CRAWICK MULTIVERSE
The rain has ceased, but its memory clings to the air. It is a morning of bright clearances, the sun finding apertures in the fast-moving cloud, casting down sudden, intense beams that turn the wet grass to a dazzle. To walk into the Crawick Multiverse at such a time is to feel the landscape freshly rinsed, still breathing out the cool of the night storm. This is not an ancient place, not in the way of the stone circles that spine the nearby hills, but it speaks a language of deep time, a modern tongue for geological epochs and cosmic theories, built from the bones of a wound in the earth.
I follow the path as it curves down into the Sun Amphitheatre. The land, once an open-cast coal mine, has been re-sculpted into vast, sweeping forms. The grass is a brilliant, almost acidic green against the dark red of the exposed earth. Water still trickles down the steep banking, finding new runnels, whispering the story of last night’s weather. The place is a geoglyph, a text written on a colossal scale. Its grammar is one of spirals and sightlines, its vocabulary the rough-hewn boulders that stand like sentinels or fallen giants. They are markers, not of graves, but of ideas – pulsar, supernova, black hole. They pull the mind outwards, from the damp soil underfoot to the spinning void above.
Climbing the path that spirals around the North-South Line, I feel the shift in perspective. The valley floor falls away, and the full scope of Charles Jencks’s vision unfolds. It is a landscape of thought, a place designed to be read by walking. Each footstep is a beat in a line of poetry. Below, two mounds represent Andromeda and the Milky Way, destined for their slow, gravitational collision. To stand here, between them, is to be placed within a concept, to feel the immense, silent dance of galaxies in the quiet of a Dumfriesshire morning. The stones, dragged from the earth during its excavation, are now aligned with celestial events, their grey, lichen-blotched surfaces catching the fleeting sunlight.
From the ridge, the view is immense. The Nith Valley, lush and green, is a world away from this strange, sculpted basin. The site is a bridge between the industrial past and a cosmological future. It has reclaimed a scar, transforming a place of extraction into a place of contemplation. The ghosts of the mine – the noise, the dust, the gouging of machines – have been replaced by the sound of the wind and the call of a curlew. It is a powerful alchemy, a reminder that we can write new stories in the land, stories that look not only back at what we have taken, but forward to what we might understand.