March Stone

The March Stones of Aberdeen are boundary marker stones encircling the land owned by the Scottish royal burgh, dating from before 1525. In the 1300s Robert the Bruce granted the Royal Burgh of Aberdeen unusually strong rights over the burgh itself and the open lands outside the city. The land was valuable and so the boundary was marked out by the March Stones, "march" being the word used to describe a border area. In their first incarnation the March Stones were large standing stones and the boundary line was augmented with cairns or it ran along natural features such as streams. Because Aberdeen is an eastern coastal town the 26-mile (42 km) line of stones only encircled it to the west. To discourage encroachment the bounds were regularly ridden around by burgesses in the "riding of the marches", the Scots equivalent of beating the bounds, but eventually this became merely a ceremonial matter. The area marked out, the so-called Freedom Lands of Aberdeen, lay outside the "City Royalty" – the urban area itself and the crofts just on its outskirts. One line of outer stones ran along the outer boundary of the Freedom Lands and a second line, the inner stones, was added in the early 19th century, marking the division of the royalty from the Freedom Lands. The March Stones of Aberdeen were first written about in 1525 in connection with a riding of the marches. As time went by the stones themselves became marked for identification and between 1790 and 1810 new stones were installed with inscribed sequence numbers, sometimes alongside the earlier ones. Most of these later stones are still to be found although some are later replacements.