Qualla: Loanhead of Daviot Stone Circle

Loanhead of Daviot Stone Circle: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anne Burgess, CC BY-SA 2.0. The recumbent stone lies on its side, splitting lengthways along a natural weakness in the granite, looking now like two parallel slabs in the southern arc of the circle. It is angled slightly to the south, and the azimuth from the centre of the ring falls somewhere between 196 and 202 degrees - oriented, the archaeologists believe, toward the southern moon at its lowest standstill. On either side stand the flankers, tall pillar-stones marking the recumbent's place. Around them, eight orthostats complete the ring, twenty-one metres across. This is the Loanhead of Daviot, one of only a handful of recumbent stone circles in Scotland that still has every original stone in place. It was built in the early Bronze Age, on a ridge that catches the southern sky cleanly, and it has been receiving the dead ever since.

Image: Anne Burgess | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loanhead of Daviot Stone Circle: A Distinctly Northeastern Design

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0. Recumbent stone circles do not exist anywhere else in Britain, except in a handful of axial circles in southwest Ireland that may share their ancestry. They cluster in lowland Aberdeenshire - perhaps eighty rings total - all built to the same essential plan: a ring of upright ort...

Image: Bill Harrison | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loanhead of Daviot Stone Circle: Building the Ring

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Parnell from Scottish Borders, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0. Whoever built Loanhead chose the site for its view. The circle sits on a ridge above the village of Daviot in lowland northeast Scotland, with a long open horizon to the south. The eight orthostats on the eastern perimeter step down in height from south to north; those on the wes...

Image: Tom Parnell from Scottish Borders, Scotland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loanhead of Daviot Stone Circle: The Dead Beneath

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Wood, CC BY-SA 2.0. When Howard Kilbride-Jones led the major excavation of 1934, he came expecting to find the circle's central cairn and perhaps a few burials. What he uncovered toward the end of the season changed the site's meaning entirely. At the eastern edge of the excavation lay a cist, inter...

Image: Andrew Wood | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loanhead of Daviot Stone Circle: What You See Now

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Wood, CC BY-SA 2.0. Some of what stands at Loanhead today is restored rather than original. The western flanker had its top replaced in 1934-35; the eastern flanker, which had fallen, was reset in its original socket. In 1989 stones that had filled the centre of the cairn were removed, exposing an i...

Image: Andrew Wood | CC BY-SA 2.0