CASTLERIGG STONE CIRCLE IN THE LAKE DISTRICT

This week I would like to share my thoughts on creating a small project while traveling. When we travel abroad, we frequently encounter the problem of sensory overload combined with the realistic belief that we might never return to the area. While we all want to encounter the must-have shots, I would suggest that one strategy to get personal shots out of your travels would be to create small projects while you are traveling.

                                                                  THIS IS THE PLACE! NOT MUCH MODERNITY IN THIS VIEW.

These projects can be created through advanced planning or on the fly. The days of just winging it while traveling through Europe are long past over - this last trip to England and Scotland was planned and mostly paid for months before Fran and I boarded the plane. It was a very weird experience for me to be trying to reserve dinner reservations 7,000 miles away and four months ahead, and finding places already full. Spontaneity is vastly reduced, but that doesn't mean you can't plan ahead, especially if you decide to look for special places to explore. So certainly explore You Tube for all you're worth, but skip the obvious places after a cursory glance. The point of advanced research is to find somewhere that you wouldn't have dreamed of exploring, especially if you can be reasonably confident that most people would never have heard of it or wouldn't be interested if they had.

                FOLLOWING THE STONES ON THE PLATEAU

The other way to find special places is to equip yourself with a series of great maps, and to not be afraid of using them. Your phone has certainly made it far easier to get someplace once you are aware of its existence, but it is pretty bad at planning travel off the screen. And coverage has an annoying habit of dropping once you really get out in the boondocks. In the United Kingdom you can purchase Ordinance Survey maps of a particular area you will be visiting. These maps are of such a scale and detail that you will certainly find the house you are staying at, as well as any other evidence of human habitation all over the area. You can certainly plan any hike you can dream of, and find most of them that you will never be able to complete. That is not what makes them most interesting - it is the discovery of places to visit that never made a guidebook or a video. While there is always the possibility of not actually being able to get there, you will find it very hard to actually get lost. On Skye Fran and I found places that were just breathtaking, and we might have been the only tourists who had ever stumbled on them, because Fran was game on following the map until we had reached the end of the road.

                                       FRAN PROVIDES A SCALE REFERENCE AMIDST THE STONES

The small project I will illustrate today involved the pursuit of ancient stone circles that are spread throughout Great Britain. Once I realized that they were in some sense all over the place, it became a reasonable goal to visit some even though we weren't necessarily traveling to some "famous" ones. In the end we got to visit three stone circles, which I had discovered deep within You Tube on very local videos, the kind where you figure you could do a more professional job right now without ever producing a video. No matter, because you are in pursuit of very local knowledge. Now the maps come in , because there is literally no way the videos can ever get you anywhere near where you want to be. Research informs your interest; then other tools enable you to get there yourself, or determine that it might not be worth the bother.

                                                                  STONES AMID THE FOREST AT CLAVA CAIRNS

The stone circle pursuit obviously began with "Outlander", although I informed Fran that she would be on her own if she disappeared into the past. Depending on the difficulty of actually getting to one of these circles, you might not find yourself alone in the pursuit. One of the skills required in landscape photography is sheer patience, while you not only wait for the light, but for the other tourists to tire of touching the stones. Another skill is framing. This not only means finding a quiet background to the ancient stone circle that doesn't include a road full of traffic. It also means moving around so that your subject, the stones, obscure the other visitors around you. It helps if the stones are bigger than most humans - just use them to hide the other people. I found that this wasn't too hard, as long as you were also willing to wait to get the shot you wanted.

                                                                  PEERING INTO THE INTERIOR CHAMBER OF A CAIRN

The first stone circle we visited was in the Lake District of Northern England. While Castlerigg  Stone Circle was off the beaten track for a lot of tourists, it was easily accessible, especially for locals for whom it served as a local dog park. It was so popular that the powers-that-be were constructing a third gate through the stone wall that surrounded the plateau on which the stone circle had reigned supreme for five thousand years. The only real evidence of modernity on the site was that stone wall, with only a few farms scattered in the near distance. The setting, surrounded by hills, provided all of the evidence you might need to realize why some ancient tribe had decided that "this is the place."

                                                                  A STONE STANDS ALONE IN FRONT OF A CAIRN

We found our second stone circle near Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. We had continued our pursuit of Scottish history by visiting the battlefield of Culloden, where Highlander culture met its end in a blaze of glory. While I found the Museum to be very enlightening, the site itself is really just another plateau, with not much to offer. Culloden was less Gettysburg than Wounded Knee, since it less of a battle than a massacre - lasting far less time than a visit through the museum. But on the way back to Inverness we decided to take another route through would hopefully offer interest than the malls that surrounded Inverness. It was here that we stumbled on the Clava Cairns, an ancient site in the woods just off the smaller road. I had noted this site, but then it sat neglected in my travel notes, proving once again that research is fruitless if you don't actually look at it when you get there. This site featured a series of cairns among the larger stone circles. Cairns in this case were large circular mounds of stones with a small path into a central chamber that had been covered by a dome when they were constructed. Since these ancients were not Roman builders, who wouldn't come along for another two thousand years, the domes had long since disappeared. Archaeologists debate what the cairns were really for, much like they argue about the stone circles - but it's really humbling to consider that this site had existed for some four thousand years, while everything else that was there, including a very old forest, was probably at least the one hundredth "surrounding" that the site had seen since the stones had been erected.

                THE NINE STONES CLOSE CIRCLE REVEALS ITSELF ACROSS THE FIELD WITH ITS FRIENDLY STONE WALL AND TREE

The final stone circle we visited was in a very obscure spot in the Peak District, located all by itself between Manchester and Sheffield in the Midlands of England. I had seen it on another You tube video, and determined that it was not far off the route out of the National Park on the way down to London. Fran was game, and was not deterred as the traffic and the road got lighter and smaller as we approached the site. By the time we "arrived" the road was not even single track, but more of a lane between stone walls, and the skies had opened up. We were alone. The cows in the adjoining field were bored by our presence, and Siri had been reduced to "prepare to park" which we recognized from experience as her way of saying "you are close, but why the hell are you here?" I saw another landmark that had been on the video nearby and reasoned that if we went on the public footpath that led to it we would find the path to the circle. The only trouble was that the space left between the two stones in the wall that constituted the "gate" would have challenged me fifty undernourished years ago. Fran could only laugh while I tried to get through, admonishing me that she would leave me there while she tried to get help. We were ten seconds away from calling it a day when I spied the tree from the video and realized that we were only one field away from the circle. There was no clear path, but we traipsed across the field, and found the circle right where it was supposed to be. Fran remarked that the stones were probably quite delighted to see more people had finally arrived since the guys who had shot the video. We stayed a little while in the pouring rain, and returned to the car, which had barely not blocked the lane. In any case, we saw only one car go by during our entire misadventure.

                                                           ALONE WITH OUR LAST STONE CIRCLE AT NINE STONES CLOSE

After a long day on the Motorway, we arrived hundreds of miles and forty centuries later at Heathrow Airport. While we got to stay more than forty days in England and Scotland, we found a lot of enjoyment in the few hours total that we spent pursuing the stone circles. I would seriously recommend that you search for a similar obscure project to enliven your travels between the obvious major monuments.

                                                           THE INTREPID EXPLORER