I went to Forgue and parked at the Walter Scott hall (in use but closed when I was there). I walked up past the school and into the woods. On reflection, it seems a strange place to put a school – right up a hill on the edge of a village – but I suppose back in the day there were a lot of kids coming down the hill from crofts and farms, unlike today. As a sidenote, there are two churches in Forgue and they are both placed on gorgeous sites across the burn from each other and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are built on top of more ancient monuments.
It was a nice walk up the hill through the trees, beech and pine. I walked past the “turn off” over the fence to Raich stone circle, which I visited on the way back. I carried on up the track with trees on one side and fields on the other, until using the OS app it was judged time to take a right down a track, sticking to the countours of the hill. This led me along a winding path until the OS app told me i was next to the circle, so I advanced 5 metres into a mess of fallen trees and torn up earth (see pix). Checked the app again, turned round and the quartz encrusted stone was right behind me! I was excited at first because I thoguht it was a massive chunk of quartz (as at Auchmaliddie, which I’d love to visit), but having look at the other pix here it seems to only have a wee bit on top. Pretty though and interesting that there was similar rock at Raich nearby.
But yeah the site was an impenetrable, indecipherable mess, with trees blocking everything from access to view. Frankly I see this as the responsibility of the land owner to sort out since they should be maintaining an ancient monument on “their” land. I don’t think these trees came down that recently and I noticed the track was being kept clear in any case, so there are people about. To sum up: I found the three stones of the smashed recumbent with difficulty, had a picnic, it started raining, I left. And that was it.