Myself and Norie visited this place during lambing season during post-foot and mouth paranoia. Norie's brother Robert, who can't walk too well, chose to sit in the car.
The lambs weren't bothered, in fact they kept wandering up to us with their families and bleating - loads of them - and that noise can be a bit scary. It bypasses all defences and goes straight to the soul.
We got to the stones eventually after some map confusion (see miscellanious section).
This is a sad remains and was surely something more grand before the farmers got thier hands on it. There are now 3 main stones which seem to have been dumped a couple of hundred metres away from the original stone circle site. However, it still sits in a beautiful place near the south bank of the Teith a few hundred metres south of the Auld Knowe. The Auld Knowe is a natural and no doubt sacred hillock which has iron age remains.
We climbed the knowe and enjoyed the view whilst having a smoke.
Then on the road below a pick up truck stopped and the guy driving started shouting at us from the bottom of his bastard soul about the lambs and how we should not be there. I thought he was going to kill us and we walked towards him, I was thinking "we come in peace" and Norie was muttering about how there were no signs up and how there are no tresspass laws in Scotland. With no solicitors present, try telling that to a rosy cheeked farming psycho! I feared a messy confrontation. It didn't happen though and the guy drove off still calling us all the bastards of the day.
Yup, we shouldn't have gone there and I'll maybe seek permission the next time I go into farmland. This was a couple of months ago now and those cute wee curious lambs are probably lying in bits in the refridgeration section in a supermarket somewhere far away (£6.00 per kilo).
With that in mind and with me being aware of my own bouts of greed, I think I now understand the anger.
We drove to Callander and chilled out with a couple of Guinness.
This former stone circle once consisted of up to six stones. The original site is still marked in the new OS Explorer map as being right next to the Auld Knowe. This totally threw us when we were looking for this place.
The Canmore website describes the original site as being 24 yards from the foot of the Auld Knowe. It seems that the remaining three stones were dumped at the edge of the field a further couple of hundred metres north of the original site closer to the banks of the river Teith. The Canmore site states that this stone circle was destroyed in 1980. It's now very difficult to appreciate the relationship between the original circle and the sacred Auld Knowe.
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