The Isle of Skye Part 5 - An Sithean Part 2

NB: I'm fully aware this kind of conjecture is largely pointless without any hard facts to back it up.  So if you're not into that kind of thing then sorry! But I find it fun, and it helps build my own excitement about a stone trip, not to mention means I'm more prepared when I arrive and start looking for these stones.

Flag is pretty much the location of An Sithean, just north of the road heading south out of Broadford. Co-ordinates from megalithic website 

The above series of screenshots were taken from the "Streetview" function of Google maps at the An Sithean location. Starting from the west (side), the image series continues as if one is travelling currently moving east, heading towards Broadford.

I've made the following "assumptions" here:

1. The lifting stones of An Sithean still exist.
   - They've not been lost, destroyed, damaged by road construction, etc

2. They're on the north side of the road.
   - Peter Martin said the stones were lifted on the roadside, so whilst not conclusive on which side, I've had a quick scan on the street view of both sides and found little that looks promising on the south side. Which isn't to say a physical look on the south side wouldn't be worth it.

3. The stones were fairly near/"below" An Sithean itself.


4. Addendum to 1, the above streetview images were captured by a Google car in 2011. So it's fingers crossed that the stones existed in 2011, and still exist now, 8 years later in the same spots-ish. Google also has a street view image of the area in 2009, and the stones I'm looking at are still in the same spots.

5. The road hasn't changed that much - but given we're talking about late 19th century to now, that's not an easy given I don't feel?
    - On one hand you'd be unable to move the road much up the hill due to it's contours, and creating a road on an existing path/road would seem the most sensible option. For what is probably the most dull eccentric facs I've ever looked for, the B8083 (the road we're looking at here,) was originally an unclassified route, and became the A881 in the late 1920s, becoming the B8083 in 1995. So it was certainly pretty much the same road I presume in the early 20th century.

Now that's out the way, I've got one more consideration. Knowing that there is sites of archaeological significance at An Sithean, the handful of hut circle remains as listed at Canmore. Canmore lists three on the South side of the road, one on the north side. I've struggled to work out for sure, but it looks like the roughly rectangular arrangement of stones seen in the above images, particularly in image 3, left hand side of the photo, is the hut circle on the north side of the road. I only mention this as whilst there's the possibility that the stones lifted at An Sithean were indeed stones from these ruins, any stone identified for lifting should most definitely not be part of any existing remains to preserve these sites.

Really, that was all a long way to say I feel that if there's any way to use street view to look for these lifting stones, it might be the stones around the path most visible in the final two images. Two  are above the path both looking pretty angular in shape, and one the otherside which looks a little blockier.

My one concern about these stones being a good target for a lift to continue the tradition of lifting at this site, is there size - to my eyes they don't look that large or that heavy. Lots of the western Island stones are fairly heavy, especially in North Uist, and as we've already seen in Skye stones like Clach Mhor Mhic Crimmion are large. I've spent some time looking to see if there is any way of figuring out object sizes from Google street view, but it seems the answer is no. If you know any different please let me know! Here's a comparison image I've taken from Google street view of the Bodach Craigh Fianna at Glen Lyon.

If you start at the centre of the 'X' on the road, travel towards the fence on the RHS of the image, the stone nearest to the fence is the plinth, and just to the right/above it is the lifting stone, weighing in at 127kg/300lb whilst not being a "huge" stone in size.

I'm not going to be bringing any weighing equipment with me to Skye, so time will tell.