I’D best come clean from the start: this is Stone Age rock Music I’m on about. I was already 15 when Jailhouse Rock came out. That may seem a long time ago to most of you, but we’re headed way, way back beyond that – a good 4500 hundred years back, and when they talked about rock music in those days they meant real rocks – proper whopping great stones. It isn’t called the Stone Age for nothing.

If you’ve ever worked with stone, you’ll know that the sound of it is crucial to efficiency. That same year that Jailhouse Rock came out, I visited the granite quarry at Ballyknocken in County Wicklow in Ireland. I was full of teenage hopes of explosions and pieces of rock zizzing through the air and was bitterly disappointed when one of the old lads still working told me how he broke out the granite blocks from the bedrock.

He said: “Well now, I take me hammer and I give a little tap here and I listen, and then I give a little tap there and I listen, and when I find the line of weakness I make a groove and drive in me oak wedges and wait for the rain to swell them, and then I give the wedges a little tap here and a little tap there and – whoosh! Away she goes.”

The rock-breaking gangs of prisoners in the USA sang to their forced labour and I doubt if they were given the chance to apply any refinement to their actions. You can hear these men on YouTube in Lightning-Long John – one of the many wonderful recordings made by Alan Lomax. Their work was, perforce, relentless. Song, for sure, would help, and the steady rhythm may well have set up vibrations in the rocks that helped weaken them. The singing is magnificent, the endurance almost frightening.

Years after visiting the Ballyknocken quarry, I was breaking up large boulders on the foreshore with John-Angus so we could make a launching place for a boat. I learnt soon enough the telltale sound when you hit a weak spot in the rock. We had a massive wrecking bar and a heavy sledgehammer – both of which the quarrymen had given away as the one was too heavy and the other kept breaking shafts.

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The wrecking bar is more than 6ft long and one and three-quarter ins in diameter and weighs well over 26lbs (I ran out of weights). The sledgehammer weighs 20lbs and I did indeed have to make several new shafts, so we weren’t fooling around. But John-Angus is a MacKinnon and they are strong people and I wasn’t going to be outdone.

But we didn’t sing. We could manage about 12 swings of the sledge and 12 lifts of the pinch bar at a go and would stop for breath. One way or another we defeated the enemy, as often as not through listening out for that spot in the boulder which had a slight ring to it and working at it until you could feel the tremendous stress in the stone as we finally prized it open. But that was easy-peasy Iron Age work.

Now think Stone Age. No Iron. Not even Bronze. Just other stones and antler. It’s not so much about breaking up stone as learning how to manipulate it. It requires high levels of attention to balance, pivot points, weight distribution and, yes, sound.

The people who set up all those stone circles spent much of their lives trying out rocks – testing their qualities, comparing their hardness, researching their fracture planes, their weight, their density; watching out for their friability, for their capacity to cut you (basalt), or rub you raw (gabbro), or withstand being thrown red-hot into cold water without exploding (peridotite); admiring their beauty, and listening out for their sounds.

One of the things you’ll discover when you move a lot of rock around is that every stone has its own sound. If you’ve ever tried drystane dyking, you’ll know what I mean. Some are dull, some are very dull, some have sharp sounds, some just thud; and some resonate quite unexpectedly – even really massive rocks.

And that’s where the rock Music comes in – with the rock gongs. Like drums, they are technically known as idiophones – rocks that ring all of their own if you just chap them with a small stone. If you want to get really precise, then drums are membranophones and rock gongs are lithophones.

Take the Arn Hill rock gong. This is a massive rock, near Huntly in Aberdeenshire providing a clear example of a naturally resonant rock having been selected as the central feature in a piece of monumental architecture from some 4000-5000 years ago. Known locally as the “Iron Stone” on account of its resonant qualities, this idiophone has been decorated with concentric rings, just visible.

The stone has been carefully levelled and raised on other stones, which might also have the effect of freeing the sound. It is impossible for this stone to have been moved into place without the builders being aware of its sound qualities, so we may assume that they were happy to incorporate them into the structure.

One of the much smaller stones lying beside it is also remarkably resonant, so both stones could have been used as musical instruments.

Another important example of a lithophone is that of the rock gong at Ballaphetrish on Tiree. This stone has cup marks on it “indistinguishable from prehistoric cup-markings”, and further evidence to support its significance comes from its having been named as

Kory Finmackoul on Timothy Pont’s map of 1580-90. In modern Gaelic this would be spelt Coire Fhionn MhicChumhail and refers to the Celtic legendary hero and giant, Finn MacCool. Coire literally means “kettle” and refers most commonly to kettle-shaped landscape features such as corries (the English word is a borrowing from Scottish Gaelic).

To appreciate the relevance of the name one must understand that kettles used to have rounded bottoms being designed for suspension over a fire, as opposed to modern flat-bottomed kettles.

They were made of metal and therefore would have a degree of resonance when struck. As the Tiree rock gong is a large one, its association with a legendary giant is appropriate, the same applying to Clach Oscar on the Isle of Skye.

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A postcard dated 1918 shows a man sitting on the rock which has had the words “Tiree ringing stone” either painted or chalked upon it, and it is said that if the rock gong on Tiree were ever to be moved or broken, the low-lying island would sink back beneath the waves.

The Tiree rock gong is still a focus of ritual behaviour, the weathered coins found in a depression on the top being modern votive offerings. The accumulated evidence suggests continuous use for more than 3000 years.

When struck with hand-held stones the Tiree rock has at least two clearly audible pitches – a feature of several other rock gongs, including Clach Oscar. The legend is that this rock was hurled down from the neighbouring mountain by Oscar (son of Ossian), but there is an alternative version in which it was hurled down by a witch.

Whether the rock gongs on the sacred island of Iona were used by the early Christians is not recorded but one is not far from the Abbey which is on the site of the original 6th century AD monastic foundation, and it would be remarkable if the monastic occupiers of this small island were not aware of its properties.

The rock is on the foreshore at Port-na-Fraing and is an unusual saddle-shape, with a small hollow, which can support a stone with which to strike it, and it would appear that this hollow was manmade. A suitable stone for striking was in place when I first visited it. The rock has long had a reputation as a ringing rock, but no name is known for it.

Rock gongs are also found near Ballater and Cabrach and the one at Ballater is of particular interest both visually and sonically. It is highly resonant and produces pitched sound even when simply rubbed, and its shape and surface appearance are similar to that of an arrow or a phallus.

It’s impossible to say whether the hand of man had anything to do with this appearance, but there is no doubt the eye of man would have appreciated the striking symmetry and clarity of design, whether naturally produced or otherwise.

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Rock gongs were used for many functions. Gathering people, warnings, and rituals – notably fertility rites and ancestor worship – rites which continued in Africa into the mid-20th century when Nigerian tribesmen set up complex rhythms on the rocks, sometimes singing through bits of tubing and other items to distort their voices, which are intended to be those of their ancestors speaking from the other world.

The St Gildas and St Bieuzy rock gongs in Brittany are still used to gather the faithful. Slate miners used to make xylophones out of different sizes of slate. You can see one in Keswick made from hornfels.

One remarkable variant on rock gongs comes from the Icelandic Kristni saga (I.4), in which Bishop Frederick from the “Southern” (British) Isles bursts a stone in which an ancestor was supposed to live, simply by singing at it: Efter that fór byscop til; steinsens, ok soeng yfer thar til er steinnenn brast í sundr.

Normally, however, it is the tone that has a voice and Scotland’s kings used to be crowned on the Lia Fail – the Stone of Destiny which is supposed only to have made a noise when a rightful king sat upon it. This may simply mean that it was only sounded on such a solemn occasion.

When Bernard Fagg started playing a rock gong in the midst of apparently unpeopled territory in Nigeria, an African arrived within minutes to put an end to the sacrilege. One thing for sure, there hasn’t been a cheep out of the Lia Fail since it was stolen by Edward I. Will it ring out for Charles III?

Don’t hold your breath.

Recordings of Scottish rock gongs can be found on The Kilmartin Sessions CD but many are only available from the author.