Calanais Standing Stones

The Calanais Stones, known in Scottish Gaelic as Clachan Chalanais or Tursachan Chalanais, stand on a low ridge above Loch Roag on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, with the hills of Great Bernera behind them. Historic Environment Scotland dates their erection to around 2750 BC, which puts them before Stonehenge.

The Gaelic names describe what the monument is. Clachan means stones or a group of stones; tursa, plural tursachan, is the standard Gaelic term across Scotland for prehistoric standing stones. Tursachan Chalanais therefore means the standing stones of Calanais, and the local visitor centre trust is named Urras nan Tursachan, the Standing Stones Trust.

Archaeologists call the main monument Calanais I, a numbering that distinguishes it from the many other stone settings around it — Callanish II, III, IV, VIII and X among them — known collectively as the Calanais complex. At least three other circles lie within a few kilometres, along with arcs, alignments and single stones, many of them visible from the main site.

The existence of so many monuments in one landscape implies that Calanais was an active focus for religious activity for at least 1,500 years. The most impressive of the neighbours, Callanish II and III, lie just over a kilometre to the south-east and originally consisted of circles of at least eight stones each.

The circle itself has thirteen stones and a diameter of 11.4 metres, and it is not truly circular — the east side is flattened, giving 13.4 metres north to south against 12 metres east to west. The stones average three metres in height and the ring encloses 124 square metres, which is small by comparison with similar monuments; nearby Callanish II is two and a half times the size.

The central monolith stands 0.8 metres west of the true centre of the circle. It is 4.8 metres high, 1.5 metres wide and 0.3 metres thick, shaped like a ship's rudder, and probably weighs about seven tonnes. Its largest faces are almost perfectly oriented north and south. Every stone on the site is of the same rock, the local Lewisian gneiss.

An avenue runs north-north-east from the circle for 83.2 metres, with 19 stones remaining — nine on the eastern side, ten on the western. The two rows are not parallel but fan out, 6.7 metres apart at the north end and 6 metres at the south. The stones diminish in height from the circle towards the middle of the avenue and then increase again, and those on the eastern side stand only three-quarters as high as those opposite.

Three further rows connect to the circle, from the east-north-east, the south and the west-south-west, of 23.2, 27.2 and 13 metres respectively. None of them is aimed at the centre of the circle. The east-north-east row points to a spot two metres south of the centre, the southern row one metre west of it, and the west-south-west row one metre south. That is a consistent near-miss rather than imprecision, and it is one of the more interesting facts about the layout.

A chambered tomb 6.4 metres long lies between the central monolith and the eastern stone of the circle. It was built later than the circle and is squashed in between them. Another stone cairn on the north-east side has been reduced to ground level, its outline barely traceable, and is not necessarily an original part of the site. Limited excavations between 1980 and 1981 provided some information on how the site developed. The earliest traces of human activity are a broad ditch, no longer visible above ground, which appears to predate the stones.

The stones are among the most important prehistoric monuments in Britain and are protected as a scheduled monument in the care of Historic Environment Scotland.