Tyrebagger stone circle

During the early Bronze Age, unidentified builders raised the circle on a spur of high ground above what later became Standingstones farm at Dyce, choosing a site with wide views toward other landmarks, in keeping with the practice seen across the many recumbent stone circles built through lowland Aberdeenshire in the same period, of which more than seventy survive today.

At some point before detailed record-keeping began, the circle was pressed into agricultural use as a cattle pound: its interior was dug out and the gaps between the upright stones were packed with loose stones, converting a monument built for ceremony or burial into a working enclosure for livestock on the farm below. When Ordnance Survey surveyors visited between 1865 and 1866, they recorded only ten stones standing, fewer than the twelve later reported, suggesting that some uprights had already fallen, been removed, or gone unnoticed by the surveying party during that earlier nineteenth-century inspection of the site.

By 1896 the circle was recorded as having twelve stones, alongside two nearby cairns, but that same year one of the two cairns was demolished, permanently removing part of the wider monument complex that had once surrounded the standing stones above Standingstones farm at Dyce, near Aberdeen. In 1900 the antiquarian Frederick Coles published a paper describing the site, which he called the standing stones of Dyce, confirming the count of twelve stones and adding his account to the growing nineteenth and early twentieth-century record of the monument's condition and layout.

The circle was taken into state protection as a scheduled monument in 1925, formally recognising it as a nationally important survival among the recumbent stone circles of northeast Scotland and placing legal safeguards on any future disturbance of the stones or the ground around them. A survey in 1961 found that one of the orthostats had cracked into two separate pieces, damage that stood unaddressed for decades until the broken stone was finally re-erected in 1999, restoring the circle to something closer to its historic appearance after more than a century of recorded change.

During the 2010s the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route was constructed nearby, bringing a major road scheme close to a monument that had already survived conversion to a cattle pound, cairn demolition, stone loss, and structural damage across more than a century of documented history.