The Modern Antiquarian

Home	Latest Posts	Forums	Maps	Help

Browse Sites	News	Blog	Contributors	The Books

Lewis and Harris: Latest Posts

Previous 10 | Showing 11-20 of 1,271 posts. Most recent first | Next 10

Callanish (Standing Stones) — News

Report of damage at the Cnoc An Tursa

Via Facebook, report and images of damage (presumably fire) at the Cnoc An Tursa. :-(

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=386260970177129&set=pcb.386261190177107

Comments (0) | Add a comment | Permalink

Posted by 1speed
19th April 2022ce

Margaret Curtis obituary

Megalith enthusiast who did much to further understanding of the Calanais stone circle and other ancient sites of the Isle of Lewis

Mike Pitts

When Julian Cope, the musician and antiquary, met Margaret Curtis on the Isle of Lewis in the 1990s, he was impressed. Curtis, who has died aged 80, was a “living legend” and a “psychic queen”, said Cope, who filled him with “a real sense of awe”. He devoted a chapter in his bestselling 1998 book The Modern Antiquarian to her and to Calanais, one of the most extraordinary ancient monuments in Europe.

Near the Atlantic coast in the remote Outer Hebrides, Calanais (pronounced as in the anglicised spelling, Callanish) is a stone circle at the centre of five rows dating from around 3000BC. The tallest of nearly 50 megaliths is over five metres high, and all are made of a distinctive streaked gneiss that glows against stormy skies. Curtis did much to further understanding of this and other overlooked sites on Lewis, becoming the island’s unofficial archaeologist and sharing her enthusiasms with an appreciative visiting public.

She found many more stones under the peat as she walked the moorland, probing with a metal bar. One, at Calanais itself, was re-erected in 1982, and she spotted the broken tip of another in a wall.

Archaeologists sometimes followed up her suggestions. Patrick Ashmore, who led excavations at Calanais for what is now Historic Scotland in the 1980s, praised the fieldwork and record-keeping of Curtis and each of her two husbands. On one occasion, quartz pieces she found when a road near her house was straightened led to the discovery of a bronze age burial cairn.

More: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/apr/07/margaret-curtis-obituary

Comments (5) | Add a comment | Permalink