Use and re-use long ago.

This classic Aberdeenshire recumbent stone circle is to be found at Loanhead of Daviot. It was built, probably to act as a lunar observatory, in the late third millennium BC.

Around the middle of the second millennium BC, the residents of the area adapted the circle for use as a burial site. They built a large ring cairn of rough, round boulders in the interior of the circle in which to bury the cremated remains of their dead.

Those with a vivid imagination tend to see the upright flanking stone to the right of the recumbent as a huge phallic symbol (best seen zoomified). Others, endowed with less fertile imaginations, see the effects of 5000 years of weathering!