The riddle of the stones
Set sail for Scotland’s Isle of Arran to puzzle over the enigmatic cluster of standing stones on Machrie Moor.
Who raised them? How? Why?
PICTURE THE SCENE: it’s midsummer on Stone Age Arran. The local tribe has risen early and has gathered to watch the first wisps of daylight pour through the mountain pass notched across the island.
As the fiery orb breaches the skyline, its rays land upon six stone circles precisely aligned on a wedge of open ground. The granite boulders sparkle and the russet pillars of sandstone start to glow, casting long shadows over the dewy turf. At least that’s how Machrie Moor might have looked around 4000 years ago on the Summer Solstice. We can only speculate what its incredible trove of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments meant to the people who made them.
Stone circles fascinate us. It’s not just their age, but the mystery and myths that surround them. Who raised them? How? And why? Moreover, they’re worth walking for.
Around 1.6 million people were drawn to Stonehenge in 2019, but though it’s preeminent among megalithic monuments, it’s far from being a one-off wonder. In Aubrey Burl’s authoritative gazetteer The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany, 1248 stone circles are listed in the British Isles, with 508 in Scotland alone. By far the most impressive are to be found on the islands: at Calanais on Harris, at Stenness on Orkney and on Arran. Six of them are clustered on Machrie Moor, a mile inland from Arran’s west coast.
If Stonehenge is the St Peter’s Basilica of prehistoric ritual sites, then Machrie Moor is a provincial minster – altogether less showy and more intimate, without the need for crowd control. They may not have the size or sophistication of the concentric, lintelled rings on Salisbury Plain, and may be a little worse for wear, but they beat them hands down in the mindful ambience and rugged backdrop stakes.
The assorted stones on Machrie Moor were first studied in depth back in 1861 by Irish geologist James Bryce, who numbered the circles from 1 to 5, while a further five monuments were numbered 6 to 10. Another circle was discovered submerged in the peat in 1978, becoming Machrie Moor 11.
Walking out to the stones from Arran’s west coast road, the first monument you encounter is probably one of the later additions to this ceremonial landscape, situated half a mile from the main site. Though it’s called the Moss Farm Road stone circle, it’s not strictly speaking a stone circle at all. What we can see today are the remaining kerb stones that surrounded a ring cairn – the tomb of a Bronze Age bigwig. They encircled a mound 20m across, made from heavy boulders set in sand, which would likely have covered a stone cist into which a crouched body was interred. In the 4000 or so years since the cairn was built its stones have been robbed out, most likely used in the nearby drystone wall. ▶
These graves marked a cultural shift in Bronze Age societies, as communal burial chambers gave way to monuments celebrating high status individuals.
The earliest signs of human activity on Machrie Moor begin around 3500BC. That’s where we’re heading next, by way of gorse clump and windblown tussock. Shortly the tumbledown buildings of Moss Farm hove into view, with the largest of Machrie Moor’s stone circles crowning the next rise. This double ring of squat granite boulders is called Fingal’s Cauldron Seat. Fingal – or Finn McCool as he’s also known – is the heroic Irish giant credited with building the colossal basalt causeway that once fused County Antrim to Scotland. Having bridged the North Channel, he was evidently feeling peckish and needed somewhere to rest his jumbo-sized cookpot. Local folklore also postulates that Fingal tethered his dog Bran to a hole in one of the outer stones while he ate.
Like the other circles arranged below it, it was probably preceded by a ring of timbers slotted into place around 2500BC. About 500 years later these were upgraded with specially selected stones from the local area. Easily the most striking are the three remaining upright slabs of sandstone of Circle 2, each weighing several tonnes. Centuries of rainfall have weathered them, leaving long vertical grooves streaked with lichen. Surveying their shapes and positions, it’s tempting to imagine they might relate to the geometry of landscape, aligning with Goatfell and the other high peaks of Arran soaring away to the northwest. We’ll never know for sure.
As with the other stone circles, it was left to us by Arran’s Neolithic islanders, who lived in a period when nomadic hunter-gathering gave way to more settled farming. Far from being isolated, they were well connected people living at a maritime crossroads with cultural links to Ireland and much of western Britain. They’d have exchanged tools made from local pitchstone with visiting traders.
Machrie Moor has only been partly excavated and archaeologists are discovering more and more about Arran’s prehistoric past all the time. Only recently lidar ground scans have revealed a Neolithic cursus about three miles to the southwest: a long rectangular earthwork that marked a processional way.
There’s much to mull over as you walk back. It’s always humbling, and brilliantly puzzling, to explore the places that obviously meant so much to our prehistoric forebears. It makes you wonder what of the world we know will prove curious to walkers in thousands of years.