August 17, 2010
Rookery Fairy Ring
Filed under: Trespassing
Click thumbnail for larger image.
How to deal with all of the magic of northeast Scotland: get blasé about it. ("OH LOOK, ANOTHER STANDING STONE, JUST LIKE THE ONE WE JUST PASSED A FEW MINUTES AGO...AWESOME, I GUESS" and "OH LOOK, ANOTHER FAIRY RING THAT LOOKS LIKE ALL OF THE OTHER GODDAMN FAIRY RINGS WE'VE SEEN AROUND HERE...FASCINATING".)
Trust me on this, you either learn to take your default excitement of living amongst the remnants of a very ancient past down a notch or you're liable to meet your maker Scanners-style with just one 15 minute country drive.
(You don't even want to know how many neolithic monuments, stone circles, old graveyards, cairns, ruined castles, imposing churches, blessed wells and standing stones there are in this area. The region of Scotland Italics and I live in? Seems to have been the spiritual epicenter (of the northeast Scotland, I mean) thousands and thousands of years ago. The amount of shit that still survives - even though most has been lost (it was common practice for farmers to clear their fields of standing stones) - is legitimately obscene.)
Pictured above: A fairy ring growing just outside the drystane dyke of the "most active corvid rookery I know about". (<- Like I needed a fake horn on a real unicorn to be told the place was fucking special.) The photo's all blurry because I was still shaking from finding a roadkill fox earlier in the drive. (<- A long story over a year in the making.)
