Ostara22

It is also my mother’s birthday, so we travel toward the Fraserburgh coast and then inland, to Strichen. On the way home, mum suggests going to see the nearby stone circle.

It’s said that Aberdeenshire and its surroundings lay claim to around ten percent of standing stones across the British Isles. Buried, mostly, in plain sight - off the side of the road, betwixt and between rolling hills of Grampian or in this case, sunken within a field of poorly turnips and fallen sheep.

The stones of Strichen here, can be considered worldly travellers, for they have been disassembled, relocated and assembled back again in their original (or rather, first recorded) location twice in the past two hundred years.

As far as the lore of standing stones go, they are of a modest sort and in truth, perhaps easily missed if not for their mega mythic backstory (imagined or otherwise). I think about the likely energetic upheaval in migrating such collective power back and forth through the field and wonder if this mighty act could be considered a great undoing.

Through ferocious winds and below a bright low sun, we cut through the path beyond the bridge by the field toward the circle. There is a hushed version of me that truly hopes for the apparitions and violent visions of temporal odysseys portrayed in Children of the Stones. In the quietude of my mind’s eye, I imagine druids and sacrificial rites, summoning storms and burning herbs. I spend a few moments there before turning back down the hill, through the waning turnips and lifeless sheep, in the plains death, of rebirth and transformation.