Urban standing stones
Picture a standing stone and you will possibly think of a monument standing in wild, rural surroundings. Dr Kenneth Brophy takes us on a tour of urban standing stones, challenging us to reassess our connections with such monuments and the role they play in today’s world
At the time of writing, according to the National Record of the Historic Environment, there are 1,251 single standing stones recorded in Scotland. Almost all are prehistoric in origin, probably dating back to the 3rd or 4th millennium BCE, but some are more recent, ranging from Pictish carved stones, to medieval boundary markers, to miscellaneous post-medieval monoliths. Not all of these stones are still standing; some are little more than antiquarian footnotes from Statistical Accounts, victims of overly zealous farmers in past centuries. But the vast majority are still extant, even if not all in their original location or configuration. This is a substantial megalithic heritage measured in the thousands of tonnes.
You have probably walked or driven past some of these ancient relics, usually standing alone in a field or sitting proud on a hillside. They appear to us as inscrutable, defying time and endless weathering: some of these megaliths will have been illuminated by over a million sunrises.They carefully guard their secrets in the form of wonderful simplicity: they are nothing more than a stone that has been made to stand.What else is there to say? Excavation of the holes that standing stones occupy can lead to limited information – a radiocarbon date, some insight into the mechanism of erection – but little else to shed light on their original purpose or how scores of generations of passers-by have tried to make sense of them.
The complexity of standing stones lies not in their form or the contents of the sockets within which they stand, but in the rich biography of each standing stone that relates to their many human engagements. The standing stones that were Pictish, medieval and later more often than not were repurposed prehistoric monuments. Some standing stones may be the sole survivors of stone circles or stone rows, left to bear witness. It is in the stories about standing stones – how we have changed their form, meaning and setting – that we encounter true riches, rather than calculations based on isotopes or measurements to millimetre or gram accuracy.
Some of these standing stones are on a trajectory that has seen them closely entangled with the trappings of modernity. Rather than sited in fields or on hillsides as is the expectation (a stereotype), they are to be found in altogether different and surprising locations. Standing stones in town centres, suburbs, housing estates, the grounds of public buildings, industrial estates.