It was time to journey away again
for a quick break, so I headed off
to the Isle of Arran on the west coast of Scotland. On my first day there I went for a rather lovely
walk up the hills by Whiting Bay. The
walk takes you up by the quite spectacular Glenashdale Falls and then round to
the Giants’ Graves and the views from there over to Holy Isle. The walk was steep in parts, which wouldn’t
normally be a problem, but a touch of Angina made it a bit wobbly for me on
some of the steeper bits. However,
though I may be fat and old, I’m determined when it comes to getting places and
I soon walked it off. After a quick stop
at the viewing platform looking out on Glenashdale Falls I carried on round and
up to the top of the hill and the Giants’ Graves.
.JPG "Glenashdale Waterfall")
The Giants’ Graves are actually the
remains of two chambered cairns that were built around five thousand years ago and
sit on top of a hill near Whiting Bay. The
chambers in each would originally have been roofed with large stone slabs and
then enclosed in a cairn made up of thousands of smaller stones.
.JPG "View of the Giants’ Graves")
.JPG "View of the Giants’ Graves")
The cairns were used as burial sites,
but not quite in the way we now bury bodies.
That reverence and respect for a corpse wasn’t there in the way we know
it, and bodies didn’t tend to just be buried and left alone. No, our ancient ancestors seemed to have had religious
practices that involved leaving corpses out in the open to have the flesh eaten
from them by the birds and the beasts, before they would then pick up the
remaining bones, burn some and place these and the other unburnt bones into the
chambers of the cairn. What the
significance of this was we’ll never know, but it probably all meant something deeply
spiritual to them.
.JPG "View of the Giants’ Graves")
.JPG "View of the Giants’ Graves")
Given these religious practices the
cairns were not permanently sealed, but rather used over and over again.
Only some of the larger stones in the
cairns now remain, as most of the others were taken away to be used for
building with.
Excavations carried out of the two
cairns found human bone, pottery, flint knives and stone arrowheads.
.JPG "Graffiti carved into one of the stones")
Before making my way back down to
Whiting Bay and a spot of lunch, I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me
on my walk on one of the stones that make up the Giants’ Graves.
.JPG "Skulferatu #85")
.JPG "Skulferatu #85 on one of the stones of the Giants’ Graves")
.JPG "Skulferatu #85 on one of the stones of the Giants’ Graves")
.jpg "Map showing the location of Skulferatu #85")
The coordinates for the location of the
Skulferatu are –
Latitude 55.476701
Longitude -5.097959
what3words: acquaint.closet.deeply
I used the following sources for
information on the Giants’ Graves –
The Book of Arran
Edited by J. A. Balfour
1910
Public information sign
at site
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