Aquhorthies stone circle

In 1692 the antiquarian James Garden visited the site at the urging of the English writer John Aubrey, who was compiling notes on stone monuments across Britain. Garden's account, however, confused Aquhorthies with its near neighbour, the Auld Bourtreebush stone circle standing in the very next field, an error that muddied the documentary record for later readers of his report.

During the 1820s the circle was recorded in drawings made by the antiquarians James Skene and James Logan, part of a wider wave of interest in Scotland's prehistoric stone settings that accompanied the antiquarian revival of the early nineteenth century. Their sketches preserve one of the earliest visual records of the stones before any further loss or disturbance took place.

In 1858 a group of local gentlemen and clergy, James Dyce Nicol, Charles Dalrymple, James Nicolson, Captain James Burnett, the Reverend Harry Stuart and Alexander Thomson, carried out an excavation of the site. They found the central cairn had already been plundered, but recovered fragments of burnt bone and sherds of pottery among the disturbed material within it.

Through the later decades of the nineteenth century the circle drew further antiquarian attention, with visits recorded from William Collings Lukis, Christian Maclagan, Robert Angus Smith, William Tomkin and Frederick Coles, each adding to the growing body of survey drawings and descriptions being compiled of recumbent stone circles across Aberdeenshire at the time.

The site was made a scheduled monument in 1925, giving it legal protection as a nationally important archaeological remain. By then the ring cairn at its centre had long since lost its mound down to bare kerbstones, and only fourteen of an original eighteen or more standing stones remained upright in the ring. In 1934 the archaeologist Alexander Keiller, a leading figure in British megalithic studies, noted that Aquhorthies displayed an atypical number of stones for a recumbent circle and that their heights alternated in an unusual pattern, observations that marked the site out among its many Aberdeenshire counterparts of the same type.

Later twentieth-century researchers returned to test the circle's geometry and origins: Alexander Thom surveyed the monument in 1955 as part of his broader study of megalithic sites, Clive Ruggles examined it for possible astronomical alignments in 1981, and a geological survey of the stones followed in 2006.