Howburn Digger

Splendid Isolation – Crookedstone – A Stone Alone

31 October 2010

My domestic duties done and household chores completed I nipped out for a couple of hours to seek out the Crookedstone. I turned out of the road-end and headed south on the A702 into an afternoon of perfect autumn stillness, brilliant sunshine, blue skies and rusty coloured hills.
I turned onto the B7076 after Abington and stayed on it, by-passing Crawford and ignoring the signs willing me to visit Elvanfoot and Drumlanrig Castle. After another mile, the B7076 curved over the M74 and a wee signpost bearing the legend “Crookedstone” pointed to a turnoff. I drove down and came to a wee level crossing. You have to cross the main Scotland/ England West Coast Rail Link to get to this site. The crossing gates are hand-operated and to raise them you have to pump them up by a handpump. I quickly changed my mind when out of nowhere a Virgin Pendolino hurtled past me, causing instant sphincter tightening fear and sucking the breath out of my lungs. I decided to leave my car where it was and cross the tracks by the wee pedestrian gates. I crossed rather quickly and was immediately spotted by a gang of sheep who showed a vague interest in me before rushing off along the peaty banks of the Clyde Burn like an absurd impulse towards Elvanfoot.
I tramped the half mile or so up the farm road. The stone is in a field next to the farmhouse and as I approached I was greeted by three large snarling, barking hounds. Thankfully they were behind a high fence. The racket brought out the farm’s occupants. They looked rather surprised to find a visitor wishing to see the stone but were not in the least bit “off-ish”. The farmer was kind enough to point me a way to access the field with the Crookedstone in it, and asked me to close the access gate firmly as there were tupps in the Crookedstone’s field who were aching to attend on the ewes in the adjoining field.
The stone is about two metres long and stands about one and a half metres high, pointing upwards at 45 degrees. It is covered with large natural looking cup marks and leans Northwards in its gently sloping field about a mile across the flat valley floor of the River Clyde from Air Cleuch. The top of the stone’s profile appears to mirror that of a fold in the hills to the North-East. I wondered about rising sun alignments. I wondered about the robbed-out cairns I’d seen at the side of the field. I wondered about the strange isolation of the site. Cut off on the West and South sides by the River Clyde, Daer Water and Potrail Water, cut off by heights of Beattock Summit to the East and completely cut-off from the North by the M74, the B7076, the West Coast Main Railway Line and the Clyde Burn.
A mile or so to the South there is a MASSIVE early settlement site which covers a wide hillside near the Daer Reservoir. With masses of material from the Scotland earliest visitors through to the very first farmers, it’s been under excavation for nearly five months with the hearths and tool finds right below the bottom of the peat. I wondered about that too and those first farmers checking on equinoxes, planting crops and keeping animals. The hills and valley floor here have three feet of peat growth on top of them now. The Crookedstone seems to stick a lonely finger up from its grassy field and say “We were here”.
On the way back down the farm road I climbed uphill under a couple of nice old Scots Pines and checked out an alignment of three stones I’d spotted on the way in. Set in the turf a couple of feet apart only their topmost edges and one side jutted out of the turf. When I reached the little terrace where the stones were I saw they had a range of cups on them, some very large, some small and some which looked like pecking. The Crookedstone has natural cups on it but the cups on these three stones looked nothing like them.
Again I found myself leaving a site with much more to think about than when I arrived, but maybe that’s how it should be. I’m detecting a pattern.

Druid – Friday 15 October 2010

After a delicious (and rather IN-expensive) lunch in The Catacol Hotel, we drove down through Thundergay and Whitefarland. Beautiful calm seas and high leaden skies lent the journey a sense of impending.... something or other. I’d not had my fly rod out on the holiday, and although the trout season had finished the October runs of Sea Trout and Salmon were in full flow. A lucky angler walked up to the bridge at Dougarie Lodge as we drove past. He was carrying what must have been a twenty-five pound Salmon. “Wow Look at the fish he’s got!” I exclaimed. No answer. My OH was fast asleep in her car seat and the wee fella was snoring gently, slumped on his booster in the back. Hmm, I thought, free time for Druid!
I pulled over about half a  mile further on and walked up to Auchencar Farm leaving the two dreamers to their dreams. The farmer was just setting his prize tups out amongst his ewes in the field with the stone and in the one next to it. he stopped on his quad and told me just to go into the field if I wanted. I’ve been up to the stone many times before and I politely declined, the view is so much better from a distance. You get a better idea of the scale of the stone. A bit of perspective.... Also, I hate to disturb a tup about his business, so I contented myself with brilliant views across the field toward the stone.
Druid is just such a brute of a thing. massive and phallic, a curving, bulging, priapus and yet at the same time it is one half of a very feminine shape (the other half lies broken beside it). There is a slight rise around the stones which could be a well robbed-out cairn but I’m not convinced. Some short cists were ploughed up between the stone and Auchencar Farm about a hundred years ago and a cremation urn was found about a hundred yards North West of the stone in the late 19th Century. The surviving stone faces towards the sea and it is highly visible. This stone was meant to be seen. We saw it from miles away, walking round from King’s Caves at the start of the holiday. For the sea-going (and sea-arriving) early visitors, the 70 feet above sea level stones would have been a superb landmark as they arrived by canoe from the South up the Kilbrannan Sound. The stones would have guided them into Machrie Bay and two of the best salmon runs (The Machrie Water and the Iiorsa) on the South Western Seaboard of Scotland. There is an ancient (and large) tidal fish trap by the mouth of the Machrie Water and those runs of Salmon would have been immense in the Neolithic.
I returned to the car and the two still-snoring dreamers and set off for King’s Cross Point, our wee holiday cottage and the promise of a game of the new Arran Monopoly set.

Dreamtime in Stronach Wood – 14 October 2010

I grabbed a couple of hours during the afternoon while Junior and my OH played with the latest consumer purchase – Arran Monopoly. While they were racing around buying up the likes of Catacol and Lochranza and vying for control of Arran Aromatics, I parked up on the String Road just at the pull-in, up from the stalkers path and headed into Stronach Wood.
I could hear shooting going on up in the hills and on Monday we’d watched and heard stags at the rut in the corrie high above Corrie, from the North Goatfell Ridge and all the way back down the mountain. There were fresh quad tracks on the stalker’s path all the way to the carvings. The carvings are about half a mile along the path and actually are the path. This is a shameful state of affairs. For the want of a few felled trees, some fenceposts and a hundred yards of fencing wire, foot and quad traffic could be diverted off these beautiful panels. It wouldn’t stop the interested folks getting as close as they wished but it might stop the wear and tear of unintentional damage from the through traffic.
I photographed the panels and checked out some triangular pointy peaks on the panel slightly above the birds I’d noticed during the summer’s visits. They appeared to mirror the view to the pyramidical peaks of North Arran (Goatfell, Cir Mhor and Beinn Tarsuinn).

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With the forestry plantation still surrounding the panels, photographing them with the back drop of the peaks wasn’t possible – but it will be one day! The illustrations from Coles (1901) nearly show the orientation (it would be slightly more turned to the right).

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The panels in the Kilmartin Valley haven’t suffered by being displayed well. This site could easily be cleaned back and should be properly examined. Without a doubt, there is much more art to be found around the three exposed panels. I was looking for some more…

You see, I’d had a wee plan to seek out the lost panel (panel K) reported to be 80 yards to the West back in 1901. It hasn’t been seen since and was thought to be buried by bulldozer action in the dense forestry plantation. I paced and measured. I measured and paced. I retraced my steps and thanked my lucky stars it was October and the midges were all dead. After a while and right on the eighty yard mark I came across the edge of an eight foot slab buried in soil, pine needles and peat. It was right where it should be and had a plantation tree growing on top of it. I had no spade, trowel, GPS or axe. I photographed it.

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From my memory the exposed edge looked rather like the top edge of the slab shown in the very poor 1901 photograph here

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I was kicking myself for not bringing at least a wee trowel, so I promised myself yet another trip over to Arran later this year – this time properly equipped to shift some of the soil off this likely slab. It didn’t look like anything worse (or more) than the peaty spoil from the drainage ditch between the planting lines for the trees had been heaped up on top of the slab. Then the trees had been planted and had been patiently dropping sixty years of pine needles on top of that. So maybe I’d found panel K? A winter trip was definitely on!
With myself exhausted and the camera battery dying, I headed out of the forestry, onto the top of the Stronach Ridge and wound my way along a rocky crag-edge on the lower slopes of Muileann Gaoithe heading towards the Parking Area and cairn at Allt Mor at the bend halfway up the String Road. At one point below me, a large slab of rock at the side of the ridge-crag formed a great-looking rock shelter enclosing a squarish area the size of my living room. I checked my map (I aint got no GPS) and it was at NR 995 360. I climbed down carefully to have a look and nearly put my foot down on a BIG Adder.

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It hadn’t sensed or seen me. It lay dozing, coiled in a considerable heap in the last warmth of the afternoon in the rock shelter. I leaned down as close as I dared and snapped a picture. It woke and slid very quickly into the long grass. It was between three and a half and four feet long. A BIG Adder! I legged it out of the shelter pronto. I’ll have to go back in winter for a photo of the rock shelter too.
I got back to the road and decided to forgo the cairn at Allt Mor and head down the hill to my car. I’d had enough excitement for one day. Stronach Wood... it’s the gift that just keeps giving. Go get some I say.

Blimey – They’ve let this place go a bit! 14 October 2010

This place has a few names. Lamlash Road Circle on Canmore. Blairmore Circle locally. Lamlash Stone Circle on TMA. They were the first stones I ever visited on Arran over thirty years ago. Regardless of what the circle is called, this group of stones occupies a superb location, albeit rendered rather impotent, being hemmed in by hundreds of acres of Sitka Spruce on both sides of the road (thoughh to be fair, some of the forestry is at last being cleared). As I approached the outlier, I set up a Barn Owl which had been using the stone as a perch to vomit up its pellets. It lifted off silently and drifted into the trees towards Clauchlands leaving its last pellet on the outlier, steaming slightly in the cold of the morning.
The four surviving stones are perched on a slight knoll, at the highest point on the road between Lamlash and Brodick. The stones were barely poking their heads up out of the mass of heather and bracken. The site used to be regularly cleared of the heather and bracken though this hasn’t happened for a for a while!. A few years back a fire caused some cracking and damage to the outlier. A rock cut cist was found in the centre of the three main stones but isn’t exposed nowadays. There are other large stones half hidden under the peat on and around the mound. There is little to be seen or made sense of here now. This site should be an almighty place. It should look North to Goatfell, Cir Mhor and the jagged ridges of North Arran. Instead it is hemmed in by scrubby Birch, Willow and the massive Spruce plantations of the 1930’s and 1940’s. To the South, Holy Island, Blairmore Standing Stones and the robbed out Dunan Beag and Dunan Mor cairns are now invisible, swamped by forestry.
Through the forestry track another mile to the coast leads you to the hillfort at Clauchlands (not listed on TMA). The forest trek takes you through some of the best Pitchstone areas on Arran and you can grab yourself a little souvenir pebble of the shiny glassy stone our ancestors loved so much. A beautiful circular walk takes you back to Brodick by the very best pitchstone outcrops at Corriegills.
I believe that one day these stones at Lamlash Road could be sympathetically restored to something rather special. The site’s original majesty was in its location. With the forestry removal currently underway on this magical island there is a real opportunity to re-instate the views and carefully excavate the peaty knoll and its immediate surroundings for the surviving stones fallen comrades. But I wont hold my breath.

Back To The Old House – 24 October 2010

Back in Ayr for the weekend. I was born here and my parents (177 years between them) still live in the house I grew up in. I really hadn’t thought of there were any sites I could visit or photograph while I was visiting. But of course memory sometimes drags one up...
A dazzling sunny October Sunday meant a wee drive up to the top of the Carrick Hills for the most incredible views of Arran. The crystal clear skies meant we could see cars and houses on the island far across the Firth of Clyde. Driving back into Ayr along the coast road I suddenly remembered Stonefield Park! My OH had her camera – Oh Yes! In my early teens, my best pal used to live in the street next to the stone and it was our rendezvous point where we’d meet up on our bikes. Thirty five years later, I pulled off the Doonfoot Road and found this old stone just where I’d last left it.
It stands on a wee patch of grass with a few nice trees around it in a very quiet street. The actual site could hold at least two house plots and is worth its weight in gold in a rather exclusive and very expensive area of Ayr’s housing. I think we are very lucky this six footer wasn’t bulldozed back in the sixties when the nearby bungalows were built.
The stone is quite cheese – holed on one of its faces. There is a certain phallic element when viewed facing North . There is absolutely no landscape context in which it is possible to view this stone, but it really does give the little street a quality which no other street in Ayr has.

Torr an Loisgte

Notes in Grey Weather – Morning 13 October 2010

With a grey morning mist and low cloud across the Firth of Clyde, I set off early to seek out Torr an Loisgte. I’d been intrigued by Greywether’s pictures on here and had been longing to check out the site for myself. Torr an Loisgte was my “must do” during this October week with my family on Arran. We were staying at one of the cottages at Point House at King’s Cross Point and from a vantage point on the way up the winding access I could make out the Giant’s Graves on their now deforested terrace. On my OS Explorer map the cairn appeared to be a couple of hundred yards to the West and about 45 feet above the [Giant’s Graves].
I parked by the bus terminus at the South end of Whiting Bay and headed up the Glenashdale Falls Path. I took the left turn up the steep hairpin bends of the route to Giant’s Graves. They used to have hundreds of steps cut into the path years back and I’m glad they have relaid the path. The circular route via Glenashdale is a bit gentler on the way in but I was in a bit of a hurry, having haggled an hour or two off from my OH and Junior. I was up to the Giant’s Graves in fifteen minutes, sweating out the previous night’s Cab Sauv and replacing it with a generic supermarket version of a popular energy drink. The Giant’s Graves had been visited by some ***** who’d lit a fire close in by the North cairn and piled up felled tree trunks over the chamber like some kinda log roof. I couldn’t leave it like that and kicked the hearth and ashes into the felled forestry then I tossed the trunks off the edge of the terrace like a salvo of cabers. Job done, I pressed upwards and onwards.
Greywether described Torr an Loisgte as “Not easy to get to”. Times change. It is now impsy-pimpsy, easy-peasy since they felled the forestry. Simply continue on the wee footpath from Giant’s Graves until you reach the old forestry road. Turn right, follow it round the hillside for about two hundred yards. Stop at the picnic table by the roadside and scramble up the bank above the road. This large cairn is behind the wee hillock in front of you.
I wasn’t quite prepared for the sight which met me. A pandemonium of tumbled stone, half opened chambers and hints of a huge façade all coated in a thick blanket of moss, turf, peat and lichen. I found it very difficult to get a handle on the site at first, as the layout of visible chambers seemed to make little sense in relation to each other. Strange uprights emerged from the middle of the cairn, there were obvious chamber collapses in some areas and only one area (the North end next to the wee hillock) seemed to be in its original state. I could not work the visible and slightly open capstones into any kind of sensible orientation, and the notion of a row of central chambers seemed farcical given the carnage which faced me. Even the façade seemed to start going one way then I’d find a second row of façade uprights which bore no relation to the initial one. The cairn was only first reported in the 1970’s and as far as I know has never been excavated. Downhill all that is really left of the Giant’s Graves are the central chambers and a few façade stones, the cairn material now exists as a series of drystane dykes which run around the hill below. In comparison, Torr an Loisgte appears to be fairly complete and unrobbed, but the central and southern end look like someone has taken a JCB and pushed it around. To me, trying to make sense of Torr an Loisgte was a bit like looking at heap of scrap metal and trying to work out how a car works. I am sure there is a LOT of archaeology still in Torr an Loisgte and its comparatively recent discovery ensured it escaped the attentions of 19th Century treasure seekers and gentleman antiquaries.
I took a set of pictures and found my OH’s complex digital camera had stuck itself on Black and White setting. I couldn’t get it back to colour so my apologies for the monochrome set. I sat on the wee hillock and gazed out to Holy Island drinking in the view and the early morning quiet. No-one from TMA had contributed any notes or photos since Greywether’s visit back in May 2005 and I wondered if anyone at all had been up here since then. This long forgotten cairn does not even have an agreed name “Torr an Loisgte” here on TMA, “Torran Loisgte” with the Ordnance Survey and according to Canmore the hill is called “Torr on Loisgte”. Even the gaelic word “Loisgte” is a bit vague, my limited knowledge suggests it means “Hill of the fire” or “Hill of the burning”. I returned to my car by the Glenashdale Falls path… more confused about Torr an Loisgte than when I arrived…. but in a good way.