Undiscovered Scotland

 

It was rather a surprise to stumble across a stone circle we'd heard nothing about only a mile from where we've lived in Livingston for over two decades. It's been more of a surprise to be able to find out very little about the circle. There is no on-site information and an appeal on a local Facebook group unearthed little of substance. The circle appears to be called the Stones of Livingston, and appears to have arrived on the scene in the context of the development of Livingston as a new town from the 1960s onwards. Certainly it doesn't feature on old OS maps, so the one thing that is clear is that it's not ancient in origin.

And that really is about it. The setting is superb, beside the Lochshot Burn a little north-west of Livingston Village. We describe the circle in a little more detail below, but if you know more about how it came to be here we'd love to hear from you at: info@undiscoveredscotland.co.uk. (Continues below images...)

 

The first think to say about the Stones of Livingston is that they are quite convincing. If you'd stumbled across them in Argyll's Kilmartin Glen, it would be easy to accept them as a genuine ancient monument.

What you find is a circle of nine vertical stones, each of up to a couple of metres in height. Within this outer ring is a circle of seven lower stones, which itself surrounds a central recumbent stone. We've seen this referred to as a sacrificial stone. There's another recumbent stone at the west end of the circle. The two recumbent stones seem to be of a different stone to the rest of the circle and are perhaps the aspect of the monument/installation/feature that is least convincing.