Thermal

I have hundreds of megalithic pictures, so here’s another:

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Sunhoney

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This picture is my desktop at the moment, and I find it mesmerising. I took it at South Ythsie stone circle, and its a piece of quartz about the size of an apple, protruding out of one of the stones. Quartz was valued by the ancients, and used in large amounts around the stone circles of the north east-apparently it glows under moonlight, which must have made for an incredible sight 4000 years ago. Beautiful.

We went up to Sunhoney Stone Circle recently. It was the first time up to this site, although I’d long been intrigued simply by the name.

As you can see, the stones are composed of a pink conglomerate, that in the lazy autumnal sunshine just seemed to suit the name Sunhoney so much. The air was still & warm, and the stones seemed to exude a warmth all of their own. Sunhoney is known as a recumbent stone circle, owing to the largest of the circle stones being set on its side, in between two others:

No-one knows for sure quite why these circles were built in this way, but the recumbent has been found to focus on the major moonrise, with the moon ‘framed’ between the uprights. A good 5000 years old, still standing, and still doing what it was designed to do. Cool eh?

It all began for me in late 98-browsing the shelves at the Virgin Megastore, my eye was caught by this large hardback book, its spine decorated in orange & blue chevrons-what the hell was that?

It was The Modern Antiquarian, filled with photos of sites across Britain that I never knew existed. The introduction clinched it, talking about how your history education in Britain starts with the Romans & how everything before was just some subhumans in animal skins, effectively swinging around in trees . This resonated with my experience strongly, I bought the book & never looked back.

If, like me then, you don’t know, the whole of the British Isles is covered from the far north of Scotland, to the Scilly Isles in the south west with thousands of stone monuments, between 3500 and 7000 years old. Most well known are the Stone Circles, but even these have many different forms from the well known Stonehenge to the tiny, unknown, Glassel Dam Wood. In addition to this, there are single or grouped Standing Stones, tombs of many different kinds, cairns and souterrain.

The reasons behind their construction are uncertain at best, and for the massive effort involved in construction, you almost wonder why they bothered. But, for me there is something incredibly evocative about the sight of these stones, still standing after thousands of years. Their builders had an obvious eye for location, design and colour, when I see one it just gives me an itch at the base of my skull which says that these places are special – a racial memory? Or just a romantic imagination?

Whatever, visit one of these places, especially if you can get a quiet site to yourself, and you may feel it too.

For more information, please have a look at my Stone Circle Website: Bigstone?