Whilst on residency at Cove Park I travelled to the Isle of Arran
to visit the ritual landscape of Machrie Moor.
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I can’t remember clearly five days later what I thought on Machrie Moor. Too busy experiencing it I suppose. What about the peat? Did it bury the stones all the way to the top, like I heard it did at Callanish. The houses and the graves were near the circles, a small area really. Desolate now but warmer and more homely then, a friendly valley of crops and jokes and shit and rubbish and love and walking and ritual and power and worship and killing (people and beasts I guess) and death and rain and sun and hope and loss and cycles and time. But at some point the rain rained more and the land got bogged and the crops stopped growing and the homes and the graves had to move and the rituals changed and maybe the old stones weren’t as reliable as they had been; they were still big and they still pointed to whichever way they were supposed to point to mark the hills around with the eye of the observer (perspective and the position of the body being the important bit) but the stones or the people long dead in the cairns (‘the lady made old bones’) or both together couldn’t stop the rain and the water and the bog so the people left and each child after each child saw less of the stones as the ground absorbed them in to its memory and the new valley weathered itself in to the memories of the new children that the new children had.
