"A quieter ellipse of ancient gneiss on a ridge above Loch Roag, within sight of the great Callanish circle"
Callanish II Stone Circle
Callanish, Alba / Scotland
On a low ridge overlooking East Loch Roag, five standing stones and two fallen slabs trace an ellipse that once held ten uprights around a central cairn. Callanish II is the quieter sibling of the famous Callanish Stones, separated by a kilometre of open moorland but connected by five thousand years of shared purpose. Where Callanish I draws the crowds, this satellite circle offers something rarer: solitude among Neolithic stones, wind off the Atlantic, and the long view across water to the monuments that define this landscape.
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Quick Facts
Location
Callanish, Alba / Scotland
Tradition
Site Type
Coordinates
58.1945, -6.7291
Last Updated
Feb 8, 2026
A satellite stone circle within one of northern Europe's most significant Neolithic ritual landscapes, active from approximately 3000 to 1500 BCE.
Origin Story
The story of Callanish II begins before the stones. At some point during the late Neolithic, perhaps around 3000 BCE or earlier, people dug holes on this ridge above Loch Roag and set timber posts into the ground in a circle roughly ten metres across. The posts would have been visible from the water and from the ridge where Callanish I was already being planned or built. Whatever gatherings took place within the timber circle, they were considered significant enough that when the posts eventually rotted or were removed, the community replaced them with something more permanent.
The stone ellipse took shape over the centuries that followed. Ten slabs of Lewisian gneiss were selected from the local landscape, shaped minimally if at all, transported to the ridge, and raised into an elliptical setting approximately twenty-two by nineteen metres. An eleventh stone stood apart as an outlier. The choice of an ellipse rather than a true circle may have been deliberate, perhaps tracking an astronomical alignment or reflecting a different ceremonial geometry from the circles at Callanish I and III. Or it may simply reflect the natural contour of the ridge.
At some later point, a cairn 8.5 metres in diameter was constructed within the ellipse. This addition changed the character of the space, introducing the dead into what may have been a purely ceremonial enclosure. Similar cairn insertions occurred at Callanish I and at stone circles across Scotland, suggesting a widespread shift in ritual practice during the transition from the late Neolithic to the early Bronze Age.
Eventually the ceremonies ceased. The reasons are unknown. Peat began to accumulate, slowly burying the lower portions of the stones. For thousands of years the site stood on its ridge, progressively absorbed into the bog, its original scale hidden. When Sir James Matheson ordered the peat stripped from the Callanish monuments in the mid-nineteenth century, the full dimensions of Callanish II emerged for the first time in millennia.
Key Figures
Sir James Matheson
Henry Callender
Patrick Ashmore
Calanais Virtual Reconstruction Project
Spiritual Lineage
Callanish II belongs to the stone circle tradition of the British Neolithic and early Bronze Age, a practice of communal monument building that produced thousands of stone settings across the British Isles and Brittany between approximately 3500 and 1500 BCE. Within this broader tradition, the Callanish complex represents one of the most significant concentrations of megalithic monuments in northern Europe. The complex includes at least thirteen known stone settings scattered across the landscape around Loch Roag. Callanish II's elliptical form connects it to a subset of stone settings that deviate from the circular norm, though whether this represents a regional variation, a chronological development, or a functional distinction remains debated. The use of Lewisian gneiss, the oldest rock type exposed at the Earth's surface, gives the Callanish monuments a material distinctiveness shared by few other megalithic sites.
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