KILMARTIN GLEN
To walk the Kilmartin Glen on a bright spring morning is to feel the past press close, to read a language written in stone and light. The air, sharp-edged and tasting of salt blown in from the Sound of Jura, seems to hold a different quality here, thrumming with a low, ancient frequency. This is a landscape that remembers. It is a palimpsest, its surface scored and inscribed with the passage of five millennia, and the morning sun is the scholar’s lamp that reveals the script.
You feel the pull of it first at the great cairns, the hollow hills that stud the valley floor. To stoop and enter the Nether Largie South Cairn is to cross a threshold not just of stone, but of time itself. The world of birdsong and wind-stirred grass is exchanged for a sudden, profound quietude. The air cools, heavy with the scent of damp earth and cold rock. Your eyes adjust, and the immense, jigsawed slabs of the inner chamber resolve from the gloom. These are stones that have known the dark for longer than our history has known the light. To lay a hand on their surface is to feel a cold that is not of a single season, but of accumulated ages, a deep-time chill that seeps into the bones.
Out in the sun again, blinking, the world feels new-minted. You follow the great linear alignment, that deliberate stone-path of cairns and menhirs that marches down the glen. The standing stones at Temple Wood are not mute sentinels; they are conversational, angled towards one another, towards the sun’s rising and the moon’s setting. Their surfaces are a cartography of their own: continents of lichen, grey-green and rust-red, bloom across the weathered schist. They are timekeepers, their long shadows creeping across the turf like the gnomon of a vast, geological sundial, marking out a rhythm far slower than the human heartbeat.
It is here, in the dappled light beneath the new-leaved birch, that you find the other script, the more intimate one. The cup-and-ring marks carved into the flat rock outcrops are a form of touch made permanent. You trace the concentric circles with a fingertip, following the same path a bronze-age hand followed, feeling the slight dip and ridge of the groove. Are they maps of the stars, or of the soul? We have lost the glossary to this lexicon. They are whorls and spirals, eddies in the rock that seem to capture the very motion of the water that once flowed over them, a memory of fluidity locked in stone.
Standing, finally, on the high ground near the fortress of Dunadd, you see the whole glen laid out, a vast page of inscription under the spring sky. The stones do not give up their secrets easily. They ask for a different kind of attention, a slowing of pace, a willingness to listen to their long, slow speech. You leave not with answers, but with a deeper sense of the questions, feeling your own brief existence measured against the immense, enduring presence of the stones.