Coming down from St. Margaret's Hope take the other end of the Herston road, the one marked Sandwick and Herston and the stone is very obvious just a little downhill from the road. Nice, clear and calling for a photo. Couldn't see a setting but there is a dark green grass ring about that might be more. Uphill slightly back from that annular mound is a large boulder, the one mentioned by the NMRS I guess, which I naturally forgot to measure. I think there is another such boulder hidden in the grass about the same distance downhill of the stone. Perhaps there are more. Of course these might have the same origin as postulated for the NE arc at Clouduhall Cairn. Methinks in neither case are these boulders merely thrown up by roadmarking, for surely this would have been from some structure that would have been remarked.
1920 news reports place the cist discovered then, slightly larger than that of 1926, at the back of an old stone stump. One report places it in the mound and the other disna, but this is because one sees the mound as 18' diameter whereas archaeologists 'extend' this to 18m (a 1903 report records that ~20 years previously the O.S knocked a huge chunk off the top of this howe because it was too high !).
RCAHMS NMRS record no. ND48NW1 at ND43538957 is 8'6" high, 4'2" wide and 8-9" thick and has evidence of a setting. A cist found a few feet from the W side is now thought to be a reference to the cairn many metres away. An earthfast stone, not from a cist, lies 2.8m WNW.
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Posted by wideford
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