loading . . . It is not often I get angry, but a recent encounter with a standing stone has really annoyed – and shocked me. I am pretty used to prehistory being badly treated, and indeed a whole chapter of my forthcoming book (have I mentioned this before?) deals with 20th and 21st century biographies of megaliths that have been treated shoddily. Many of these bounce back however, or take on a new life for a new audience, and most are still valued by a variety of different people and communities.
And then there is the Bogleys Stone of Fife.
Visualistion of the urban Bogleys Stone (artist unknown)
I came across the story of this standing stone by chance, as I was looking for a megalith to visit on a trip to Fife. Soon I encountered a visualisation of a standing stone set into what looked like cobbles situated in some kind of park. This (admittedly) crap vision for this standing stone came from a proposal for a future housing estate. But how on earth had a standing stone become part of this vision?
The Bogley’s Stone (Trove page) was / is a 2.7m long sandstone monolith that up until a quarter of a century ago had stood in relative peace for millennia in rural Fife just north of Kirkcaldy. I say relative peace because it was documented in the 1865 OS Name Book that rather strangely it was ‘was lifted and replaced a few years ago, but nothing was found’. In and out, just like that, and no treasure to be found.
(c) HES (date unknown, Brian Malaws collection)
The status quo remained and in 1960 an OS fieldworker reported that the ‘stone is in an excellent state of preservation’. This would not remain the case. In the late 1990s, a proposal was tabled to create an open cast coal mine in the vicinity of the standing stone, and it was quickly realised that this wonderful old sandstone sentinel was in the way. A proposal was cooked up by the opencast coal people. The stone would be removed, and a full excavation carried out. The stone would then be carefully placed in storage. The stone would then be ready for inclusion in a large housing estate that would be built at some point in the future as part of the reconsolidation of the land once it had been hollowed out of coal and filled back in again. This became a condition of planning permission being granted, a fact worth bearing in mind as our story unwinds.
In theory, this sounds OK. Archaeological information would be gained by a full excavation that might otherwise not have happened. The stone could be studied at leisure including investigation of a putative cupmark towards its top. And then a new community would benefit from having a standing stone in their midst, an educational resource and source of community pride. Megalithic place-making. Perhaps they might even name a street after the stone, even a school. I am comfortable with these sorts of pragmatic accommodations, even if it does seen rather drastic (and fanciful) in hindsight.
But the reality has been much, much darker.
Things started well. The page for the stone on the website The Modern Antiquarian documents as much, with the stone initially looking rather lost as the opencast encroached.
Photo taken by Nobut on 22nd August 2004
The stone was removed from its socket in September 2004 and the hole and surrounded area subject to excavation.
Photo by BigSweetie, dated 10th September 2004
The excavation was hugely valuable, carried out by AOC Archaeology and funded by the opencast mining company, by then called GM Mining Ltd. Results were reported on quickly, in the pages of the _Tayside and Fife Archaeological Journal_ volume 13 (2007), written by John Lewis and John Terry, something of a dream team back in the day.
The excavation was able to show that the socket for the standing stone was almost 1m deep, cut into bedrock, and 0.7m across. Nothing of note was recorded from the hole (already looked into in the 19th C) as it was emptied of its precious megalithic filling, but evaluation trenches radiating out from the stone hole identified four small pits that each held cremated human bone. A fifth cremation deposit was found near the stone, suggesting that at least five people were associated with this stone in death. No artefacts that were prehistoric were found. But radiocarbon dates confirmed the excavation results: this was an early Bronze Age place. Job done.
But then things started to go amiss. At the time, it was believed that the stone would be in storage for only three years (_Fife Today_(29 October 2004)),__ but field notes in The Modern Antiquarian told a different story. A tale of delays and no news. User Trajan contacted Fife Council Archaeologist Douglas Spiers in 2008 and got this update (and this is worth quoting in full):
“The excavation process involved the complete removal of the stone. It was lifted and has been stored on pallets within a secure area within the development site since its excavation. However, as GM Mining is now in the final phases of site restoration and is due to leave the site for good in the next few months, the Council’s Archaeological Unit is in the process of arranging to have the stone uplifted and removed to for safe storage at the Council’s Roads Depot in Thornton. Moves are afoot to ensure that the redevelopment of the Kingslaw site is accompanied by planning conditions that will ensure that the stone is re-erected as close to its original position as is practicable. However, as the master plan for the site is not yet complete, it is not currently possible to say exactly where the stone will be re-erected and how it will relate to the new built environment around it. But it will be sensitively re-erected in a setting that will enable easy public access and interpretation” (source)
But still, nothing happened. GM Mining Ltd went bust in 2016. But construction work did begin on a large housing estate, part of the ‘New Kingdom Park’ development, currently focused to the south of where the standing stone had once stood. Kingslaw Gait is based on masterplans published in 2012.
JM Architects Master Plan for Kingslaw Gait (the standing stone stood roughly where a small roundabout is located near the centre of the image) (source)
But what of the standing stone, presumably still in storage, patient as a rock?
The local press reported in 2020 that finally, 16 years after the stone had been removed, it was on the comeback trail. Jon Brady of Fife Today reported excitedly that: **The return of a 4,000 year-old standing stone to its rightful place in Fife has been assured after planners signed off on detailed proposals for its reinstatement.**
Planning permission had recently been submitted to the Council by Murray Estates for Phase 3 of this massive post-mining development, and this included a pledge that the standing stone would be “sensitively re-erected in a setting that will enable easy public access and include interpretation of the history of the stone”. Accompanied by the dismal and unimaginative visualisation that started this blog post.
Armed with this information, I could have been mistaken for thinking that by spring of 2026 (a full 22 years after the stone was removed, and 19 years after it was supposed to be re-erected) my trip to Fife would be a classic urban prehistory tale – megalith meets urbanisation and magic happens. But it quickly became clear that the stone had still not made a re-appearance into the social world.
I contacted Douglas Speirs and asked him (a) where the stone was currently stored, and (b) could I at least visit the stone in storage, a sort of hospital visit for an ailing friend I had yet to meet. I had assumed there would be some sensitivities around this due to the prolonged delays involved. But, he gave me directions to the current location of the stone to my surprise and suggested there would be no problem accessing it as security was non-existent. For the sake of the ongoing security of the stone, I am not going to reveal where the stone currently lies, but suffice to say that it is not in ‘safe storage at the Council’s Roads Depot in Thornton’.
And so I headed off to Fife with my old friend former archaeologist Sam McKeand and his son Leo, to find the megalith. I was not prepared for what I was about to find.
We parked up and walked for about half an hour to get to the barn in which the stone now sits. Approaching the barn, it was clear that this was an abandoned building, and fallen Harris fencing sprawled around the perimeter of the small cluster of buildings, offering no resistance to visitors. We had a real sense of foreboding as we ventured towards the central barn, a structure whose roof was collapsing in part due to bricks that had been tossed up there. An asbestos warning added to the grim tableaux.
We continued round to the front of the barn, where doors had long since ceased to exist, adorned with a stopped clock. We found the standing stone almost immediately, not hidden towards the back of the barn and covered for protection from the elements as one might reasonably expected to find, but right at the entrance, balancing on two fence posts. The following images should really be preceded by a trigger warning if you are in any way inclined to believe that our heritage actually matters. Photos by Sam and I.
I need not labour the point. The stone was daubed with painted graffiti, and rocks and broken glass were strewn on its surface; clearly people sat on this stone drinking. Bottles had clearly been broken on this megalithic park bench. Worst of all was clearly very recently carved initials on the stone, brutal incisions that cut deep. These terrible tatoos may well scar this stone forever.
We left the barn shaken. On my return to work, I immediately reported the damage and the state of the stone to Fife Council. I was sent a photo showing the stone on the last official visit that had been made here, date unknown. Something had dramatically changed for the worse in the years since this photo was taken…..
Photo courtesy of Douglas Speirs
Douglas Spiers pledged to investigate and look into this, and this blog post is not intended to find fault in the work of the small Fife Archaeological Unit and his colleagues. They are poorly resourced and at the whims of obscure rules about ownership, the planning condition that the stone be re-erected in the housing estate, and health and safety no doubt as well. And of course be that plans to erect the stone remain in place, ‘delayed for reasons outwith everyone’s control’.
But something has gone horribly wrong here. A precious and unique part of Bronze Age heritage – that belongs to us all, not a defunct mining company or tokenistic housing developers – is being trashed potentially beyond repair. How can this stone ever be erected again without serious and very expensive remedial work being carried out? And what has happened to this standing stone since I reported this to the authorities over 2 months ago? I dread to think. It is very upsetting. This stone was a focus for five burials for goodness sake.
Urban prehistory is often – but not always – about good news. Or at least compromises that have decent outcomes. Prehistoric sites and monuments are often changed when they are swept up in the arms of urbanisation, but there is an underlying sense of resilience that means that this change is modest or understandable. Standing stones might be moved, or repaired with concrete, or have some modern marks added to them. The enate _prehistoriness_ of such places usually offers some kind of protective veneer. That is why they are rarely so horribly disrespected as the Bogleys Stone.
Disrespected by the planning system.
Disrespected by whoever put the stone in that barn and left it to rot.
Disrespected by those who frequent the barn who probably don’t know this is a 4,000 year old megalith.
Disrespected by whoever could not even be bothered to keep the stone out of the wind and the rain.
Disrespecting the dead.
Disrespecting the living who deserve this standing stone to be, at the very least, cared for when out of sight.
What would happen, I wonder, if I were to arrange for the stone to be moved from its current location to a safe place? Who would this anger? Who thinks they own this stone? Would this become my heritage crime?
One things is for sure – a heritage crime is being committed here and it stinks.
This should cause a barn storm of anger. But perhaps we are all too busy with our existential environmental and political crises to give bandwidth to what might be called a Bronze Age problem. When push comes to shove, what do we really value? And who cares?
_**Sources and acknowledgements** : thanks to Sam and Leo for coming on the visit to the stone and helping me document what we found. The Modern Antiquarian website was invaluable, thanks to those who left photos and fieldnotes (named above). Thanks also to Douglas Speirs for providing information about the stone’s location and for taking this up with the authorities. I will be very happy to update this post when I get news of any kind. _
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### _Related_ https://theurbanprehistorian.wordpress.com/2026/05/19/barn-storm/
