Transactions. 9 



arraign the principal offenders, and endeavour to prove my 

 position, that, in the three cases to be quoted, no trace whatever 

 of man's tooling is visible. (1) We must go back some thirty 

 years, and seek, in the pages of the Proceedings of the Society 

 of Antiquaries of Scotland, session 1864, for the first curiously 

 erroneous statement made by the late Sir J. Y. Simpson, who, in 

 his exhaustive monograpii on the Ciip and Ring sculptures, when 

 about to describe certain cup- hollows on one of the stones in 

 Holy wood circle, starts with the extraordinary fiction that " the 

 circle is about 80 feet in diameter ! " I need scarcely explain 

 to an audience of Dumfriesians that the circle is, first of all, not 

 a true circle, but an ellipse ; and that its longest diameter is 97 

 yards, and its shortest 78 yards. With its extent, however, I am 

 not at present concerned. Simpson proceeds to say that on the 

 largest stone, about 10 feet long, which has fallen prostrate, there 

 are about thirty cup marks on one end and the sides. Now, there 

 are tw'o stones "about ten feet long;" but the one Simpson 

 indicates must be that on the S.-W. radius (D on diagram). It 

 measures quite 10 feet 6 inches E. and W. and 7 feet 6 inches 

 N. and S., and its height on the inner end is 5 feet — altogether 

 the largest of the seven whinstones in the circle. There is little 

 doubt that this stone was once erect, if so, it would have been 

 exactly radially opposite stone J, which is at present the highest 

 one. But, if it were ever erect, it must have been with its broad 

 end on the ground and its slightly tapering end atop. Now, the 

 odd fact is this, that nearly all the cup-hollows (claimed by Simp- 

 son as artificial) are to be found on this broad base ! Even were 

 this not the case, these hollows, to my mind, are not in the 

 slightest way indicative of artificial cuttings ; two, perhaps more, 

 are very nearly circular, it is true ; the majority are decidedly 

 oval and sharpedged, and, instead of occurring in any symmetric 

 group, however rude— and such grouping is one of the character- 

 istic features of true cup marks, whether associated with rings or 

 not— these hollows are at all sorts of irregular distances, and 

 many of them very suspiciously confluent with the natural lines 

 of cleavage in the rock.* Supposing, for a moment, these 

 hollows on the end of this great stone were cut with an 

 intention, we see that by its position they would be invisible 



* The girth of this .stone is fully 25 feet at its broad end, and only 17 or 



so at the otlier. 



