Balbirnie Stone Circle

Ten stones once stood here in an ellipse of about 15 by 14 metres, set around a rectangular arrangement of slabs measuring 3.25 by 3.75 metres at its centre. Only five were upright when Graham Ritchie's excavation began; digging recovered the stumps of four more and the socket left by the tenth. Cremated bone lay beneath four of the circle stones. The rectangular slab setting and the ring itself belong to the earliest of three phases of use identified in the ground, placing the first work at the site in the late Neolithic, the closing centuries of the first farming age in Britain.

Later, cists — stone-lined graves sunk into the ground — were inserted inside the ring. Two of them had been given side-slabs cut from earlier carved stones, one bearing cup and ring marks and the other cup marks alone, so that rock art made for some other purpose was reused as building material. Grave goods included a Food Vessel, a pottery form of the earlier Bronze Age, and a flint knife. Wood associated with one of the cists returned a radiocarbon date of about 1330 BC.

In a third phase the cists were sealed beneath a cairn of stones that filled the interior of the ring to a height of half a metre. At least sixteen cremation burials were placed within that cairn. Radiocarbon dating of the land surface that had built up inside the circle gave a date of around 890 BC, and the excavators concluded that this last phase of use fell in the late second millennium BC, so the site was in use, on and off, across something like two thousand years.

The circle stood originally at grid reference NO 2850 0304. Ritchie excavated it in 1970 and 1971 ahead of a planned widening of the A92, and the principal features were afterwards re-erected a short distance away at NO 2859 0296, which is where they stand today. The monument therefore survives as a rebuilt arrangement rather than one left undisturbed in the position it was built in.

Balbirnie lies close to the ceremonial complex at Balfarg, and the two are treated as parts of a single prehistoric landscape. The scheduling document for Balfarg describes that complex, together with the stone circle at Balbirnie and other sites nearby, as forming one of the most important groups of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in eastern Scotland.