Temple Wood
The stone circles of Temple Wood are among the monuments of Nether Largie , southwest of Kilmartin in the county of Argyll and Bute in Scotland .
Overview
The chronology of the two monuments could not be fully established. First there was the north circle with a wooden henge . It was later replaced by stone pillars. The renovation seems to have remained unfinished. The following activities were directed to the Southwest District alone.
Important elements here were two small cairns erected outside the circle that contained stone boxes. The circle was formed by a completely closed ring. The spaces between the 22 large stones were filled with upright slabs. The circle was surrounded by a stone dam five meters wide, which also covered the external cairns. It cannot be determined at what time the three structures within the circle were built. There are two differently designed stone settings in the south and northeast, as well as the central cairn with the stone box. One structure is an oval circle made of plates with a diameter of 2.5 to 3.0 m. The other is a box-like setting made of six stones. The internal structures were ultimately also covered with rolling stones.
Southwest district
The slightly oval south-western stone circle measures 12 m × 13 m. It originally consisted of 22 flat menhirs up to 1.6 m high . Today there are 14, some of them as stumps. In the center of the circle is a stone box measuring 1.4 mx 0.8 m. Several burials were found in the box, in one of the stone settings inside the ring, and in the small boxes outside. A smaller stone in the largely destroyed southeast of the circle is the only one perpendicular to the circle. It measures 1.05 m in height, 1.0 m in length and 0.1 m in thickness. Two almost neighboring ring stones in the north are carved. One with only faintly recognizable concentric circles, the other with a double spiral that extends over two side surfaces. Two opposing stones (north and south side) are made of schist chlorite, the rest are made of a different type of stone. On the outer side of one of the stones there may be some small bowls (cupmarks). Two small cupmarks were discovered on one of the spacer plates.
The northeast district
An older stone circle, 10 m × 10.5 m in diameter, was discovered in 1979 a few meters away in the northeast. It was provided with a round stone embankment and markers to document the two phases. The older one is a wooden henge, which has been replaced by a ring of upright stones.
The South Cairn of Nether Largie is 250 m to the northeast and the menhirs of Nether Largie are about 300 m to the southeast.
See also
literature
- The Royal Commission on the Ancient and historical Monuments of Scotland: Kilmartin Prehistoric and Early Historic Monuments. An Inventory of the Monuments Extracted from "Argyll, Volume 6" . The Royal Commission on the Ancient and historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), Edinburgh 2008, ISBN 978-1-902419-03-9 , pp. 78-81
Coordinates: 56 ° 7 '24.7 " N , 5 ° 29" 55.4 " W.