Balquhain

A most unusual circle. From all sorts of perspectives.

Balquhain is today overlooked by houses, wind turbines (not that I mind these per se), and rather more jarringly, the A97 from Aberdeen to Inverness. It sits facing Mither Tap with wide views to the North. However, it is possibly the lowest lying circle I have visited thus far, and the steep hill behind it feels instinctively like a better place than down almost at the base of the valley. The circle also has an unusual Quartz outlier, here on the right. It is the tallest stone in the group and feels very much like a "special addition" to mark some sort of notable providence that became the people or this area.

Sunset behind the sacred mountain we now call Mither Tap. Crows make an angry outcry at my presence. Near to the ground, I smell wild garlic.

The outer face of the recumbent is DEAD flat. I mean perfect. This is a heavenly mirror. All recumbents face the sun. Maybe they are there to collect energy and release it to people in their rituals. It starts to hail lightly.

Now reclined, the recumbent only terrifies with its size and not its vertiginous height. Imagine tooling that thing flat. That would have taken weeks, months of painstaking work. As would tooling all of the standing stones, which in 90% of cases have been moved, broken and piled up in corners of fields by landowners over the generations.

I would be disappointed were I to learn that the flat face was a result of the stone being broken or splitting under thousands of freezing winters.

The Quartz outlier is every bit as grand and powerful as I expected. You can almost forget the dual carriageway in the background.

AND NOW....some photos in colour...