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tjj wrote: thesweetcheat wrote: GLADMAN wrote: A point for debate, perhaps? Are prehistoric sites still 'sacred' places - however you might define that? - or are they now irrelevant, of no use in assisting human beings relating to life on this planet? Simply museum pieces from a bygone age?
I happen to experience what could be described as 'spirituality' at these places... a feeling that somehow the world does mean something. Not in a concrete, definable, measurable sense of course, but within that bizarre, (currently) unfathomable world of introspection. Just electrical pulses. But guess the point is this is the medium we've always used, so for me these sites are still relevant, doing their job.
I've experienced some of the most visceral highs and lows at prehistoric sites. Some have made me want to laugh into the wind for pure joy (in fact my recent locating of the cist on the slopes of the Sugarloaf had me doing just that), some take the breath away with their splendour or their landscape setting, some have a very special quiet and hushed beauty, while others have brought buried emotions to the surface in a very unexpected way.
And occasionally sites have brought anger and disappointment, when they've been badly abused by people.
Purely my own opinion, but I wouldn't probably use the word "sacred" to describe these places, as that carries some kind of "higher being"/religious connotations, in my mind anyway. Any religion practiced at them now is essentially made-up Victorian romanticism, no matter what the druids might tell you. But spiritual? For sure. The high, remote places are invariably a salve and a tonic. Just not when there's a coach trip arriving.
TSC, you and Gladman have a way with words. I enjoyed your posts on this subject a lot. I have been guilty of turning up in a coach on one occasion - when I visited the Ring of Brodgar a few years back. Was travelling alone and it was the only way I could get there - I also recall it being one of the most euphoric experiences I have had on a visit to an ancient site - perhaps it was the effort involved in getting there, or the heavy mist lifting just as we arrived on Orkney, or the deep blue of the sky, the like of which I hadn't seen before, or that it was midsummer. I can't pin it down but it has stayed with me.
On the other hand, Callanish didn't have that effect much to my surprise (though the golden eagle did). I remember Sunkenkirk for getting hopelessly lost trying to walk there with my companion who had used a very old one inch map to plot a five mile walk meant to end up there - instead we ended up walking into a bog hemmed in by barbed wire. After retracing our steps we drove there and just walked a short distance from the car. My feet were soaking wet and my friend was now 'very hungry'. We ate our packed lunch huddled behind one of the stones in the rain. It was an amazing place though, in spite of the discomfit - also I saw my first and only red squirrel run across the road with a baby in its mouth on the journey across Cumbria to get there.
I first went to Callanish on the bus, Tjj. Foot passenger from Ullapool. It was the sight of the other stone circles through the window that prompted a week tour a few years later... as I recall I then literally spent all day at the stones, dawn to dusk. Because I could, and it felt good. I'm not religious, don't believe in the metaphysical, but the sensations being there generated within me, of timelessness, about us and our civilisation being 'just another passing through', another chapter in the human story to be superseded, built upon in turn by another, meant something, you know? I'm quite prepared to say I think these places are sacred - to me - not in the narrow conventional sense of blind devotion to some deity championed in holy texts - nicely packaged for human consumption - but as a location where introspective musings upon being built of the same stuff, the same atoms continually recycled, as everything else on this planet feels not only appropriate but an imperative. I don't think this was left to chance, merely a happy accident. Those people knew what they were doing. Those slender monoliths of Lewisian Gneiss - with that grain - were chosen for a reason. The location, too. The stage for whatever rituals were carried out had to be right. In my opinion that at Callanish still is. As are the locations of innumerable other monuments. Of course the point is this is all in the head, human perception, so there can never be a definitive benchmark. People may also argue that 'thought' doesn't actually exist. How can electrical pulses in the brain be 'about' anything? Fair point, although I feel if many people are experiencing the same introspective sensations from a location, from the aesthetics formed of stones stuck in the ground, or a pile of stones piled upon a mountain top, then, from a social perspective it has to be of worth to the human psyche.
I recall a young girl saying to her - presumably - grandfather at the Tursachan, 'What's so good about a pile of old stones?'.... to which he replied "Because they represent the dawn of civilisation upon Earth". Not bad, eh? He was an old Indian gentleman in a turban.
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