East Aquhorthies Stone Circle: Aberdeenshire’s Most Complete Recumbent Circle

Why this circle matters

Aberdeenshire has more stone circles than anywhere else in Scotland, and most of them have been robbed, toppled, cleared for ploughing or patched up by well-meaning Victorians. East Aquhorthies escaped all of that. Every stone is still in place and still standing, and none has ever been put back up. Adam Welfare, whose 2011 survey for the Royal Commission is the standard work on these monuments, singles it out as the only recumbent circle that survives complete in that way.

That makes it the best place in Britain to see what a recumbent circle was meant to look like. It sits on a gentle slope just west of Inverurie, with the long ridge of Bennachie on the skyline, and it is one of more than 400 recorded stone circles in Scotland that we have mapped on our standing stones and stone circles guide.

The stones, and why the colours matter

The builders were choosy about rock. Historic Environment Scotland notes that the stones seem to have been picked for their colour, and once you know what to look for it is obvious:

• The ring: eight broad stones of rough, pinkish porphyry, plus one of glowing red jasper standing next to the east flanker. Local tradition held that touching the jasper stone brought luck, and parts of its surface have been rubbed smooth over the centuries.
• The flankers: two tall pillars of grey granite, about 2.25–2.5 m high, standing either side of the recumbent. Three possible cupmarks have been recorded on the inner face of the left-hand one.
• The recumbent: a huge block of red granite, flecked with quartz, laid on its side. Its outer face has been carefully smoothed and its top is level. It is thought to have been quarried near Bennachie and dragged several miles to the site.
• The two blocks: two more large stones run back from the recumbent into the ring, almost at right angles, closing off a small space in front of it. This boxed-in area is one of the features that separates the Aberdeenshire circles from anything else in Britain.

The ring is graded. The stones rise from about 1 m on the north-north-east side to around 1.8 m beside the flankers, so the whole circle builds up towards the recumbent. The reddish stones cluster on the south-south-west side and the greys sit opposite. The ring is not quite round: a careful survey measured it at 18.4 m by 18.1 m.

In the middle there is a slight rise. Writing in 1934, the antiquarian Alexander Keiller recorded a cist covered by a capstone at the centre, which suggests the circle once held a cairn. It has never been excavated, so nobody knows what, or who, lies underneath.

The moon, the recumbent and Bennachie

Every recumbent circle puts its big stone in the same place: on the south to south-west side of the ring. Stand inside the circle and look out over the recumbent and you are looking at the southern sky, where the moon runs low along the horizon. The archaeologist Aubrey Burl found that the level top of the recumbent here lines up with the southern moonset towards the Hill of Fare.

The moon’s path shifts over an 18.6-year cycle. At the extremes of that cycle, known as the major standstill, its rising and setting points swing furthest north and south over the course of each month. Many archaeologists think these circles were built to frame the moon at particular points in that cycle, which would make them lunar monuments rather than sun temples. How precisely they were aligned is still argued over, but the consistent southern placing of the recumbent is not in doubt.

What a recumbent stone circle is

Recumbent circles are a purely regional tradition. They are packed into an area of Aberdeenshire roughly 80 km by 50 km, and almost none exist outside it. Counts vary with how strict you are. Welfare’s 2011 gazetteer lists 71, after testing 156 sites that had been claimed. Historic Environment Scotland’s Canmore database now classes 73 as recumbent circles. Older estimates by Aubrey Burl and Clive Ruggles ran as high as 99.

A group of circles in County Cork and County Kerry in Ireland also has a low stone opposite the entrance, and in 1909 they were called recumbent circles too. Since the 1970s Irish archaeologists have classed them as a separate type, the axial circles. They look alike, but they do not share the Aberdeenshire lunar pattern. Burl also saw Torhouse in Galloway as a possible link between the two traditions.

Excavated examples show the circles were used for the dead. At Loanhead of Daviot, 8 km to the north, digs found the cremated remains of at least 31 people. Many recumbent circles also enclose a low ring cairn, much like the cairns inside the circles at Clava near Inverness, the other great regional style of the north.

The circle through history

The name is Gaelic, but its meaning is disputed. It is usually given as “field of prayer”, while others read it as “field of the pillar stone”. The nearby farm is East Aquhorthies, which is why Historic Environment Scotland uses that name, while older books and many signs still say Easter Aquhorthies.

• 1829: James Logan describes the circle in Archaeologia, one of the earliest printed accounts.
• Between 1847 and 1867: a stone dyke, known as a roundel, is built around the circle, possibly using stones from the central cairn. The low bank you see today belongs to this period. It is not prehistoric.
• 1875: Christian Maclagan draws the site and argues, wrongly, that it was the base of a broch.
• 1884 to around 1889: General Augustus Pitt Rivers, Britain’s first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, takes an interest. His assistants measure and photograph the circle to build a scale model, which is now in the Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire.
• 1900: Frederick Coles surveys it carefully and finds it “in an excellent state of preservation”.
• 1920: George Browne finds the ring choked with whin bushes taller than a man.
• 1925: the circle is scheduled as an ancient monument. It passes into state guardianship in 1963.
• 1985: the stones are cleaned so casts can be made for an exhibition in Edinburgh, revealing details of colour that had been hidden under lichen. Later studies also noted that the ring has unusual acoustic properties.

The farmland around the circle has changed hands too. In recent years Aberdeen & Northern Estates marketed 87.75 acres at East Aquhorthies, including the field that holds the circle, at offers over £530,000. That makes no difference to visitors: the monument is scheduled and in state care, and public access is protected whoever owns the fields.

The circles around it

East Aquhorthies sits at the heart of the densest cluster of recumbent circles in Scotland. Within 10 km of it, Canmore records eleven more:

Distances are straight-line from East Aquhorthies. Several of these stand on private farmland, so check access before you set off. Further out, Old Keig (about 14 km), Midmar Kirk (about 15 km, standing inside a churchyard) and Sunhoney (about 15 km) are the best-known of the rest. Click a pin on the map for its Canmore record.

Stones that left their circles

Not every circle survived intact, and some of their stones turn up in surprising places. Two are close by.

The Brandsbutt Stone, 3 km away in a housing estate on the north side of Inverurie, is a Pictish symbol stone carved around AD 600, with a crescent and V-rod, a serpent and Z-rod and an ogham inscription. Historic Environment Scotland thinks it was probably a stone from a prehistoric circle before the Picts reused it. It was rebuilt from pieces found in a field dyke, so some missing parts have been filled in with cement.

The Lang Stane (Scots for “long stone”) stands about 1.8 m tall in an alcove at 10 Langstane Place in Aberdeen, just off Union Street, and the street is named after it. It already appears on Paterson’s map of the city of 1746, and “LANGSTANE” was cut into its face around 1850. Most likely it served as a medieval boundary (march) stone. Its base is shaped to a keel-like point, which is common on stones from the recumbent circles, and the local historian Fenton Wyness suggested in the 1960s that it came from a lost circle. Canmore lists it only as a possible prehistoric standing stone, so that story remains an open question.

Visiting East Aquhorthies

The circle is signposted off the A96 on the western side of Inverurie. Follow the brown signs west along minor roads to a small car park. It only holds five or six cars and coaches cannot use it. From there, walk a few hundred metres up the farm track to the circle; signs at the car park have given the distance as 400 m. The track is easy, but take decent footwear after rain. There is an honesty box by the gate for the upkeep of the access road.

Entry is free and the site is open all year. Without a car, Stagecoach buses 10 and 37 run to Inverurie from Aberdeen and Huntly, and it is a walk of a few miles from the town centre. The circle is a quiet place with no facilities, so bring what you need.

Making a day of it

Walk Bennachie. The hill the recumbent came from is the obvious companion trip. Forestry and Land Scotland’s Timeline Trail climbs from the Bennachie Visitor Centre to the granite top of the Mither Tap, with its Pictish-era fort. It is 6 km and about 2¾ hours, and it is steep, rough and slippery when wet. The visitor centre closes over the winter, so check before you go.

See the Maiden Stone. Near Chapel of Garioch, at the foot of Bennachie, stands a 3.2 m Pictish cross-slab of pink granite. It has a Christian cross on one face and Pictish symbols, including a mirror and comb, on the other. It is covered over in the winter months to protect it from erosion.

Walk two battlefields. Two of the north-east’s defining battles were fought within a few miles of the circle. Robert the Bruce crushed the Comyn Earl of Buchan at the Battle of Barra in 1308, and in 1411 the Lord of the Isles and the Earl of Mar fought the bloody draw of Red Harlaw just north of Inverurie.

A dram. Glen Garioch Distillery at Oldmeldrum, founded in 1797, is about 10 km north-east of Inverurie and runs tours. It is one stop on our north-east whisky trail.

Coffee. In Inverurie, Dreamy Goat Coffee Co. on North Street serves speciality coffee. Fly Cup on Burghmuir Circle is a community café serving homemade food, open on weekdays from 9am to 4pm.

Somewhere to stay. Macdonald Pittodrie House, a country-house hotel at the foot of Bennachie by Chapel of Garioch, is the obvious base for walkers. Inverurie itself has more modest options, and Aberdeen is half an hour away. For the wider area, see our guide to Aberdeenshire and the North-East.

Other great circles

If East Aquhorthies gets you hooked, the most spectacular circles in Scotland are in the islands: the cross-shaped setting of Callanish on Lewis and the huge henge of the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney. On the mainland, the biggest is the Twelve Apostles near Dumfries.

Sources

• Historic Environment Scotland — East Aquhorthies Stone Circle (visitor page and Statement of Significance); scheduled monument SM90126.
• Canmore — East Aquhorthies (site 18981); Lang Stane, Aberdeen (site 20073); Canmore Points open data, October 2026.
• Aberdeenshire Council Historic Environment Record — Easter Aquhorthies Stone Circle (MAB19076); Brandsbutt Stone (MAB18864); Maiden Stone (MAB19072).
• Adam Welfare, Great Crowns of Stone: The Recumbent Stone Circles of Scotland (RCAHMS, 2011).
• Aubrey Burl, A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (Yale, 1995).
• F. R. Coles, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 34 (1900).
• Forestry and Land Scotland — Bennachie Visitor Centre trails.