| Overview
There are many web sites featuring the big players of the
stone circle world such as Stonehenge, Callanish, Ring of
Brogar and Avebury to name a well-recognised few. And while
sites like these are truly outstanding in their own right there are also
literally tens of thousands of lesser stone circles, single standing stones,
local named stones and other ancient stones, many
of which are forgotten by most and only seen by a dedicated few. This
web site is about those forgotten stones, lying in out of
the way places and just waiting to be discovered.
At first I thought there would be few stones or circles
worth looking for in my local patch in the South of Scotland
but when you get down to it and study the maps, you can sometimes
find real surprises and my initial count revealed over 400 potential locations to visit. My search was not restricted
to the classic standing stone shown on Ordnance Survey maps
but also other stones such as named stones with Wallace�s
Putting Stone being a good example and boundary stones, such
as those found along the Scottish/English border in the high
Cheviots and also some of the "stone related"
locations such as sacred hills, glacial boulders and so on.
I started this web site by purchasing all the new
Explorer 1:25,000 series Ordnance Survey maps of the region
and painstakingly studied them, marking each possible stone
or circle in pencil, then listed them in the web site
database. Originally I did not restrict my search to only
the Scottish Borders and the Lothians but also ventured over the
border into Northumberland. However, the project soon became
too unwieldy and I decided to create four main areas for
now, the Scottish Borders, the Kingdom of Fife, The Lothians
and recently, Dumfries & Galloway. With so
many sites to visit and photograph it will take some time to
complete this site and I also suspect it will never be truly
complete as more stones are found and added. Plenty to be getting
on with.
I'd also like to point out that some of the sites
included are not strictly within the regions listed above.
For example, some sites across the Border in Northumberland
may be included within the Scottish Borders section. Ancient
stones found in around Stirling might be found in the
Kingdom of Fife section, and so on. As well as ancient
stones of recognised antiquity I've also started to include
many of the named stones and rocks found along the coastline
of the region.
The easy part is tracking down the stones themselves,
taking photographs and doing the web site is also easy. What
is really the difficult part is researching each of the
sites, finding out a little bit of history or interesting
information, how it came to have the name it has and so on.
This is where you can help. If you have a book on standing
stones, see if there are any of the sites listed here in the
index and please do send in anything that might be of
interest and could be added to the site entry. Finally,
never forget what it feels like to suddenly come upon that
special stone, the one you have been searching for all day
long. Make every stone be like the first one. |
