Urban standing stones – the urban prehistorian

January 8, 2024 balfarg Modern monuments, Prehistoric Glasgow, Replicas and reconstructions, Urban standing stones

Incandescence

The Sighthill stone circle is back in business. Glasgow’s newest megalith, constructed in AD2019 from stones that recently formed a slightly different stone circle that lasted from 1979 to 2016, is now open to the public and available for whatever Glaswegians want to do inside it. The fences have come down, the bridge connection to the city centre has been re-made, and the relationship between standing stone and the sky can now resume.

Spring 2023 – new bridge, M8, stone circle encircled in red (after ReGlasgow)

This stunning image from ReGlasgow shows the emergent urban edgeland landscape that the stone circle now finds itself within, no longer in a park but rather in a landscaped corner of a new housing development. Embedded within the community, ready and willing to be put to use. This is a huge opportunity to see how a stone circle can benefit a new urban community (albeit it a very different community to the one that was moved out to allow this new development to happen), and I am curious to follow its journey in the coming years.

Still from a 3D model of Sighthill stone circle 2.0 (University of Glasgow / Tessa Poller)

One of the uses of the stone circle – hard-wired into the monument by the creator of both incarnations, Duncan Lunan – is as an astronomical observatory (listen to much more about the circles’s history on the Stone Me podcast), and so when Duncan asked me (and some others) to take some photos at the circle on or around the 2023 solstices, it was the first chance to test and document Duncan’s arrangement of the monument without having to ask permission or climb through a gap in a fence. Aside from the summer solstice being horribly early in the morning, this seemed like an easy task.

It was also a great opportunity to visit the stone circle to document another key skyscape event, having been at the earlier incarnation of the circle for a partial eclipse of the sun on 20th March 2015 and Spring Equinox on 20th March 2016.

Archaeologist Gavin MacGregor preparing for the eclipse at Sighthill stone circle 1.0

Spring Equinox, 2016, me being interviewed by Grahame Gardner (photo: Jan Brophy)

For the summer solstice, we were given helpful instructions by Duncan, namely to stand with my back to the centre stone (serving as a backsight) and look to the horizon eastwards. The sun should rise soon after 4.30am right over a small standing stone within a setting of three, the marker stone. Make the foreground darker, ensure the globe of the sun is clear, and get snappy.

Coincidentally this marker stone was numbered Stone 001 during a baseline photography survey of the circle I did in September 2021 before I had worked out its actual job title.

Jan and I visited the stone circle on the Saturday before the solstice to get our heads around the horizon views and where to stand for photos. This was the first time we had been since the fence came down and it was a joyful experience.

The three urban prehistorians (photo: Jan Brophy)

I was further prepared for the early morning task by preparatory photographs sent to me by Duncan and a plot showing the route of the sun prepared by Grahame Gardner aka Western Geomancy.

Summer solstice sunrise at the old stone circle (c) Duncan Lunan

Midsummer sunset during construction of circle 2.0 (c) Gerry Cassidy

All that could stop me now was the weather and so it proved with a mediocre cloudy misty forecast for the actual solstice itself, 22nd June 2023. The next morning looked a lot more promising so we set the alarm for 330am and had an earlyish night. We arrived about ten past 4 and Grahame was already there with a timelapse camera set-up.

There followed a period of time that was profoundly exciting and frustrating, waiting for the sun, hoping that clouds would not obscure the view, becoming curiously annoyed at the dawn for not breaking, almost as if its being late meant that it might never happen.

Cameras were fiddled with. Mobile phones consulted. Diagrams and photos of solstice events in the past were checked and double-checked. Just in case. Killing time waiting for some magic to happen.

Waiting in the orange glow of anticipation.

The day got impossibly bright for a sky with no sun in it. The allotted time had passed. Maybe the sun had come up and we just couldn’t see it? A guy in lycra riding a bike arrived and he got his camera out too. Fiddling and waiting, waiting and fiddling. Fiddling while the sky burned.

Then something special started to happen.

Seconds of relief that an entirely predictable event that could not fail to happen was now happening. Giving over quickly to emotion, joy, awe, magic, an overwhelming sense that this was truly special and that this was a perfect moment in the perfect place to experience this moment. A moment that all three of us were able to record although this was not a time for staring at screens or through viewfinders any more than necessary.

The guy who had come on his bike casually leaned on a standing stone, almost as if it has been designed for this purpose, and took in the awesome sight.

As the sun painstakingly climbed in the sky, what most struck me was the curious way that it was both moving unbelievably slowly, but at the same time going very fast. Relative to the centre of the galaxy, the sun is moving at 200km per second. Here on earth we orbit around the sun at 107,000 km per hour (source). None of these dizzying speeds was apparent of course, our minds and eyes unable to comprehend such space mechanics. On the horizon it looked like a bright orange bug climbing up a blueish window, a casually tossed smartie in slow motion about to describe a parabola in the sky.

The orb’s brightness has an incredible intensity, although we could still look at it. The orange-ness was remarkable, quite unlike the yellow of a summer day sun. It was only getting warmed up, but already the sky was on fire.

The virginal sun cast almost no shadows, something that surprised us. This is because Duncan had asked for us to document some other effects that had been built into the stone circle: “A shot of the shadow of the marker stone on the central stone, and one of the central stone’s shadow on the southeast solar stone, would also be good”. Sorry Duncan, no can do!

Midsummer sunrise 1992, southeast quadrant shadow (c) Duncan Lunan

I’ve often wondered about the relationship between shadows and standing stones, and how this might have been exploited, and understood in prehistory. So it is interesting that this phenomenon has been built into the monument as well. Pity it was not apparent that morning.

So – Sighthill stone circle works. Not that we needed to get up before 4am to prove that. The effect that we saw that summer morning was of course pure science and mathematics masquerading as theatre. What we saw was built into the monument, which was designed to work this way and it was not possible that any other outcome could have happened. The prefigured nature of all of this is humbling, a level of reliability that we rarely find these days.

The nature of stone circles and the sun is that they never stop interacting and so this will all happen again and again for centuries (here’s an account from 2010), but also in different ways during the solar cycle. However, the sky does not always play ball.

Mission 2 (which I chose not to accept because I missed the email!) was for the equinox sunrise on 23rd September at 7.04am. This time the sun would rise above a car showroom to the east of the stone circle. Duncan hoped that we could go along in case he could not make it.

In the end only Grahame was there, and it was cloudy.

The same fate befell us on the second solstice day of the year – winter solstice in December 22nd 2023. This time the opportunity arose for both sunrise and sunset solstices without this being too long a day as it was not a long day, the going up of the sun and the setting of the same being only around 7 hours apart.

As before, Duncan had primed us with some visual aids.

Winter solstice sunrise primer (c) Duncan Lunan

Winter solstice sunset primer (c) Duncan Lunan

Plan of version 1 of the circle with solstices highlighted (Dave McClymont)

But the weather forecast was not promising for a week either side of the solstice and so my visit on the morning of 22/12/23 was dark, drizzly and disappointing. Except visiting this stone circle is never really a disappointment despite the dreary weather and the motorway noise. I was right there on the border between day and night, prehistory and the present.

A recently worn desire line, probably left by a cyclist passing through the circle (maybe lycra guy from the summer solstice), pointed the way towards reflected early daylight on residential windows, the circle overlooked by Christmas trees and faintly illuminated by urban electric lighting. But the sun did not make an appearance at dawn or dusk that day.

Such is the fate of heavenly bodies, not always observable for very human, or meteorological reasons. But Sighthill is a stone circle for all seasons, and many archaeoastronomical observations. It works and I would encourage anyone who has not done so before to get out of bed early, get to the circle, and wait for the sun. This stone circle might be urban, and it might be less than five years old, but when megaliths and the sun get together, age and location no longer matter.

Acknowledgements – I would like to thank Duncan Lunan for his advice and help, and for trusting me to do some of this recording for him. He also provided many of the images used in this blog, reproduced with permission and relevant picture credits in captions. Thanks also to Jan and Grahame for being there!

Worth noting that one of my pictures of the summer solstice was used in this Glasgow Live story uncredited, not the first time they have done this to me…

November 30, 2023 balfarg Modern monuments, Prehistoric Glasgow, Public art, Replicas and reconstructions, Urban standing stones

Contemporary pagans

On Saturday 25th November 2023, I took part in a fascinating day-long workshop called Sacred Dichotomies. This was organised by Dr Yael Dansac, Centre for Interdisciplinary Study of Religions and Secularism, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and Prof Scott Spurlock, Professor of Scottish and Early Modern Christianities, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow. The theme of this event was, to simplify somewhat, contemporary pagans, as expressed in the call for papers, reproduced in full below – so the words in italics are not mine!

Sacred Dichotomies: Time and Space in Contemporary Pagan Rituals

In Western societies, the term Contemporary Paganism encompasses a large variety of religious and spiritual practices that value animistic and pantheistic worldviews, promote interactions with other-than human beings, emphasize ecological consciousness, stress inter-connectedness of all things, and are inspired by pre-Christian religions. Applying creativity and reflexivity, adherents of this heterogeneous and globalized phenomenon design and perform ritual practices to experience their spirituality. Pagan rituals comprise acts of sacralization, which according to Veikko Antonnen (2005) “make distinctions between spaces, mark them for specific uses, create visible and invisible boundaries, and establish cultural conventions of behaviour to deal with those boundaries”. Additionally, to design a Pagan ceremony is generally to invoke a sacred/profane dichotomy where specific spaces and dates are considered quintessential for engaging in ritual actions and communicating with the divine. Paradoxically, this binary construct seems to run up against Pagan holistic worldviews. This workshop seeks to address temporal and spatial dimensions of contemporary Pagan rituals, as well as to explore the dichotomies and paradoxes of their social construction. We invite you to propose a paper that deals with these issues using various theoretical and methodological approaches: from ritual theory, cognitive theory, and phenomenology to historiography and ethnography. We want to place particular emphasis on the relations between sacred space materiality and immateriality, ritual improvisation and prescription, and sacralisation of time.

The organisers very kindly invited me to give a talk as part of this workshop and I was – never wanting to miss a chance to hear my own voice for 25 minutes – happy to accept.

The programme for the day was really strong, with a nice range of experienced and early career researchers, and a good balance of topics thematically arranged. The format was simple – each hour two papers were given, and a discussant followed up with thoughts to stimulate discussion. There was also a keynote paper to start the day.

I don’t want to review the whole day here in much detail, suffice it to say that it was stimulating, interesting and nicely inter-disciplinary. I was especially fascinated by talks on aspects of digital paganism by Edinburgh PhD researchers Joe Sedgwick and Katie Lawrence. Joe introduced me to the book Cyberhenge (Robert Cowan, 2005) which I had somehow never heard of before! It also struck me as very interesting that some of the participants self-identified as a pagan or a druid. Even as I listened to the morning session, I mentally re-wrote parts of my paper to the extent that I had to disappear at lunchtime to find a keyboard and a printer.

In the afternoon a theme continued that had been evident in the morning too – archaeological sites, especially megaliths, came up all of the time! (Read my thoughts on this below.) Stone circles, standing stones, dolmen, passage graves, all that jazz. In the afternoon Dr Jenny Butler (University College Cork) gave a really nice talk about Fairy Places, Power Centres and Otherworldly Time in Contemporary Irish Pagan Rituals and there was a lot of prehistory in there.

My largely incoherent notes from Dr Butler’s lecture

Yael Dansac presented a frankly fantastic ethnographic study of Crawick Multiverse, Charles Jencks’ monumental art-complex in SW Scotland that I have blogged about before. Yael’s research should be better known amongst archaeologists!

For the remainder of this post, I reproduce my notes from the day, and I have included some links to the case study sites rather than write even more words in this post. These are very much – largely unedited – my initial thoughts on this matter, which were somewhat chaotically arranged over several pieces of paper, and through time I hope to refine my argument. I have made some minor edits to the text due to grammatical or egregious errors, adding notes in parenthesis for clarity in places [italicised], and the conclusion is transcribed loosely from my written notes made just before I spoke. I’ve included a few of my slides as well but not all of them.

Pagan interactions with modern and urban standing stones (presented at Sacred Dichotomies, 25-11-2023 in Glasgow; note change in title from the programme)

Introduction

It is really interesting being here today as an archaeologist! Many of the speakers today have been talking about places I think of an ‘archaeological sites’ and prehistoric monuments – stone circles, standing stones etc. And the interesting thing is that the kinds of information that archaeologists know and surmise about these monuments has relatively little or indeed nothing to do with the ‘big tent’ (as it was put earlier) of pagan or pagan-esque practices. There is a complete disconnect between our prehistoric narratives and the layers of spiritual meaning that different individuals and groups afford to megalithic monuments today. This is healthy and I am pleased that there has been no real sense that the prehistoric uses and meanings of these monuments represents a continuity of practice with druid and pagan groups today.

Archaeologists have a good deal of expertise in terms of prehistoric monuments, although we don’t have all the answers. But this does not mean that we shut down other forms of knowledge, or control contemporary practices that don’t align with standard heritage discourse except where there is a chance of damage being done to a site or the more general heavy handed control of totemic sites like Stonehenge. So I’m not here today to suggest pagans are wrong! [I’m not sure how clear this point is but I’ll let it stand]

Rather, I want to come at this from my own research into the contemporary archaeology of prehistory – my contention being that prehistoric sites, monuments and things are resilient and retain a relevance and visibility today.

I want to explore some of the issues raised by the organisers in relation to my experience of contemporary pagan practices at a range of megalithic prehistoric sites – stone circles, standing stones, passage graves and so. Here, I am taking a broad view of what might be considered pagan practice, from big P formal rituals and ceremonies, through to the much more common small p sets of practices that align in some way with emotional or spiritual engagements with standing stones.

I also don’t care if the standing stone was erected in 2500BC or 10 years ago – we heard this morning about the Gorsedd stones [from discussant Prof Andrew Prescott, who made the point that the late 19th century adoption of this tradition does not nullify its druidical significance].

What I want to do is present some examples of what we might term a contemporary archaeology of pagan-esque practices at stone circles and standing stones. This draws on methodologies such as psychogeography, archival research, interviews, repeat visits, collecting found objects, and sometimes even actual archaeological fieldwork.

I will argue, from my own fieldwork and experiences, that actions that we might interpret as being pagan, or pagan-adjacent, are carried out for a variety of different motivations, in some cases genuinely spiritual in nature, in other cases cosplaying paganism [and here I don’t mean to cause offence, I see this as a positive], or having nothing to do with paganism at all.

This is perhaps all the more unusual as one might imagine that activities that have a pagan character might focus on rural locations

Not ‘fake stone circles. Not standing stones in towns. So my examples will include ancient and modern megaliths.

General observations from my own experiences

I guess I should start with some general observations about a range of contemporary pagan-esque practices that I have witnessed or documented evidence for at a wide range of stone circles and standing stones.

For me this often seems to involve acting out tropes associated with pagan practices and rites at places and monuments that have a popular association with paganism – these are likely to involve actions that are assumed to be pagan in nature and might even be believed to have happened at these places in the past despite archaeological evidence sometimes to the contrary

This might include deposition of offerings, flowers, objects, written notes and could be accompanied by dressing up, performance, music and / or ceremony / rites – or other actions such as hugging or climbing stones, or using monuments to monitor the annual cycle and skyscape events

So such actions as these might happen at specific times of the year that could be regarded as spiritually significant or have some resonance in folklore – solstices, equinoxes, Samhain, litha, beltane

Or could relate to formalised ceremonies related to rites of passage and the life cycle such as marriages, hand-fasting, cremation scattering.

And they may involve interactions with heavenly bodies – solstice sun rises and sunsets, eclipses, full moons, unusual moon phenomenon e.g. harvest moons, constellations, planets, northern lights

Evidence for these activities can be found at many stone circles, passage graves, and stone circles today – in the form of deposited objects such a coins and shells, candles, incense sticks, wear patterns but also evidence of more invasive forms of activity

Some of these can and do damage prehistoric monuments, such as fire-setting, lit candles, jamming coins in cracks in tombs and standing stones, graffiti, removal of objects and fragments [Jenny Butler also reminded me on the day that practices such as pouring liquids from alcohol to milk onto ancient sites might also be damaging]

[Also worth noting that some of these acts are heritage crimes, not to get all serious]

Archaeologists have not done a huge amount of research into these types of contemporary engagements with ‘our’ monuments although they are in some cases ongoing management concerns. In this sense archaeologists can be gate-keepers – managing access, deciding what is and what is not permissible, controlling narratives about how these monuments might have been used in the past

There has been limited research into phenomenon such as deposition. Bradley included a nice two page study based on his experiences at Balnuaran of Clava during his excavations there in late 1990s recording placement of coins in cracks, gemstones laid at the base of standing stones, and noting seemingly meaningful assemblages e.g. “a coin and a dowsing rod placed beside a glacial erratic in line with the entrance passage” / wing of a pigeon laid out in a chamber. [This monument has more recently become a focus for Outlander pilgrimages]

Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey has, so I have been told, to be regularly clearer out of all manner of offerings that are associated with druid activity and the solstice connections that this site has [for examples see this Howard Williams’ blog post]

On a visit to West Kennet a few years ago I found candles and incense sticks, but what are the motivations to leave this stuff behind? In that case it was because some random guy had been sleeping in the tomb – it was his source of light.

Blain and Wallis (2004, 240) [citation in acknowledgements] argue that motivations for such acts are complex and they are often improvised: “pagans are constructing their own forms of worship or engagement with sites and spirits”.

Motivations for pagan-esque activity at stone circles and standing stones

It is clear that not all of this is truly the outcome of contemporary paganism – there are other communities who carry out these kinds of activities for a host of other reasons and it is not always easy to detect the motivations of those who carry out such actions from the material remains alone – this requires additional research such as participant observation, interviews and monitoring social media

Astronomical events are documented at stone circles and tombs for astronomical study and archaeoastronomy

Offerings can be left at stone circles, standing stones and tombs to memorialise and remember deceased relatives and loved ones, or may be left for some specific reason e.g. to memorialise persecuted witches – and there are also examples of ‘time capsules’ buried at modern stone circles – and deposition can also have political motivations (such as Aye Stones left at Sighthill stone circle recently, or deposition on the Auld Acquaintance cairn, Gretna]

Such offerings might also relate to TV shows and films that have been shot at these sites or associated with them, from the Rollright stones and Dr Who, to random associations with Outlander as noted above at Clava

Or relate to acts of vandalism and anti-social behaviour around such monuments – candles in long cairns such as West Kennet are as likely to relate to someone sleeping in the tomb overnight as pagan practices and I quite commonly find broken beer bottles at the base of standing stones, perhaps thrown at the stone. Some people are just arseholes

Ceremonies, dressing up, and music might be related to more creative practices and this perhaps coincides with an increasing public interest in the last few years in standing stones and stone circles as places of enchantment – this has elements of both the esoteric and occult, but also has a hobbyist nature – the rise of Stone Club, the entanglement of prehistoric sites into folk horror narratives via zines such as Hellebore, stone circles and haunted generation narratives drawing on 1970s TV shows, and a slew of new films and TV shows featuring standing stones – Enys Men, A year in a field, Dr Who (again). In other words visiting stone circles and standing stones and doing things at them has become fashionable again – and some of this activity very much draws on the same tropes of rites, deposition, performance, ceremony – often in a highly stylised and creative form, a sort of hyper-paganism that is not pagan at all.

It should also be noted that there is some evidence that dressing up, rites and performances at some megaliths are motivated by blood and soil nationalism and neo-norse beliefs, which can be twisted versions of paganism

In other words there are pagan adjacent actions carried out at stone circles and standing stones that are not spiritual, but derived from a series of other motivations; however they can use the trappings of, or cliches derived from, paganism

In many cases from my experience a lot of this type of activity might be regarded as cosplaying paganism – leaving things like coins, shells, flowers, notes – not as part of a formal spiritual practice but rather because this is the kind of thing one is supposed to do at a stone circle or standing stone – or because others have done so – this is done not so much with the aim of a religious practice but rather as a performative act

So we should be cautious about assuming the motivations of a whole series of contemporary practices that we find evidence for, and even witness, at stone circles, around standing stones, and inside prehistoric tombs.

Case studies

You can read more about my case studies at these blog posts and further sources of reading – I’m happy to provide pdfs of the papers / chapters on application (ask me via the comments at the end of the post!).

Sighthill stone circle – Thatcher’s Petrified Children – Heathen Stones – The last days of a stone circle part 2 – Great crown of stone

Brophy, K 2019 Urban prehistoric enclosures: empty spaces / busy places, in C Campbell, A Giovine & J Keating (eds) Empty Spaces: confronting emptiness in national, cultural and urban history. IHR Conference Series, London. Pages 181-203. Book is online here

Science facilitating paganism (from the Duncan Lunan archive)

Brophy, K, Green, H & Welfare, H 2014 The last days of the Sighthill stones, British Archaeology July-August 2014, 44-49.

The Kempock Stone – Shadow of the stone – Galoshans

Edensor, T & Brophy, K 2023 The potent urban prehistory of an ancient megalith: the Kempock Stone, Gourock, Scotland. International Journal of Heritage Studies 29, 81-96.

The Galoshans street festival in 2022, with Granny Kempock figure (my photo)

Conclusion(s)

There is space for better working relationships between archaeologists and the pagan community

There might be for instance some mileage in exploring the entanglements between those who document the astronomy of stone circles and those who gather at those places to watch the skies

And there is a need for archaeologists to take more interest in practices and the material outcomes of activities that happen in and around archaeological sites such as stone circles and tombs. This is not just rubbish and it is not always a problem. But it could be and it might be.

Contemporary pagan activities should be regarded as part of the ongoing biography, resilience, reinvention, and living history of prehistoric places.

Sources and acknowledgements: I would like to thank Yael and Scott for organising, and inviting me to speak, at this event. My thanks also to the other speakers and discussants for what was a stimulating Saturday. Many images used in my presentation were from the archive of Duncan and Linda Lunan, used with appreciation and fully credited.

Blain, J., and R. Wallis. 2004. “Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights: Contemporary Pagan Engagements with the Past.” Journal of Material Culture 9 (3): 237–261.

April 24, 2023 balfarg Modern monuments, Urban standing stones

The memorial that never was

I have blogged in the past about the use of standing stones and megaliths as war memorials, and Howard Williams has also blogged and written about this phenomenon. Standing stones, dolmen and other forms of megalith are redolent with deep time, reliability, a solidness of form that brings reassurance, and can have ancient connections with land and even national identity (for good but for largely ill), all characteristics that make them ideal memorials.

A while back I was pointed in the direction of what might have – had it been realised – become the most elaborate example of this phenomenon – a war memorial in Campbeltown, Argyll and Bute.

This remarkable vision was the work of Glasgow architect James Salmon (1873 -1924) and was an entry in a competition to design a war memorial for the Argyll town that was held in in the years immediately after the First World War ended. Salmon’s vision did not come to pass however, and in the end a very different winning entry was unveiled to the public in 1923 – it stands in the town to this day. Incidentally, the winning design includes a Celtic cross element, another connection to a mythical past. The architect of the winning entry was by Alexander Nisbet Patterson (1862-1947).

James Salmon was an architect active in Glasgow at the end of the 19th, and early part of the 20th, centuries, and he worked in various different styles – art nouveau, modernism, romantic, mock tudor – being influenced by his education at Glasgow School of Art.

He worked in partnership with John Gaff Gillespie (1870–1926) and his most famous building is known as the ‘Hatrack’ building, located at 142a-144 St Vincent Street in Glasgow. Together, they “embarked on one of the most astonishing and innovative periods of architectural design the city had yet seen, with the introduction of Art Nouveau, Glasgow Style and Modernist elements in their buildings” (source).

A closer look at the plans for Salmon’s ‘Celtic circle’ and mound concept shows that this was very much an amalgam of various ideas and architectural forms from British prehistory.

The plan of the monument, above, shows it to have been a circle of standing stones, with a grass interior area divided into four quarters. The centre of the monument was a tower with large boat sculpture atop it.

This was envisaged as a communal, even crowd-sourced, construction project. The plan above included the notes:

This reminds me of the Gretna Auld Acquaintance cairn, constructed during the independence referendum in Scotland in 2014 from stones brought by visitors from across the UK.

This also suggests that not only was there to be a stone circle, but also earthen mound and stone dyke elements to the monument. These are only hinted at in this sketch:

This drawing does show however that several of the standing stones were in fact intended to be trilithon arrangements, including an elaborate triple setting facing towards the sea.

The date of this drawing is given by the holder of the Salmon archive, HES, as between November 1918 and September 1923, but it is likely that the competition entry was submitted in 2019 (source). Salmon himself died of cancer within a year of the rival war memorial plan being completed but not before submitting an entry for another competition – the Chicago Tribune Tower – in 1922.

Salmon’s vision for a monument to mark the sacrifices of the Great War is inherently romantic and fantastical, drawing on a mythical pagan past, and shaped by the collective efforts of society during the War. One can only imagine what this would have looked like had it been the prize-winner and been constructed. No doubt today we would look on the imagery included by Salmon as much more problematic than it would have been regarded in the 1920s.

The memorial that never was …. probably no bad thing.

Acknowledgements – thanks to Peter McKeague of HES for making me aware of this war memorial design. Image sources are given in the captions above.

The original drawing is now held by HES in their archives – here.

February 21, 2023March 1, 2023 balfarg A bit political, Ancient London, Psychogeography, Public art, Urban standing stones, Weird

Tapes of stones

I had many questions and I got some answers. About cinematic standing stones. Tropes of horror, folk horror, rural horror, the uncanny. The entanglement of film and megalith: tapes of stones, and stone tapes. Urban prehistory in the big screen in the city – London, Edinburgh.

Q&A. Call out and response. Panels and chairs, chairs and panels. Tapes of stones and stone tapes.

During January 2023 I had the good fortune to attend two cinematic events that presented films that all combined elements of rurality, unsettlement, and standing stones. In both cases, films were followed by Q&A and panel sessions with film makers and artists.

First up was a showing of Enys Men, directed by Mark Jenkin. This Cornwall-set movie has been branded in marketing as being folk horror and includes many of the key elements – a remote rural setting (in this case an island), a lonely protagonist, local legends turned to song, a hint of menace, and a standing stone.

The director was happy enough during the Q&A at the end to suggest that the marketing for this film perhaps over-egged the horror element, but there is no doubt that despite there being little blood shed or physical violence shown on screen, nonetheless a horror-scape was evident through a fragmented temporality and the wonderful use of sound. The recurring roar of a generator reminded me of some of the more visceral sounds one finds on Italian horror movie soundtracks.

The film was wonderful and the Q&A fascinating, with Mark Jenkin being generous both with his time and his insights into the creative process. For more of the same, here is an extended discussion about Enys Men with Mark Kermode and central actor Mary Woodvine.

But we’re here for the standing stone! Sadly my raised hand did not get my question asked on the night, and a tweet the following day remains unanswered at least by Mr Jenkin.

In fact, it is both a real – and a fake – standing stone. The actual Boswens menhir was used for some scenes.

But in an article about the film by Tanya Gold in The Spectator, she suggests that a fake standing stone was used in some scenes, and this makes sense, as it comes and goes, and is to an extent altered during the film.

Landscape has agency in Enys Men. I walk to Boswens Menhir after watching it: it’s the stone in Enys Men, though they made a replica, which I found in the rafters at the reclamation yard Shiver Me Timbers a few days later because the owner is also the prop master. It’s middle Bronze Age, about 4,000 years old, a haunted object.

The two incarnations of the standing stone – real and fake, mirror images of one another – nonetheless have a powerful agency in this film, and probably deserve second billing in the cast list. It / they fulfil(s) the role that megaliths often do in folk and rural horror, in that the standing stone acts as a focal point for our fears and anxieties, a mute and timeless observer that just might become a participant in the right set of circumstances. “Presiding over this time-slipping strangeness is a giant standing stone” (Mark Kermode) and Jenkin himself has noted that of standing stones in the Cornish landscape:

I was really haunted by the Pipers. I’d look through the gateway and I’d think they’d moved slightly. I like the idea of a sentient stone.

And this is a sentient stone with anthropomorphised traits: reviewers use phrases like ‘keeping her company’, and note that the stone seems to have the ‘power to move’, and even that it ‘moves around the island …. changing position and size’. I’ve also read phrases like ‘stands sentinel’, and ‘presiding over’ (reference perhaps also to the fact that it seems to be located in the highest point in the internal island landscape of the film).

Writing about the film, Adam Scovell (sort of the godfather of critical Folk Horror writing) is also drawn to the recurring standing stone imagery, an evocation of what might be called ‘Cornish eerieness’. This is also suggested by the other heritage landmark shown in the film, an abandoned tin mine, which reminded me of earlier Cornish horrors – Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966) and Crucible of Terror (1971). These heritage horrors play on time depth and mystery, a vein mined with much success by MR James. Mark Kermode has suggested that Enys Men could be viewed as “the cult 70s TV frightener The Stone Tape reconfigured” – if only past lives, rites, and voices played out beside standing stones could be recovered now, but what if we were to find that blood had been spilled or the living petrified?

Enys Men is a thought-provoking megalith movie that happens to have people in it, orbiting around a standing stone, an eternal entanglement.

A couple of weeks later I was back for more, this time an event organised by The Stone Club, part of London Short Film Festival, and called Figures in the landscape – see this page. Over a couple of hours, five short films were shown followed by a panel discussion.

Stone Club traverse Britain and Ireland’s ancient landscapes via the medium of shorts. From mysterious apparitions in Cymru, sculptural monoliths on the misty moors of Kernow, and a bouncy Stonehenge travelling across the UK, Stone Club offer visions that attempt to thin the veil, inviting us to re-enchant the landscapes we inhabit on a daily basis.

The five films shown were:

Figures in the landscape is a short documentary about the artist Barbara Hepworth at work in and around St Ives, with an evocative narration and soundtrack, and featuring standing stones (of course) and artworks that perfectly align with the Cornish landscape. This included the juxtaposition of standing stones and sculpture as this selection of stills demonstrates, such as the 1938 piece Forms in Echelon.

Forms in Echelon (Tulipwood on elm base): Tate

The narration intones: Stones for dancing and stones for dying…death and rebirth, in and out

You can watch this free on the BFI player here.

This was followed by Tresor, a film directed, written and produced by the Cornish singer, composer and artist Gwenno, to accompany her recent album of the same name. Claire Marie Bailey, a Cornish-based film-maker and photographer, collaborated closely with Gwenno on videos for this album and the short film I saw in London. (Mark Jenkin worked with her on a video from a previous album, and one song by Gwenno appears on the Enys Men soundtrack.) This film is joyous and playful, and features Bryn Celli Ddu Neolithic barrow, upon which Gwenno did a DJ set in 2022. (The hat worn below by Gwenno was designed by the Stone Club’s Lally MacBeth.)

Gwenno at BCD solstic 2022 (Pic: Megalithic Portal by dodomad)

Also obligatory draping over and hugging the ubiquitous Mên-an-Tol!

Like Enys Men, Tresor includes the use of Cornish, and was made during a Covid lockdown.

Third up was Jeremy Deller’s film English Magic, made and first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The centrepiece of this work was scenes of children playing on Deller’s bouncy castle Stonehenge, Sacrilege (2012). Again, this was joyous and fascinating, and it was fantastic to hear at the end during the Q&A how much Deller admires the creative thinking and creativity of archaeologists.

The exhibition for the British Pavilion at Venice included this film and other pieces. Deller’s website notes,

The exhibition reflects the roots of much of Deller’s work, focusing on British society – its people, icons, myths, folklore and its cultural and political history. He weaves together high and low, popular and rarefied to create unique and thought provoking work. English Magic addresses events from the past, present and an imagined future.

Sacrilege is a famous artwork, megalithic in form, but green and plastic in execution, a playful inflatable that toured the UK during Olympic year of 2012 including a stint in Glasgow Green park.

In Deller’s film, we see bouncy Stonehenge blown up (not Transformers 5 style!), enjoyed via the process of uncontrollable bouncing, and then deflated like a giant air bed (but more dignified than National Lampoon’s European Vacation style!). I’ve been to Stonehenge a few times and I’ve never seen anyone have much fun there, so this was always a refreshing installation, and it was nice to see its use documented.

The penultimate film was HforSpirit and Nick Hadfield’s 2021 short ‘pagan rave film’ UnTyMe, “… a short fly on the wall film about a group of friends that flee the city on a rave escape to the hills”. I must confess this was less engaging and joyful than the other films. I can’t like everything! But there was some cool dancing around Castlerigg stone circle with a typical foreboding big sky. You can watch an extract here.

Finally, there was a rather depressing Irish documentary from 1974, called Stones will Speak, directed by Terrence McDonald. This was an evocative and poetic exploration of, I suppose, elements of misplaced nostalgia, for a rural way of life that was neither sustainable nor equitable. “…voices of residents of the west coast tell the stories of their lives – dispelling romantic notions of rural life with tales of immigration, loneliness and hard work….[the film] has an air of truth, bearing witness to the changeless beauty of the Irish countryside but equally the harsh reality that a man cannot live on beauty or support his family on folklore”.

You can watch the film here. I suppose it speaks of a universal human melancholy related to landscape change. “I doubt there is anything in the city to match the sunshine on the mountains”.

The evening was concluded with the panel discussion featuring artist Jeremy Deller, the Stone Club’s Lally MacBeth & Matthew Shaw, artist and archivist Victoria Jenkins, and musician and producer Richard Norris. This was a free-flowing discussion on the films that covered a lot of ground although didn’t quite bottom out the enduring fascination for stone, and standing stones, suggested across the films. There was much discussion about ‘re-enchantment’ which I confess is a concept that I am not sure how to respond to as a prehistorian. It was all, with one exception, very English.

The chance to watch these films on the big screen was too good to miss, coupled with the opportunity to hear film-makers, artists and musicians discuss them. It was also an opportunity for me to explore the increasing interest there is today in Britain with standing stones and megalithic rites, a trend that transcends Folk Horror, despite what this recent Guardian article suggests.

There is something in the wind – perhaps this was even said by a panel member in London – that has so far largely escaped archaeologists. Looking back at my notes from that evening event, perhaps a better way of putting it is that there is a ‘yearning for something’ – and this seems dripping with nostalgia which is entangled with childhood TV memories, some kind of slower paced past, and played out through a rather retro and analogue sensibility. There are dangers of course with such nostalgia, especially were recollection falls to a sort of pagan past that never was. But I get the sense that all of those who were involved in making and curating the films discussed in this blog post are well aware of these dangers, and indeed would actively work against them.

Panels and chairs, chairs and panels. Tapes of stones and stone tapes. Standing stones in the cinema.

PS I still have many questions. One of them was answered via twitter by Mark Jenkin, a belated but welcome answer to my question as set out above about the Enys Men standing stone.

Sources and acknowledgements: I’m very grateful to all of those who organised and participated in the events that are discussed in this blog post, and I’m appreciative of the creative talent involved. I paid to attend both events, this was no junket! My companions on these evenings – Bam and Jan – both helped me think through some of the issues discussed above.

Special thanks to Gwenno for correcting information on the first version of this post in terms of collaborations for Tresor videos and film, and for the kind words!

I hope I have cited all sources for images and so on correctly and clearly above, let me know if you see any problems.

My visit to London was supported by a grant from the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow.

January 20, 2023January 27, 2023 balfarg Modern monuments, The theory behind urban prehistory, Urban standing stones

Stone-circling

Stone circle is a category of monument that does not, in its definition, and despite what you might think, have a stipulated time period. There is no point beyond which a stone circle is no longer a stone circle. A circle of standing stone will always be a stone circle. I have written about this elsewhere in a short piece called Stone circle (21st century). These are some of my words:

The implication that we might consider building a stone circle as an active living tradition is not as daft as it sounds. You are unlikely to travel much distance by road in the UK without passing a roundabout with a stone circle inside it, while megaliths seem to be default landscaping elements when a gap in a new development needs to be filled.

Recently I visited two stone circles which very much belong to the 21st century (this century, not the BCE one). I encountered one by accident, the other by design. This reinforced to me that there are, in effect, endless permutations and purposes to the simple act of arranging stones in a roughly circular setting. (The circle thing is a bit of a misnomer if you are looking for geometrical perfection.) There is a kind of magic to this simple concept, transforming both the materials used, and the space defined, into something altogether different through a bringing together and re-arrangement of some geological raw materials. Under the correct circumstances making a stone circle might also change the maker, while there may be a hope that the stone setting will affect some or all potential users.

Megalith creation might be an act of decoration, of convenience, even of whimsy. Or it could be deadly serious, done with the purpose of remaking a place, engaging with people, offering a service, perhaps enhancing wellbeing.

This is what one might call stone-circling: verb, the creation of a stone circle. At any time in the past, present, or future for whatever purpose. It doesn’t get much more niche, or vague, than that.

Retail therapy

During a recent visit to Mainsgill Farmshop on the A66 in the north of England, I noticed by chance when looking out of the upper floor window a bloody stone circle! My views of this monument shifted as I moved from window to window, creating a series of surreal vignettes, a juxtaposition of gift shop nonsense with a neatly organised circle of stones.

Framed – a triptych of stone circle views from a gift shop

The origins of the stone circle at Mainsgills Farmshop are not precisely known, its construction sometime before 2010.

This is a confection, a jumble of farm detritus, with random gateposts and, perhaps, lintels, gathered together and set in a circle. A stone lies recumbent in the centre, and picnic benches intrude on the northwest side.

The monument itself has its own page in the Megalithic Portal, categorised as Modern Stone Circle. Editor Andy Burnham quotes Andy Farrington who noted that this monument “is made up of old farm gate posts and has been built in the last 5 years as a tourist attraction for visitors to the farm shop and tearooms”. This would date this monument to the years before 2010, and since then the expanding farm shop has begun to encroach on the fringe of the circle as this photo of the monument, below, taken by Farrington in 2011, suggests.

Photo: Andy Farrington (c) Creative Commons, source

This stone circle seems to me a superficial gesture to rurality in a highly commercial environment, part of an attempt to make this place as farm-like as possible. Slightly ruinous barns, muddy roads, animals, the faint whiff of shit in the air – are all part of the farminess of Mainsgills Farmshop. One can almost imagine a brainstorming session where stone-circling was conceived of as another layering of authenticity.

Actual therapy

This contrasts with another modern stone circle I visited recently, this time as part of my Death BC project. This circle is equally recent in terms of its construction and also sits within a business premises, but could not be more of a contrast.

The stone circle at The Lost of Village of Dode, Kent, is part of a different set of transactional rural practices, built with marriage, death and other life landmarks in mind. The church itself was sealed shut during a bout of the old Black Death back in the 14th century. It was brought back to life by Doug Chapman in the 2000s, who lovingly restored the building. An income stream was found through this becoming a wedding venue, and things have evolved further since. The church itself is stunning.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Doug for the project about his barrow columbarium, built during lockdown.

This partially overlaps Dode’s stone circle, known as Holly Henge. This is – despite the name – a stone circle consisting of seven stones set in a circle with a single stone towards the middle. This was added to the church grounds as the services provided here expanded. It is now used for hand fasting and baby naming ceremonies, and memorial services. The additions of the barrow means that the major rites of passage in life can now all be marked at Dode.

Those marketing Dode make much of the potential prehistoric depth of these kinds of interactions with stone circles.

The Handfasting ceremony has its roots on Ancient Celtic Tradition and dates back as far as 7,000BC.

Traditionally a handfasting involved a couple, holding hands which are bound by cords and declared that there is only one life between them; much in the same way as vows are made now. The couple would then exchange a gift, most commonly rings or a gold coin, broken in half; a token of their love and commitment.

Where better to continue this meaningful tradition that at Holly Henge, the stone circle of Dode. To declare the significance of your relationship and future journey together, witnessed by your guests and the centuries old stone that has seen so much of the history of our world. (from Dode website, link above).

It is interesting that an appeal is made here not only a timeless human tradition, but also the timelessness of stone – the stone is ancient, and so therefore the stone circle has an ancient quality. These are appeals to perceptions of prehistory rather than any reality we can prove archaeologically but why should that matter? Doug’s stories about his time at Dode and online testimonies show that this, for many people, all works.

This says something about the mutability of the stone circle form and the spiritual benefits that stone-circling can bring. Yet my earlier example, bereft of emotion, shows another side of stone-circling – the creation of atmosphere. At both Mainsgill and Dode, the stone circle serves a purpose to evoke a certain kind of atmosphere – of the rural in one case, the pagan in the other. Stone circles therefore can be – and perhaps always have been – deployed to create a temporal jump, recalling some imagined, wished-for, past to serve a specific purpose. In that sense, stone-circling retains its important social purpose even today, and what’s more, folk relate to this, they buy into it, there is an unspoken contract that we all sort of know what stone circles mean. That is real power.

Sources and acknowledgements: I would very much like to thank Doug Chapman for showing Andrew Watson and I around Dode and for being interviewed. Thanks also to Andrew for accompanying me on the visit and helping with the interview and logistics on this project. Photos in this blog post with no attribution were taken by me.

November 2, 2022 balfarg Urban standing stones, Weird

Galoshans

Halloween on the banks of the Clyde, chasing down a witch in swirling wind and spluttering rain, weather fitted for late October. Early evening is neither the witching hour nor the devil’s hour but this does not mean that a haunting would not take place.

Galoshans – guising – trick or treat in descending order of Scottishness – terminology for transactional temporary arrangements entered into between children and adults. Deals are made at this time of year – allowance to walk the street, dress up, paint faces, stay up late, demand sweets from friends and strangers, all in exchange for a performance, however feeble. These contracts may last for only minutes but can echo across a lifetime.

And so the pavements are alive with ghouls and vampires, superheroes and robots, and sometimes even wizards, warlocks and witches. But not midnight, more like just-after-dinner time, as more than likely this will be a ‘school night’ and even the generosity of parents can only be stretched so far.

To Gourock, the car park of the railway station to be precise. Here be Galoshans, giant puppets manipulated by three people, one anonymously buried deep inside the torso, the other two working the hands and arms with sticks. Jerking unnatural movements, always on the edge of falling over, vulnerable to puffs of wind and surges of enthusiastic children, the giants weaved their way back and forth, moving to the beat of George Ezra and Taylor Swift.

Kids followed the giants around the car park, safely protected from the real dangers of the world and the night by gazebos, catering vans, an ice cream van, even a minibus and a static portaloo. This was an enclosure, the children and their patient parents wrapped in the kinds of things children really like – ice cream, crap burgers, terrible pop music. Amidst the whirling and the screaming wandered a whole family, each with an illuminated pumpkin for a head.

The giants were weirdly scary – a pirate, a white-skulled ghoul, Mel Gibson from Braveheart, a creature that looked like a living giant white loaf. In the middle of it all was the witch that we were looking for – Granny Kempock. Her trio of puppeteers steered her around the car park, swaying to Lizzo, awkwardly posing for photographs. Her green horrible face was topped by straggly grey hair and a black pointed hat of the type that seems only to be worn by cartoon witches. Around her neck was a rope connecting green skulls, neon death jewellery. The arms had too many joints and were serpentine, the hands like five-headed snakes. Her clothing hung around her like dirty white rags, and this translucent garb meant that the operator inside was visible, almost as if the giant witch had swallowed a human who was then forced to wriggle through Granny’s guts to escape.

The looming witch and the other giants tirelessly roamed the car park compound even as we retreated. We had witnessed history – local history, but we had also seen reflected back on us prehistory, local prehistory.

Just a few hundred metres away from this street party, solace was to be found with a silent and altogether more dignified incarnation of Granny Kempock, a standing stone on the edge of a cliff overlooking the back of the main street in Gourock. Standing stones always transform in the dark, and this one is no different, even if it was illuminated by a sickly orange street light. Located within a caged enclosure, mimicked by the enclosure of facilities down at the railway station event, Granny Kempock remained immobile, completely un-moved by the new single from Lewis Capaldi. If local myths are to be believed however, a person is also trapped within this version of Granny, a petrified witch, consumed by stone.

The contractual nature of Halloween was evident here too – this is a standing stone that is fogged up with stories of deals made with the devil or god, promises of protection, blood vows, eternal life, lost souls. Salacious stories collected by local historians and repeated by generations of locals bring this stone to life as surely as if they were her puppeteers. Dressing up the stone as a New Year’s Day rite continued until the 1970s, another key point of the year where Granny Kempock rises from the dead and de-petrifies.

The dual nature of this late October evening was powerful and moving. Two Granny Kempocks, one alive with movement and rhythm, surrounded by children dancing with the scary witch. The other dead, danced around in the past only by the recklessly heathen. Traces of prehistoric cosmologies, ancient ways of understanding the world and the passing of the seasons, preparation for the cold dark winter where witches haunt the alleyways and car parks.

Two Granny Kempocks. Polar opposites, doppelgangers, still holding this small Inverclyde town in their spell after all these years.

Notes

The Galoshans Festival is an annual event in the run-up to Halloween held across Inverclyde. An element of this event is street performance by local musicians and the Galoshans giants, all based on local myths and legends. The street party I attended on evening of 28th October 2022 described above was a street party, one of three that weekend, with others in Greenock and Port Glasgow.

The Kempock Stone is a standing stone in Gourock town centre, almost certainly prehistoric, perhaps not in its original location. There are many local stories and myths and rites focused on this stone, including an association with Granny Kempock, supposedly a local witch. I have blogged about this stone before and working on a paper on the local value of this monument with geographer Tim Edensor.

Some of the photos from this blog post were taken by Jan Brophy. The book extract comes from Rev David MacCrae’s 1880 book Notes about Gourock, Chiefly Historical.

February 24, 2022 balfarg Urban standing stones, Urbanisation

Buried alive

For the next issue of History Scotland magazine, I have written an article on Scotland’s urban standing stones. In this blog post I want to expand on the rich story of one of those standing stones, the Lang Stane in Aberdeen. At the end of the blog post there can be found links to posts I have written about some of the other stones mentioned in the article.

Hidden in plain sight, only the throw of a fish supper away from Union Street in Aberdeen, stands the Lang Stane, a most peculiar example of urban prehistory. This angular standing stone is squeezed into a niche in a wall, looking remarkably like a human corpse that has been crammed into a coffin, buried alive. The stone has a kinetic, restless energy, as if at night it tries to escape from the confines of its premature burial. Inscribed – branded – across this stone cadaver in what I assume to be the torso area is the word LANG STANE in capital letters, with a suggestive slight pause between the two halves of its name, the deep breath taken before the coffin lid closes. Curious linear marks run across the stone, mostly natural erosion lines – wrinkles – but some hint at rough treatment at some point in the stone’s life – scars.

Is this actually a prehistoric standing stone? If it is, clearly something happened between 2000 BCE and AD 2000 that caused the stone to end up in this unorthodox setting. It’s shape has led some to suggest that it was once part of a recumbent stone circle, commonplace in North-east Scotland, although it is unknown what happened to the remainder of this monument, most likely a victim of more interventionist farming practices and early urbanisation in the post-medieval period. Canmore offers little more than a description of the stone, largely drawing on a brief note from Wyness’s 1965 book City by the grey North Sea: Aberdeen, a surprisingly rare mention of this stone in a book about the city.

The stone is shown alone in the 1746 Map of the Burgh of Aberdeen by G&W Paterson, here a solitary stone near a windmill; it sits poised to be swallowed up a tidal wave of urbanisation coming from the east, beside the track that would become Union Street. When the inevitable happened at some point after this map was made, according to Wyness, the stone was “built into the niche at the rear of Messrs. Watt and Grant’s building” and the street named Langstane Place. The niche is on the corner with Dee Street, named for the river, not the Tudor alchemist.

Extract from G&W Paterson’s 1746 map of Aberdeen (National Map Library of Scotland)

Appropriately for Aberdeen this stone is made of granite, and so it blends in with the background stonework and niche, three shades of grey. This is a big lump of stone, measuring 1.8m height, 0.68m breadth and 0.3m thick. It is pointed at both ends, more so at the bottom, which has a slightly green tinge. We have no way of telling which way up this monolith stood in any earlier incarnation in a stone socket; for all we know it is propped upside down, a cruel fate indeed. Little more can be said about this stone now, and I don’t think any form of direct analysis of the stone itself could shed more light on the story; this has moved from the purview of prehistorians to those who like to dig in archives.

The stone is enjoyed by some regardless of how old it is or how it got there despite the unpromising surrounds. A series of wonderfully strange photos can be found online showing the stone in various compromising situations. In the Megalithic Portal, The Captain documents the stone is “now presented in an alcove behind Burger King …. The poor thing seems neglected amongst the bins and street signs, but at least it is still here.” This is reinforced by a Google Street View image that looks like the work of Cold War Steve. Why not create your own versions?

7 Dee Street, Aberdeen (from The Megalithic Portal)

My own google street view attempt looking west along Langstane Place

There is a really lovely blog post written about the Lang Stane by the author Ailish Sinclair, who includes the stone in her historical novel Fireflies and Chocolate (GWL Publishing, 2021). She suggests the stone was moved to the niche in the 1960s but this must be a confusion with the published note on the stone by Wyness. She also notes a “faint six pointed star just below the text” carved onto the stone although I confess I could not find this on my visits to the stone. She also notes, “I like to pay the stone a wee visit when I’m in the vicinity, all tucked away and squished into its alcove as it is. There’s no scenic rolling hillsides or lush forests for the Lang Stane as enjoyed by its contemporaries!”. Such standing stones are indeed in unfamiliar surroundings, their present setting having been occupied perhaps for only 5% of the lifetime of the megalith.

I visited the Lang Stane twice in preparation for this blog post and the magazine article. I was of course drawn to the incongruity of the stones and its context, an unintentional masterpiece of urban juxtaposition. It sits on a curving street corner in the aforementioned bespoke niche, raised slightly from the pavement level on a sort of kerb, but not the kind of kerb that was in common use in the Bronze Age. Above it is an antiquarian road sign with a portentous finger pointing up the street and over the head of the stone.

The niche itself is in many ways as interesting as the stone itself, as I also found to be the case at the London Stone. It is defined by clean rectangular grey granite blocks, with shaped blocks forming an arch. The tidy look is somewhat let down by a metal cable concealer running vertically just to the left of the stone and a downpipe beyond this has caused unsightly water stains to form on one side of the niche. No history has been written about the niche, nor do blueprints or architect’s drawings exist (so far as I know) to show if and how it has developed through time. However, this old archival photo (source) suggests that at one point like so many urban standing stones this one was caged or held in position, in effect pinned down to avoid resurrection. And there was a much larger niche at this point too, coarser in stonework, wider in girth; indeed the different stonework suggests that this is a different niche, although presumably in the same location. Hints in the current stonework suggest there have indeed been modifications here.

I could see no offerings behind or beneath the stone, and nothing was draped from it, although surely from time to time football scarves are wrapped around it. The stone shares this streetside location with bins – a lot of bins as most of the images above show. Graffiti can also be found nearby: SAVE TREES FREE SPIRIT according to a 2007 photo on the the Megalithic Portal. This is a city centre edgeland, a place of smells and oozing liquid, a visceral street corner location, no place for a standing stone. But exactly the kind of place where we do need standing stones.

Diagonally across from the stone is a carry-out food place called Langstane Fish & Chips. This ensures a regular supply of punters walking to and fro to collect kebabs, sausage suppers, burgers and pizza slices. The standing stone is an irresistible place to eat beside, with the ritual consumption of food likely the kind of thing that happened around this stone millennia ago.

I started this blog post with the observation that this stone reminds me of Victorian photos of open caskets, the public display of bodies, memento mori. This postmortem photography was very popular for a while, a means to memorialise the dead on film. In some cases, the corpse was arranged as if asleep to give this impression in the photograph. Sometimes this was done publicly with the bodies notorious criminals, to show that they were indeed dead, and to kill myths and legends there and then, yet unintentionally creating a legend nonetheless.

This process, quite alien to us now, as alien in many ways as erecting a standing stone, captures for me some of the more ghoulish elements of urban prehistory. The Lang Stane sits on display, exposed, and for all intents it plays dead as drunks stagger past, and tourists trace the contours in the granite with their fingers. Photographers are drawn to it, not for the beauty of the stone but the weirdness of its setting, and like the dead it can do nothing except accept how it has been posed for our benefit.

But the Lang Stane, like other urban standing stones, does not ask for our sympathy, but might benefit from our thoughts, our concern, our whispers, a little care. It is resilient and will no doubt outlive us all. At least it is still here.

‘Weep not for me my parents dear,
I am not dead but sleeping here‘.

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks to Jan who accompanied me on both visits and took the night-time photos in the blog above.

Links to blog posts about some of the standing stones in my Historic Scotland article (details of this article will be added when it is published):

Granny Kempock, Greenock – In the shadow of the stone (Urban Prehistorian post 84)

Dagon Stone – Dagon Day (UP post 7)

Hoar Stane, Tulllibody – The solace of deep Anthropocene time (UP post 97)

Ravenswood Avenue standing stone, Edinburgh – Behind bars (UP post 28)

September 21, 2020 balfarg Prehistoric Edinburgh, Urban standing stones

Hot mess

Hot mess: a person or thing that is spectacularly unsuccessful or disordered, especially one that is a source of peculiar fascination.

Is that really a standing stone?! So must passers by in cars on the A8 near Edinburgh Airport ejaculate with great frequency as they pass by a very prominent megalithic upright in the shadow of an industrial unit. And well they might wonder what is going on when they spot out of the corner of their eye a right old hot mess of temporal entanglements.

Yet this standing stone demonstrates a key characteristic of urban prehistory – resilience in the face of change. These kinds of monuments act as a sort of fulcrum around which change happens, but yet retain their own internal integrity. This can be in the face of indignities such as bad planning decisions, a lack of care, vandalism, or even just being ignored.

The more cynical observer might even presume that this ancient survivor is giving our world of cars, commerce, and industry, the megalithic finger.

What is going on here? A quick visual inventory adds up to the sum of nothing much that makes sense. A standing stone. A cairn. A picnic bench. A fire escape. Some kind of rusty ventilation unit. A generic industrial estate building. It is all rather confusing: these seemingly random and largely disconnected things appear to lack synergy. It is as if some kind of time travel experiment has gone wrong and smashed together a whole load of things that existed in this single space but in different times. More of a peculiarity than a singularity. It is all rather surprising.

I guess a small percentage of the curious drivers or passengers in passing vehicles who spot this crazed arrangement might do some research when they get home or when it is safe to google. They might then stumble upon the fact that this is indeed a ‘real’ standing stone and not an unreal standing stone (in itself an interesting concept) and that it has stood here for rather a long time. Indeed of all of the things that are arranged in this location, it is by far the oldest, even older than the rusty ventilation unit. It is everything else that is out of time, disparate elements of this tableaux that have gradually accrued around the standing stone as if it were a magnet attracting 20th century crap.

This standing stone has been in the shadow of buildings for a long time, in the nineteenth century being close to a farm, Lochend Farm, which gives the stone its modern name. It’s prehistoric name? Who knows. By the 1940s the stone had moved (in context, not literally) from relatively rural isolation to being situated within a knotwork of rail lines and roads. Soon it would lie directly beneath the flightpath of the airport, and be made to ever so slightly vibrate according to flight schedules; the busy A8 road nearby is another source of vibration and gives this stone no peace.

1955 map. The standing stone is shown as an un-marked dot to the SW of Lochend Sch.

This is a standing stone that has been a mute witness to an ever-changing set of surrounds, from the turn of the seasons, to constructions and activities associated with thousands of years of human activity, the churn of change. One might imagine a stop-motion film of the life of this stone, extracted from the stability of bedrock or an outcrop, dragged, heaved into position, followed by a process of slowly moving from the centre of the lives of people, to the peripheral vision of a tired commuter.

A small noticeboard beside the monument, and its modern-looking cairn, tells the sum total of the story of the stone from our perspective, a banal account of pathetic ignorance, our know-nothing stance on such sites, which don’t make the textbooks, barely trouble maps, and warrant just one sentence in the National Monuments Record of Scotland. The local context is given more prominance in this megalithic short story:

IT IS POSSIBLE THAT IT IS AN OUTLIER OF THE BURIAL AND RELIGIOUS SITE AT HULY HILL ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROUNDABOUT ALTHOUGH IT COULD HAVE STOOD ALONE. STANDING STONES OF THIS TYPE OFTEN HAD CREMATED HUMAN BONE AT THEIR BASE ALTHOUGH IT IS BELIEVED THAT THEY WERE NOT PRIMARILY BURIAL MARKERS

Situated on the other side of a huge roundabout and intersection is Huly Hill, an enigmatic and rather larger prehistoric monument consisting of a mound and three standing stones. Our industrial estate monolith appears to be little more than an appendix, a footnote, a PS, to this place, despite the fact we know bugger all about Huly Hill either, and what’s more, it is not even as easy to see from a car.

The standing stone is now associated with this industrial unit, part of an industrial complex rather than a sacred prehistoric complex. It stands outside the fire exit of a shapeless and colourless block that is inhabited for the time being by Element. The unit has all sorts of corridors and rooms, containing machines, desks, revolving chairs, meeting rooms and those plastic things that dispense water. This is probably not a permanent state of affairs – this place – this standing stone – was a ‘development opportunity’ in 1982 and will be so again. This building won’t he here in 50 years. But the standing stone will. It will outlive us all.

I visited this standing stone twice in 2019, in a more innocent age, after many years of yearning to touch its cold surface, rather than view it through rectangular voids in a fence, which has always given the stone the appearance of having been drawn on graph paper to scale. On my second visit I was able to get to the stone itself on a midweek visit. In the reception area, I barely needed to explain myself, as if visitors to the megalith were not as uncommon as I had supposed, something I found re-assuring. Here to visit Standing Stone. This way sir, how do you like its office?

As I was taken along a series of corridors, I began to feel sorry for the standing stone, alone despite the staff who sat at desks just metres away behind tinted glass. There is no escape for this megalith, no chance of peace to be found while humans work around it oblivious to its elegance and mystery. The office block arches around the stone, a semi-panopticon, but only with a dis-interested audience of sandwich munchers. As I approached the fire doors which stood between me and the stone, I speculated as to whether the stone was at times the victim of the tortures of office workers, cigarettes stubbed out on its grey flanks by bored smokers during tea break.

I pushed ‘bar to open’ and emerged into a different sonic environment from the low hum and muted sounds of the office environment. Ahead of me was the standing stone, hemmed in by monobloc and the kind of gravel one can buy in garden centres (sub-standard cairn material imho). This location was haunted by the drone of cars and motorcycles, and the muted roar of overhead planes. These machines fly over the stone constantly, silvery echoes of the comets and shooting stars that must have been witnessed over the monument thousands of years ago when the skies were darker and quieter.

I did not go back through the fire doors, now locked to me, and scrambled around the grassy exterior of the industrial unit to get back to the front of the building.

Despite the hot mess, the botched landscaping and compromised setting of this monument, it remains a constant, a fulcrum point. This is despite the peripheral role it plays in the life of almost everyone who encounters it. The stone has probably never been busier, never been seen by more people, yet it has an invisible quality. Office staff and lab technicians look through its transparent patina, familiar to the point of banality. Oh, you want to see the standing stone? Why?! Drivers and bus passengers shoot by, focused on the forthcoming traffic lights and road intersection, seeing the stone as a blur, never truly in focus except in the eventuality of a traffic jam.

Yet….in this ever-changing world we live in, the Lochend Farm standing stone offers a constant, unchanging, re-assuring presence, not moving or evolving, not in need of an upgrade or reboot, and never becoming obsolete. Just what we need in 2020 if only those who encounter this magnificent megalith would realise it.

Notes: The Lochend Farm standing stone was described by Smith in 1877 as ‘large standing stone..of coarse greenstone’ on the ‘south side of the Edinburgh to Bathgate road’. This brief note concluded, ‘It bears no sculpturing or inscription of any kind and measured about 10 feet in height from the surface to the ground’.

Coles (1903) showing the plan view of the Lochend Stone & Haly Hill stones

Coles, in 1903, added little more to this description in an account more focused on nearby ‘Heelie Hill’. Upon walking from the railway station to the cairn and standing stones, ‘the first object to arrest the eye of the antiquary is a great monolith, over 9 feet in height’. Coles did some recording, as the illustration above shows.

Thereafter there is no further archaeological engagement with the stone, which as the black and white image from 1982 above shows, stood in the farm ground near the expanding A8 road for some time. The post-1982 construction of the industrial estate here was when the landscaping of the stone, with gravel cairn surround, must have occurred.

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks to the staff at Element who allowed me access to the standing stone.

Sources used above for images and the notes section:

Smith, JA 1875 Notes of rock sculpturings of cups and concentric rings and ‘The Witches stone’ on Tormain Hill; also of some early remains on the Kaimes Hill, &c; near Ratho, Edinburghshire. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 10, 141-51.

Coles, F 1903 Notes on….(4) a cairn and standing stone at Old Liston, and other standing stones in Midlothian and Fife….Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 37, 193-232.

June 21, 2020June 21, 2020 balfarg Ballardian, Modern monuments, Public art, Urban standing stones

Coatbridge Carnac

As I explore the places near where I live on foot, within the approved 5km or so limit, I ask myself: ‘Do I just see urban prehistory everywhere? Is it just me? Or are allusions to the prehistoric hard-wired into our urban spaces, industrial estates, retail parks, and housing estates?’. I am coming to suspect the latter, as the alternative would mean that urban prehistory is simply a product of my own delusional state of mind, a pathological condition.

So that’s fine then. On to the business of this post.

Urban exploration is seldom a walk wasted. And following a path, or a desire line, just that little bit more, towards the end of a long walk, if often the time when unexpected discoveries are made. And so it was recently on a lockdown walk in the Lanarkshire sun. On a wander that had already delivered olfactory pleasure drifting from whisky barrels biding their time in warehouses with their doors flung casually open, Jan and I pushed on just a few minutes more, in the shadow of Tesco Extra that from the rear had the appearance and scale of an airport terminal.

A deserted path ran along the backside of this massive grey warehouse, pitted with black doorways at the bottom of unwelcoming stairways. Someone has spray painted a brick wall ‘Mind the steps’ while a bunch of dying flowers hung from a rusting banister nearby, a plaintive sad simple note attached: RIP. An accident on the stairs? We became overwhelmed by the sound of the shop, a low capitalist hum, as if the building were not really a shop but a huge power station feeding on the energy of queuing shoppers.

I glanced off the the right, along a narrow but concrete-paved pathway that led to a clearance, within which were I glimpsed a few inverted shopping trollies, and a pile of big angular boulders. Attracted to this – what other word can I use? – cairn, I pushed aside the foliage, and emerged out into an opening, where other blocks were arranged in more cairns. Huge sandstone discs, like giant tiddlywinks, were arranged in a snaking line. The chase was on, with each break in the vegetation leading to more megalithic revelations.

This cannot be a coincidence. The place we stumbled upon is some kind of landscaped public art, perhaps industrial in spirit, almost certainly not prehistoric in any way whatsoever in the mind of the creator, and yet I cannot help but see these blocks, these lines, these deposits, as prehistoric-esque, to coin a clumsy compound word. Why would anyone see these piles of boulders as anything other than cairns? One even took the form, I am sure, of a fallen standing stone.

The fallen standing stone (photo: Jan Brophy)

Consider the basic facts of the matter. In a hesitant line some 150m in length, punctuated by bushes, squeezed in a green triangle between the Faraday Retail Park, Coatbank Street, and South Circular Road, there are multiple cairns and fallen megaliths of granite and sandstone.

These stones are a 1980s palette of oranges, greys, and pinks, and arranged casually, but the sheer size of some of the boulders meant that there could have been nothing casual about this. In the shadow of high rises, near the din of traffic noise, this is surely urban prehistory?

In one clearing, two trollies lay tied to one another by the chains attached to the pound coin slots. One trolley was from Tesco, the other Asda. This unholy coupling appeared to have been deliberately engineered, perhaps for my benefit, a Ballardian touch that I appreciated. Trollies were strewn all around, their metal carcasses ridden in, broken, borrowed, stolen, then finally dumped amidst this Coatbridge Carnac.

The abandoned trollies give this place the feel of a mortuary space for excarnation, their defleshed skeletal frames picked clean of their consumer flesh, the tin cans, the multi-packs, the boxes and packets, and left to tarnish in the sun. Exposed to the elements, their wheels silently spinning in the breeze.

Gareth Rees recently tweeted about coronavirus and his specialist subject, retail park Car Parks. (Would he choose this topic were he on Mastermind?) One picture, showing ‘bizarre trolley alignments’, made me think about the new affordances that shopping trollies have for us during pandemic. Arbiters of safe social distanced space in shops. Delineations for queues outside shops. And perhaps they should also be viewed as vectors of the transmission of Covid-19 via unwashed hands and surfaces, things to be handled while wearing latex gloves.

It was difficult to make sense of this mostly abandoned piece of landscaping behind the Faraday Retail Park. The gravel surfaces that most of the boulders and stones had been laid atop were overgrown with weeds, and broken bottles and bent cans were strewn all over the place. Litter accumulated around the base of standing stones and collected in the unusual angles created by stones like tangled limbs. Fires had been set in the shadow of some cairns. This was a place that was hidden in plain sight, just off the road, just behind a retail park, and yet seemed like another world that belonged to someone else. We were trespassing, and yet the only life that we could detect here at 4.30pm on a Monday afternoon were rabbits. Lots of rabbits. Some hiding behind shopping trolleys, perspective creating the illusion they were in cages at the whim of a mad scientist.

Someone tweeted later that evening that this place was known as a rabbit run, and the various meanings of this phrase seem apt for this place. Someone else told me it was a failed attempt to establish a Japanese garden behind the Retail Park, although many of the stones looked to me like the byproducts of the heavy industries that used to dominate this landscape. The huge sandstone discs were, I am sure, remnants of bridge supports, although from where I have no idea. Still another theory goes that this is a liminal place that marks the boundaries between the territories of two Coatbridge gangs, perhaps borne out by the tags sprayed onto some of the blocks.

Yet the scale of all of this did not quite compute with any of these explanations. The megaliths that we encountered in that liminal space, that edgy edgeland, seemed to me like they belonged to the fantasy worlds of Doug McLure, or James Franciscus, beneath, beyond, impossible, deeply strange, and yet enchanting. It was our world – my world – and yet not quite of that world. Shoppers nearby largely knew nothing about what we had encountered, in this space that in the end was deemed suitable only to plant shrubs and erect standing stones and cairns. It is defiantly not a shop. But maybe a little bit prehistoric.

As we emerged out of this nether region, passers by on a better-used path looked at us suspiciously, as it urban exploration in that place was unusual behaviour even for lockdown walkers. Little did they know that only a few metres away, amidst the trollies, the rabbits, and the rubbish, lay the Coatbridge Carnac.

March 20, 2020April 22, 2020 balfarg Modern monuments, Prehistoric Glasgow, Replicas and reconstructions, Urban standing stones

Great crown of stone

Exactly a year ago, 20th March 2019. the new Sighthill stone circle was officially revealed to the media. Designed, as was the first iteration, by Duncan Lunan, this astronomically aligned stone circle has been constructed as a permanent and unique resource within the emerging new Sighthill just to the north-east of Glasgow city centre.

At the time when this new megalith began to emerge, it sat on a raised island amidst a giant muddy building site. Sighthill itself was yet to be reborn, the old variant having been more or less completely bulldozed and remediated as part of a £250 million redevelopment. The standing stones stood resplendent like teeth, their concrete foundations exposed like white gums. At the time they sat in a noisy landscape of construction, with the closest neighbour being a Mercedes car dealership, a Ballardian crash of epic proportions.

A year on, residential Sighthill is now growing slowly, although the stone circle remains (just) in glorious isolation. It still sits in a brownscape of mud amidst machines of construction, but it is slowly visually and metaphorically being lost in an urban skyline. Yet even now, driving west along the M8 into the city centre, the Sighthill’s second stone circle is a fantastic site / sight, emerging as it does on the horizon off to the left. A similar and wonderful view can be gained by the pedestrian by standing on Baird Street bridge over the motorway.

The stone circle is surely Glasgow’s Angel of the North, a great crown of stone on the horizon.

This photo essay (my rather grand description of what is basically a series of photographs) documents the time I was privileged to spend in and around the stone circle on 20^th March 2019 thanks to a kind invitation from Duncan.