Visiting Sheffield on a wet and cold December afternoon last year, I wandered into Waterstones bookshop looking for warmth and shelter and picked up a copy of British art, Ancient landscapes by Sam Smiles. Now, as readers of the blog may appreciate, this is my kind of book- a combination of art and megaliths. I bought it and highly recommend it.
Nesfield, Circle of stones, from the V&A collection
Leafing through the book later with my wife, we came across a painting by (the hitherto unknown to me) William Andrews Nesfield entitled Circle of stones neat Tormore, Isle of Arran, 1828. We didn’t know the site and we reached for our old and battered copy of Aubrey Burl’s Guide to the stone circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany. The place in question was Machrie Moor on Arran, an area we had never visited. A plan began to form…
During the last week in June we visited Arran and Kintyre. The weather was astonishingly perfect- blue skies unbroken for seven days. Arran was stunning- both lush coastal woodland and dramatic mountains (although perhaps not quite as spectacular as Nesfield would have had us believe). On the Sunday morning we visited the Machrie Moor complex, a short drive across the middle of the island from where we were staying in Brodick.
There is a walk of a mile or so from the carpark, but then you wander through a succession of megalithic monuments, spread out over a gently sloping moorland covering another mile or so. This many stone circles in one place was remarkable enough; for them all to be so impressive was more incredible still. There are six, plus two cairns. The standing stones reach as high as five metres. As ever, you are confronted with bafflement as to their purpose and the motivation that led to such sustained and prolonged effort with limited technology. it’s suggested that they are all orientated to the midsummer sunrise between the mountain peaks to the east. We’d arrived a week or so too late to check this…
Next to The Glenartney where we stayed in brodick was the studio of artist Angela Elliott Walker. Before departing, we purchased a copy of her print of Machrie Moor. I love her almost Futurist style and the great sense of perspective over the whole ritual landscape that this picture gives.
Angela Elliott Walker, Machrie Moor.
On leaving Arran, we crossed on the ferry from Lochranza and stayed at a Landmark Trust property at Saddell Bay on the east cost of Kintyre, almost directly opposite Machrie Moor on the island’s west coast. The Saddell estate comprises a castle, a stately home and four cottages, all available as holiday lets. You get your own beach, too, with seals, otters and gannets. Pop fact: the video for the (in my personal opinion, execrable) ‘Mull of Kintyre’ by Paul McCartney was filmed on Saddell Beach. You can see the isolated cottage used for picnics and the castle in the background when the Campbelltown pipe band march manfully along the beach. You can ‘enjoy’ this on You Tube.
Ballymeanoch standing stones (from Neilston webcam)
Anyway, on our first full day we undertook the long drive north from Saddell to visit the second ritual landscape in the area, at Kilmartin in Argyle.
Temple Wood stone circle (from Tripadvisor)
The Kilmartin monuments are slightly more extended than the Machrie Moor site, so that it’s not possible to comprehend the distribution of circles, cairns and stone rows in their entirety. It has been very well preserved, although to a degree this was a disadvantage as its accessibility drew coach parties. I may be selfish, but I prefer having stone circles to myself, just so that there’s time and silence to absorb the sense of place. That personal gripe aside, the complex is well worth visiting.
Nether Largie cairns (from Undiscovered Scotland)
These sites are both called ‘ritual landscapes’ by the professionals and it’s appropriate to end with a few thoughts on that. We have next to nothing in the modern, certainly Western, world, to equal these planned and co-ordinated Neolithic and Bronze Age constructions. Other than, perhaps, the Vatican City and a couple of other places of Christian pilgrimage, the last millennium has largely produced single, albeit very impressive, structures. At both Kilmartin and Machrie Moor we find a half dozen or more interrelated constructions. Furthermore, we can barely begin to match their usage. The carbon dates suggest that Machrie Moor was in use over a period of 800 years. The sites at Kilmartin attracted worshippers and new building over a period of 2500 years. Very little from the Christian era can match that kind of deep significance and veneration.
Kilmartin standing stones (from Tripadvisor)
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