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Already a large area lay unexplored behind us and to the west, but at Lochgilphead we branched away northwards. I'd seen on the map that we were soon to arrive in an area dotted with prehistoric settlement and quite suddenly there we were, apparently in the thick of it. There are more than 350 ancient monuments within a six-mile radius of the village of Kilmartin. 150 are prehistoric. Cup and ring markings can be seen on the standing stones at Ballymeanoch. |
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Although successfully targeted by thieves, there is still an impressive cairn at Dunchraigaig. It's about 30m in diameter and 2.5m high. Two burial cists are visible and a third is hidden by replaced cairn material. Cremated bones, flints, an axe and pottery were found during a 19th century excavation and a crouched burial beneath the paved floor of the cairn.
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I don't fully understand why it is, but I do appreciate that not everybody is totally fascinated by environmental issues, political matters, mountain scenery, blues and loud rock 'n' roll music, vegan diets and related land use, woodstoves, VW campervans, reading about Buddhism, etc.
There again, I'm sure there are some folk who might expect me to be tremendously interested in football, cricket, golf, TV "personalities", cross-stitch, knitting, nuclear physics and church music when, though I might well have tried to be, I'm not.
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We wandered out of the thinly wooded area to a field where a quad-biking farmer and his three dogs, the oldest caked in poo, were rounding up a flock of sheep. After a few minutes the sheep were left to graze. "What was all that about?", Jo asked.
I could only assume that the purpose of the flurry of activity was to enable the farmer to assess whether or not all the sheep were physically fit enough to escape from three dogs and a Honda. Within the same field, but fenced around, was an area of low, glacier-smoothed rock on which cup and ring markings were very evident. (To make one show up better I had wetted the ring markings, bottom right).
Whilst indulging in my small obsession with the why and how of matters prehistoric, I am, I hope, quite careful not to overstep Jo's boredom threshold. While passing through Kilmartin Glen I scampered around selectively dipping into what I might quite easily have made into a three day visit of exploration. |
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What was the purpose of these markings? Nobody knows. At first I fancied that the cups once might have held simple candles, but that theory is shot straight in the (sandalled) foot by the existence of similar cup markings on vertical standing stones.
Modern toes, (just to lend some scale). |
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