Hill o' Many Stanes

The name

People

• A

  Alexander Thom

  Proposed in 'Megalithic Lunar Observatories' (1971) that the rows functioned as a Bronze Age lunar observatory

Cultural influences

• Caithness-Sutherland stone-row tradition — the site belongs to a distinctly northern Scottish group of multiple low stone rows, a form with no parallel elsewhere in Britain.

Connections

• C

  Caithness and Sutherland stone rows

  One of more than twenty similar multiple-stone-row sites known across these two northern counties

• S

  Stone rows of Brittany

  Cited as a comparable (though much taller) tradition of stone rows outside Britain

In culture

• In 'Megalithic Lunar Observatories' (Oxford University Press, 1971) Alexander Thom argued the rows served as a Bronze Age lunar observatory tracking the moon over an 18.6-year cycle — though none of the twenty-plus similar Caithness and Sutherland rows has been linked to astronomical use, leaving the claim much debated.

What to look for

• The roughly 200 upright stones, none taller than a metre, set in rows down the incline.

• The fan-shaped layout — the rows run approximately north-south but are not parallel, splaying outward across the slope.

• The long northward view: on a clear day the hills of the Banffshire coast can be seen across the Moray Firth some 80 km away — the sightline at the centre of Thom's lunar-observatory argument.