and they might serve as permanent definitions of the boundaries of property. There are many evidences of their uses for these purposes.
The Register of the Bishopric of Aberdeen records (vol. i. p. 80) that William de St Michael and others are cited in 1349 to appear at a Court to be held at the Standing Stones of Rayne in the Garioch, on a charge of usurping lands and rights of the Bishop. They were to meet there, in the full court of the Bishop, the King's Justiciar benorth the Forth, ad unum diem legitimum per juris ordines ordinahmi apud stantes lapides de Rane en le Garniach\
The Register of Moray (p. 184) records that the Bishop of Moray and his attendants are summoned in 1380 to attend a temporal Court at the Standing Stones of Rait near Kingussie — quod co?npareant coram nobis apud le Standand Stanys de la Rathe de Kingucy.
The great Register of the Priory of St Andrew's has been lost sight of for more than two centuries. It contained (Stuart, Sculphired Stones, vol. ii. p. xxvi) a charter of a gift to the Priory by King Malcolm (probably Can- more) of lands of Keig and Monymusk. One of the lines of march ran up to Standing Stones near a place with a long name meaning, the charter says, "the plain of sweet m'\W"— usque ad Stantes Petras juxta Albaclanenauch, quod Latine sonat campus dulcis lactis; probably Achadh-leamhnacht, field of sweet milk. We return to this when we describe the circle of Auld Keig.
The Bass of Inverurie, Plate VI, much larger than the Midmar Seat of Justice, stands magnificently on a level plain, is a great feature in the Vale of Urie, and it too is called a Seat of Justice. Some one was wise enough, generations ago, to create a legend that if ever excavations were made on this remarkable Bass, the ancient family of Keith would come to an end. Ex- cavations are not made. The Bass is safe. " Bass," by the way, is apparently not a Gaelic word. It seems to mean much the same as the word "boss," a knob. In some parts of Scotland, a foot-stool is called a "bass," but that may be due to the plaited matting with which it was covered.
While the Keith legend saves the Bass of Inverurie, an old song is supposed to prophesy its destruction,
When Dee and Don run both in one And Tweed shall run in Tay The bonnie water of Urie Shall bear the Bass away.
But to those who know the keen rivalries of Dee and Don, and Tweed and Tay, the oracle reads Never. There is another saying apposite to our purpose,
Ae fit o' Don's worth twa o' Dee Unless it be for fish or tree.
It seems to be so for " Druidical fanes."
' The proceedings are described under the head of Old Rayne, page 91.
Sin Hinny, Midmar, Castle Fraser 63
Near the end of the eighteenth century, the old kirk of Midmar, near the Seat of Justice, was pulled down. From a very interesting connection of ideas, the builders of the new kirk deserted the curious hollow where their church had stood, and went up the rising ground to the spot where the original place of worship of their community had been, a large level space on which stood and still stands the Stone Circle of Midmar, with its great recumbent stone and tall flankers. They built the modern kirk between the circle and the road, leaving the circle untouched, and continuing to bury in the old kirk- yard. In 1 9 14 they made a new burial ground round the new kirk. They removed the turf from the circle and laid the area in gravel. We are assured that they did not move any stone. The circle is complete on its south and east sides. Towards the west and north there are two stones still standing, leaving room for three stones, possibly for four to complete the number of twelve, including the recumbent stone.
That stone and its flankers are very fine. The recumbent stone is a little over 14 ft. long and is thick and massive, 4 ft. thick and 3^ ft. high above ground. Mr Coles was informed that it weighs 9 tons 3 cwt., but its dimensions suggest more. The flankers are well over 8 ft. high, and more than that if they are measured from outside the circle; the other stones range from 7 to 3 A ft., but the shortest stones are evidently mere dwarfed survivals. The larger stones are near the recumbent stone. Of course the levelling of the ground has removed all traces of banks and mounds, and probably has lessened not inconsiderably the height of some of the stones other than the flankers. In- deed, as has been said above, the flankers themselves shew higher from the non-levelled ground outside the circle. The recumbent stone faces, we cal- culated, about north-east. In a wood on the