Qualla: Hill o' Many Stanes

Hill o' Many Stanes: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The stones are not impressive, individually. None reaches a metre. They are the size of a small dog, or a milestone, or a tombstone for someone the village wished to remember without expense. But there are roughly 200 of them, set in rows that run north and south along the incline at Mid Clyth, and the rows are not parallel - they fan outward, as if the hillside itself had been combed. From a hundred metres up, the pattern is unmistakable. From among the stones, it is impossible to see all at once. This is a place that becomes itself only from a particular angle.

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Hill o' Many Stanes: What Was Counted Here

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We do not know what the people who placed these stones were doing. They came from the Bronze Age - between roughly 2000 and 800 BCE - and they did not leave instructions. The Scots writer and engineer Alexander Thom argued, in his 1971 book Megalithic Lunar Observatories, publish...

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Hill o' Many Stanes: Stones Without a Country

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What makes the Caithness stone rows strange is their geography. Standing stones of various kinds appear all over Britain, but rows of this particular type - low, numerous, set in fans on hillsides - are found only in Caithness and Sutherland. They have no British relatives. Their...

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Hill o' Many Stanes: Standing in the Field

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walking among them is curiously quiet work. The stones do not rise above the heather and bracken, so they read at first as natural - shed glacial debris, perhaps, or the remains of a wall - and only when the eye registers the pattern do they become a monument. The site sits at ab...

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