Old Keig

Also known as:
Auld Keig and The Old Kirk O' Keig
Nearest town:
Inverurie (17km ENE)
OS reference:
NJ597194
OS sheet:
37
Latitude:
57° 15' 48.7 N
Longitude:
2° 40' 5.51 W

Images

Image of Old Keig (Stone Circle) by ruskus

I know I’m biased, but I love (this picture of) Old Keig.

Image credit: ruskus
ruskus
ruskus Dec 19, 2018
Image of Old Keig (Stone Circle) by Nucleus

Old Keig lies in a mystic little grove
Visited June 2011

Image credit: Uwe Häberle 06/2011
Nucleus
Nucleus Nov 4, 2017
Image of Old Keig (Stone Circle) by GLADMAN

Don’t be fooled by benign appearances – these young ‘attack cows’ charged soon afterwards, forcing me to take sanctuary upon the recumbent... plenty of room, however, as the rucksack emphasises.

Image credit: Robert Gladstone
GLADMAN
GLADMAN Mar 19, 2016
Image of Old Keig (Stone Circle) by Nucleus

Although Old Keig is quite damaged, the recumbent and the spot makes sure, that you won’t regret a visit!

Image credit: Uwe Häberle 06/2011
Nucleus
Nucleus Jun 28, 2011
Image of Old Keig (Stone Circle) by Nucleus

This is really a huge and heavy recumbent stone

Image credit: Uwe Häberle 06/2011
Nucleus
Nucleus Jun 28, 2011
Image of Old Keig (Stone Circle) by faerygirl

If your’e not quite sure where it is, youre losing light fast, and the snow is waist deep in the field, Old Keig can be quite a trek...

faerygirl
faerygirl Feb 21, 2010
Image of Old Keig (Stone Circle) by greywether

From just outside the circle showing the recumbent and flankers and the only other upright stone (2.9m).

greywether
greywether Mar 22, 2005
Image of Old Keig (Stone Circle) by Moth

The trees make the circle difficult to photograph. Also difficult to spot the fact that the ground is strewn with cowpats from the devil’s own satanic herd....

Yes I know the photos don’t quite fit together!

Image credit: Tim Clark
Moth
Moth Aug 30, 2003

Articles

Old Keig

Jane
Jane Jul 30, 2006

To reach Old Keig you first have to climb over a nasty barbed wire fence (be careful! I cut my leg!) and trespass down through a narrow strip of copse. The farmer clearly doesn’t want visitors. The stones are set onto a spur of land in a rolling wide valley – a fantastic location. All that is left of the circle stones at Old Keig is a jumble of large broken stones which have been moved and dragged about and hidden in undergrowth. But the recumbent and flankers are just too massive to move or hide. With some effort I clambered onto the gigantic recumbent and paced it out – 6 paces long! It’s also noticeable flat and straight along the top.

The feeling of trespass didn’t leave me, however, especially as we were being watched only metres away by an equally gigantic snorting red bull with testicles the size of footballs and a Mike Tyson look his eye, held back only by a line of barbed wire.

Old Keig

greywether
greywether Mar 22, 2005

You have to close your eyes to the mess elsewhere in the circle but the recumbent and flankers here are a joy to behold.

It happens to be the heaviest recumbent (53 tons and nearly 5m long) but what really makes it special is the recumbent’s smooth outer face and the level top.

From inside this circle you can get a good impression of that classic RSC outlook. The recumbent just below the horizon with the flankers breaking the horizon line. A window through which to view the moon.

Access. Merrick has given the directions. I’ll just add that there is a disused roadside quarry providing a handy parking place opposite the point where you enter the wood.

Visited 16th March 2005

Old Keig

Merrick
Merrick Aug 7, 2000

(notes from the recumbent stone, 2 July 00)

Yet again a slender antiquarian copse leads from the road to the stones, like at New Craig, Dunnydeer and others. These copses appear to be of roughly the same age, too. Who planted them? They seem deliberately planted to protect the stones from farmers like the trees planted on Wiltshire hilltop barrows. As if to prove it, here at Old Keig an arc extends back from the recumbent and flankers in a good approximation of the position of the circle, and no tree stands within the precinct. On the south side there’s a gap of forty or fifty metres so the south-western view is unobscured, save for a single stout tree that protects the recumbent from close-up farming! (The present farmer’s thrown field clearance boulders between the tree and the standers, a metre from the recumbent).

These copses have the feel of a BBC Sunday evening TV drama Avalonian/Narnia enchanted grove. The excited and expectant roar of thousands of buzzing insects up in the canopy of the trees fed this enchantment as we approached.

And there they stood, the epically proportioned stones. As at Dunnydeer, there’s only the recumbent and flankers. And as at Dunnydeer, it’s all that’s needed to generate a real sense of the scale of this massive circle, and a very potent sense of place. This huge recumbent stone feels so serene, centre of a wide and peaceful 270 degree landscape with the peaks of Bennachie poking up at the north-east and a fort-topped (therefore anciently sacred?) hill of The Barmkyn immediately behind.

We’re slowly discovering that the Modern Antiquarian’s directions of ‘requires an OS map’ can mean ‘not on a path’. Initially I envisioned that line as meaning three-mile slogs across hill and bog, but it’s definitely been used liberally. Old Keig certainly doesn’t need one at all. From the B992 take the western road out of Keig, there’s a farm on your left after a mile, then 400 metres later a thin line of trees on your left, perpendicular to the road. The stones are 200 metres down from the road in those trees.

Also, The Modern Antiquarian describes as subjective a thing as atmosphere at a site in such ‘factual’ terms, and I’ve been sceptical; surely a lot of it’s to do with the state of the observer, what you already know/don’t know of the area and the history, the weather, the season, the surrounding crops, etc. And yet I’ve found it to be invariably correct. At Old Keig ‘the peace overlooking the valley is as though the world has long stopped,’ is precisely and completely right.

Sites within 20km of Old Keig

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