Standing Stone: OS Grid Reference - NN 98280 00061
Also Known as:
- Canmore ID 25931
- Home Farm
Castleton Standing Stone
Easier to locate if you approach from the Pool of Muckhart side: just off the A91, along a small lane that tells you it’s “Walking & Cycle Friendly”! A half-mile along, up the hill, watch out in the fields to your right, where a clump of trees are enclosed 100 yards off the roadside, before you reach the track to Castleton Farm. There’s a gate allowing access up the field, but you;re just as well asking at the farm, where the folks there are most helpful.
Archaeology & History
Originally standing to the west of the farmhouse, this large stone was moved and resurrected sometime in the 1920s to its present position. It’s another gorgeous standing stone in a truly beautiful setting, set amidst a richly coloured landscape breathing life all around you. I get one helluva good feeling when I visited this site, but it’s the cradle of the landscape itself with Law Hill, Gloom Hill and the Ochils stretching around here that does it to me.
The northern cup-marked side
Castleton standing stone, looking south
The stone is some eight feet tall, with a couple of its upright faces covered in what looks like cup-markings, but these are man-made and are entirely Nature’s handiwork. The site was first described in the 1859 Name Book as “a large standing stone about 8 feet high in the angle of the garden wall close to the W side of the farm steading, which gave name to the farm.”
Folklore
In the 1859 Name Book it was told that the stone was “considered a…memorial of some event”, but we know not what.
References:
Royal Commission on the Ancient & Historical Monuments, Scotland, The Archaeological Sites and Monuments of Clackmannan District and Falkirk District, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 1979.
© The Northern Antiquarian
