Qualla: Aikey Brae Stone Circle

Aikey Brae Stone Circle: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.0. It weighs about twenty-one and a half tonnes. It lies on its long side, oriented just so, between two flanking uprights with the long axis pointed between south and south-west - and it has done so since the Bronze Age. The recumbent stone at Aikey Brae is one of the largest in Aberdeenshire, and the ring it anchors is one of more than seventy recumbent stone circles found nowhere on Earth except a small patch of lowland Aberdeenshire and the south-west of Ireland. Whatever its builders intended, they built it for the long term. Nearly four millennia later, it is still doing whatever it was meant to do.

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Image: CC BY-SA 2.0

Aikey Brae Stone Circle: Crowns of Stone

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0. Recumbent stone circles are a Scottish invention. The defining feature is the recumbent itself - the largest stone in the ring, laid horizontally on its long side rather than driven upright like the others. Its long axis points always between south and south-west. The two stones ...

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Image: Bill Harrison | CC BY-SA 2.0

Aikey Brae Stone Circle: The Site on Parkhouse Hill

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Derek Gray, CC BY-SA 2.0. Aikey Brae crowns the summit of Parkhouse Hill, near the village of Old Deer in the Buchan country east of the Aberdeenshire town of Maud. The circle is between fifteen and sixteen and a half metres across. Five stones still stand, including the great recumbent; five more lie fal...

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Image: Derek Gray | CC BY-SA 2.0

Aikey Brae Stone Circle: Red Stones, White Stones

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0. When Chris Ball and Richard Bradley excavated Aikey Brae in 2001, they uncovered something the surface had hidden. The ring bank around the circle was edged with kerbstones, and the kerbstones alternated by colour: red and white, red and white, like teeth in a circling mouth. For...

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Image: Bill Harrison | CC BY-SA 2.0

Aikey Brae Stone Circle: Astronomers Without a Calendar

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the 1980s the archaeo-astronomers Clive Ruggles and Aubrey Burl came north and measured Aikey Brae with the rest of the Aberdeenshire recumbents. The pattern they had been chasing held: the recumbent stones all looked out toward the segment of horizon where the moon rides at t...

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Image: Bill Harrison | CC BY-SA 2.0