Isbister: Tomb Of The Eagles

Date Added: 17th May 2024
Site Type: Chambered Cairn Country: Scotland (Orkney)
Visited: Yes on 14th Jul 2015. My rating: Condition 5 Ambience 5 Access 2

Log Text: A bit of a trek from the visitor centre/museum... but a spectacular one, looking out over impressive cliffs with open sea as far as the eye can see. Guillemots and every other bird with a squawk to offer contribute to the soundtrack. There's a monument to the archaeologist who curated this site a few metres from the tomb.

The tomb is wonderful, even with the crude concrete cap etc, and the craftmanship with which the stones were interlocked is fabulous.

Isbister: Bronze Age House

Date Added: 17th May 2024
Site Type: Ancient Village or Settlement Country: Scotland (Orkney)
Visited: Yes on 14th Jul 2015. My rating: Condition 2 Ambience 4 Access 2

Log Text: Not far from the Tomb Of The Eagles, this was probably an industrial building of a sort, maybe a tannery? Whatever it was, there was much use made of a pool for heating water using red-hot stones. Some of the discarded stones are strewn nearby but most form a midden to one side, now mostly overgrown.

Tomb of the Eagles Museum

Date Added: 8th May 2024
Site Type: Museum Country: Scotland (Orkney)
Visited: Yes on 14th Jul 2015. My rating: Condition 4 Ambience 4 Access 5

Log Text: Marvellous museum displaying relics from the Tomb Of the Eagles and one of those rare places that encourages you to handle some of the exhibits. Various stone implements, an eagle's talon, and so on. The inevitable gift shop is not half bad.

Ness of Brodgar

Date Added: 10th May 2024
Site Type: Ancient Village or Settlement Country: Scotland (Orkney)
Visited: Yes on 15th Jul 2015. My rating: Condition 3 Ambience 4 Access 5

Log Text: I visited while the annual dig season was in full swing. Difficult to interpret what you're seeing (and much more excavation has been made in the years since, 2024 being the final year of excavation). This isthmus of land is packed with so much history but don't overlook the Ness if you are nearby.

Skara Brae

Date Added: 12th May 2024
Site Type: Ancient Village or Settlement Country: Scotland (Orkney)
Visited: Yes on 15th Jul 2015. My rating: Condition 5 Ambience 5 Access 4

Log Text: Absolutely stunningly preserved settlement, down to the stone dressers, hearths, sleeping quarters . . . a shame one of the houses is sealed off but there's enough to keep you occupied for an hour. It can get very busy though.

Maes Howe

Date Added: 12th May 2024
Site Type: Chambered Cairn Country: Scotland (Orkney)
Visited: Yes on 16th Jul 2015. My rating: Condition 5 Ambience 5 Access 4

Log Text: Make sure to book early as the limited numbers allowed in the Howe at one time might mean it's several days before you can find a slot. Our guide was blind, but clearly knew every inch of the site and it was only when she told us this that it became apparent she was using muscle memory and perhaps a very hazy tunnel vision to navigate. The twenty-ish minutes passed in an instant.

The craftsmanship of Maes Howe is breathtaking.

Cuween Hill

Date Added: 17th May 2024
Site Type: Chambered Cairn Country: Scotland (Orkney)
Visited: Yes on 16th Jul 2015. My rating: Condition 5 Ambience 5 Access 2

Log Text: A gem of a site, this is like a miniature Maes Howe. Not much room inside and very dark. There's a torch you can borrow but no guarantee the batteries will be any good so you might want to take your own. There are lots of details you will miss in the dark.

Avebury

Date Added: 15th May 2024
Site Type: Stone Circle Country: England (Wiltshire)
Visited: Yes on 5th May 2016. My rating: Condition 4 Ambience 5 Access 5

Log Text: Having visited Avebury numerous times I've chosen the date when I last visited, which was already seven years ago. Each time we visited we would take a photo of one of us, or one of the kids, sat on the Devil's Chair, and by estimating ages (if the images themselves aren't dated) could come up with a chronology of some kind.

In 2004 we rented a cottage in the village for a week and that gave us a really good chance to explore more fully. When the kids got bored of that we took them to Swindon for the day. They liked it lol.

We walked the putative route of the Beckhampton Avenue one evening. There really are a lot of sarsens at the sides of the road, incorporated into walls, half-buried at the side of the road and so on. Pete Glastonbury's CD captured these very well.

The walk petered out at the Longstones, Adam and Eve, isolated in their field about two miles or so from Avebury village.

Mitchell's Fold

Date Added: 16th May 2024
Site Type: Stone Circle Country: England (Shropshire)
Visited: Yes on 23rd Jun 2018. My rating: Condition 3 Ambience 4 Access 3

Log Text: I first visited Mitchell's Fold in the summer of 2007 when a great deal of the countryside was closed down by foot-and-mouth disease. There were guys in white plastic overalls in the nearest town. Stern signs warned against it, but we snuck onto the site anyway. If there had been any animals we could turn back, but there weren't. (In normal times you will always meet one or two dog walkers, loads of space for the most energetic pup to wear herself out.)

Since then I've been back a couple of times, both times in 2018.

There's a few ways to get to the site and there is a disabled parking space very nearby if memory serves. The last time I visited, in June 2018, a bunch of about ten or twelve of us walked there from the Satipanya retreat centre, about a mile-and-half away, bang on the border between Wales and Shropshire.

It's a very pretty part of the country and makes for a splendid location even if the circle itself has been tampered with considerably over the years. The setting is worth a visit on it's own and the stones have a real sense of resilience. I seem to remember that Paul Devereux and his team did some of their research there and the suggestion was that the most prominent stone had unusual electromagnetic properties.

I'll check Places Of Power and edit this entry if it needs clarification (the book is currently in a box somewhere while I prepare to move house).

Flag Fen Visitors Centre

Date Added: 10th May 2024
Site Type: Museum Country: England (Cambridgeshire)
Visited: Yes on 21st Apr 2023. My rating: Condition 3 Ambience 3 Access 4

Log Text: It's a little bit disappointing to be honest, though I liked the replica huts and the actual causeway remains, constantly kept wet to try and slow down the rot. Although the painted walls are a bit crudely rendered they do a good job of showing how the preserved wooden stakes would have intersected with the remainder of the site. So sad that there's so little to show for it, but I'm glad I visited and picked up quite a nice quartz geode in the shop (and a signed Franny Prior book).

Castlerigg

Date Added: 11th May 2024
Site Type: Stone Circle Country: England (Cumbria)
Visited: Yes on 22nd Apr 2023. My rating: Condition 5 Ambience 5 Access 5

Log Text: I visited for the first time on my way back south from the Orkney Islands in 2015. The clouds were gathering and followed me home as far as Cambridge, more or less. If it weren't for the weather warning I would have risked a longer stay but having driven from Stromness was beginning to flag.

My second visit in 2023 gave me more time to really savour this utterly beautiful circle and to see it in the context of the surrounding hills (which were shrouded in mist the first time). So so wonderful.

Mayburgh

Date Added: 18th May 2024
Site Type: Henge Country: England (Cumbria)
Visited: Yes on 22nd Apr 2023. My rating: Condition 3 Ambience 4 Access 4

Log Text: Very popular with the local sheep!

This is an impressive henge monument, especially when you bear in mind the banks are a vast collection of cobbles, piled to a height of twenty feet or more. The one remaining menhir at the centre looks rather forlorn.

Kicking myself that I didn't follow the signs to King Arthur's Round Table, not far away.

Devil's Arrows

Date Added: 8th May 2024
Site Type: Stone Row / Alignment Country: England (Yorkshire (North))
Visited: Yes on 22nd Apr 2023. My rating: Condition 4 Ambience 4 Access 4

Log Text: On a day when it never stopped raining it was still worth trudging (trespassing) through the farmer's knee-high crops of I don't know what, rather than gazing at the two smaller arrows from afar. The biggest arrow is across the road and mighty impressive.

Easy parking at the roadside: the site is now perched on the edge of a modern "little boxes" housing estate.

Gamelands

Date Added: 12th May 2024
Site Type: Stone Circle Country: England (Cumbria)
Visited: Yes on 22nd Apr 2023. My rating: Condition 4 Ambience 5 Access 4

Log Text: Deceptively large circle of medium-sized boulders, mostly undisturbed, and larger stones, mostly prone. On the day I visited a small mob of very young lambs were having great fun leaping about on the smaller/lower stones.

Brimham Rocks

Date Added: 11th May 2024
Site Type: Rock Outcrop Country: England (Yorkshire (North))
Visited: Yes on 22nd Apr 2023. My rating: Condition 5 Ambience 5 Access 3

Log Text: Rather a grey damp day, hence the site was a bit slippy. Genuinely fun though, and I enjoyed the coy sign near the top of the site which points out all the landmarks you can see on the horizon BUT NOT the bloody awful RAF Menwith Hill NSA complex which we must all apparently pretend does not exist.

I enjoyed the local crows too, very accustomed to begging scraps from tourists but in a gentlemanly sort of a way.They park theyselves nearby, sneak a look at you every now and then, then politely look away in a "I'm just chillin' mate" kinda way. The second you chcuk them a bit of sausage roll though all decorum is abandoned and the victor speeds off to the nearest outcrop to munch smugly. Will definitely go back.

Merrivale Menhir

Date Added: 16th May 2024
Site Type: Standing Stone (Menhir) Country: England (Devon)
Visited: Yes on 22nd Apr 2023. My rating: Condition 3 Ambience 4 Access 2

Log Text: Although I visited the site less than a year ago for some reason the first visit, twenty years earlier, sticks more firmly in my memory. This spindly menhir is just visible from the hut circles unless my memory is deceiving me, but you'll have to cross all of the rows, one or more leats, and some quite boggy ground to get to it. Nearby there's a neat little stone circle and then this really pretty outlier. I have a feeling it has been toppled and re-erected once or twice at least. Depending on weather conditions and whether the stone is wet it can take on quite surprisingly dark shades even though it is - I'm guessing - mostly quartzite and light in colour. The stone looks very much like a sundial gnomon and I think I read a book where a moors aficionado made very regular recordings of the shadow of the stone and posited it as a Uriel's Machine of a sort.

Little Meg

Date Added: 12th May 2024
Site Type: Stone Circle Country: England (Cumbria)
Visited: Yes on 23rd Apr 2023. My rating: Condition 3 Ambience 4 Access 4

Log Text: A logical next visit after a tour of the magnificent Long Meg, which I had been dying to visit for so many years. This is a bit of a jumble, occupying a narrow unploughed strip at the edge of a large field at the time I was there. There are circular rings carved into a double spiral on one of the stones and you simply have to see this if you're anywhere close by.

Long Meg And Her Daughters

Date Added: 11th May 2024
Site Type: Stone Circle Country: England (Cumbria)
Visited: Yes on 23rd Apr 2023. My rating: Condition 5 Ambience 5 Access 5

Log Text: There's a generous-sized gravelled car park not far away and then it's a reasonably easy short walk to the Druid's Circle as I think the local sign puts it. I might have misremembered.

It's a spectacular site and several minutes walk to circumambulate, glancing over to the outlier, Long Meg, every so often. Most of the stones are fairly low, rounded boulders, but generally quite large. Some are not much more than stumps. About a quarter of the stones are on the other side of a narrow track, and these are the first you'll see as you approach the site.

Long Meg is majestic, red, covered in carvings, boss of all she surveys.

Maiden Castle (Dorset)

Date Added: 17th May 2024
Site Type: Hillfort Country: England (Dorset)
Visited: Yes on 27th Jun 2023. My rating: Condition 4 Ambience 5 Access 3

Log Text: Had the site pretty much to myself. It was a fine day but windy. When you're at the top of the site it is difficult to gauge the scale of the ramparts and other defences, but it is immense. A whole village could easily have existed up there.

Cerne Abbas Giant

Date Added: 8th May 2024
Site Type: Hill Figure or Geoglyph Country: England (Dorset)
Visited: Yes on 27th Jun 2023. My rating: Condition 4 Ambience 2 Access 5

Log Text: Viewed from the tourist car park it is a bit disappointing: you can't necessarily make out the whole outline of this chalk giant. When I get my helicopter license I'll have a better look. But if you're nearby it's worth a quick look-see.