Callanish Standing Stones View all content for Callanish

What can you say about this place? You have to go, even though it's a bit of a pilgrimage...I first visited last year for a few days, then felt drawn back and spent a week there this summer, staying in Ann + Angus Smith's holiday cottage - an ideal location less than 10 minutes walk from the site. The site is almost painfully impressive - maybe because of its scale or state of preservation - or maybe because of the nature of the stone that makes it. When you then add in the lunar (and solar) calculating factor one's mind becomes blown! I found it was very difficult to stay in the present time when there - there seems such a sense of history; but also a sense of drama and maybe theatricality. When you go you MUST meet up with Margaret Curtis (see Gyrus's post ). By all means visit yourself first - but you'll never see it the same way once you've done a walkround with her. She'll show you the burial cairn by her house(ruthlessly bisected by the road builders several years ago) which she reckons is the start of the place of procession to the site itself - maybe a mile up the slopes, much in the way one might imagine processing up the Avenue at Abury...then the alignments of the stones, the "windows" between various pairs of stones which align with landscape points relevant to moon set/sunrise etc. One of my pleasures when staying for a week was to walk up to the stones after sunset and sit, in the starlight, in splendid isolation, playing appropriate sounds on my walkman - Odin worked particularly well! After an hour or so, it becomes as close to a shamanic experience as I've had anywhere (even the midges ceased to concern me). It really is a must!

Posted by a23 29th August 2001ce

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