Bigstones

A new year beckons, with visits to many more stone circles hopefully!

I’ve added some new pages for 2009′s visits, including the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness and the Girdle Stanes, and I’ve also updated the photos for Loanhead of Daviot and East Aquhorthies above.

Hope you enjoy the site.

Chris.

I’ve finally managed to get the camera out and have updated the photos for both Strichen and Aikey Brae. It was a typical June day in Scotland, with about 15 different seasons in one day, but this enabled me to get some great light and clouds effects. Thunderstorms were scudding all around me, but the sun when it shone was hot!

I hope to add a lot of new sites this summer as we are off to the English Lake District and Orkney while the boys are off school so Swinside, Little Meg, Stenness and Brodgar are all on the menu!

Aikey Brae

Some 9 years after our last visit, we finally returned to Clachan An Dirdih during a long weekend in Perth & Pitlochry. Again we followed the Clunie trail from Pitlochry, only this time the weather was stunning and the sun beat down warm on this April day in Scotland.

The circle is about 90 minutes into the 5 hour trail walk and was a good place to spend lunch. My wife painted a watercolour of the site which I’ll persuade her to let me scan and post up here. Otherwise we sat back, enjoyed the sun and watched our 7 year old boys enjoy racing round the clearing – time flies outside of the circle, but inside 4000 years pass in the blink of an eye.

If you’ve stumbled onto this website via the blog, here’s an example of one of my favourite stone circles. This shot was taken last September around 5:30am and was well worth walking up the hillside in the darkness for!

More information can be found on it’s dedicated page and there’s plenty more to see in Aberdeenshire and beyond. Thanks for visiting.

Finally finished off uploading all of the England sites and doing some final tweaks behind the scenes. Now all I have to do is find the occasional visitor!

As I mentioned previously, moving my old static HTML site across to this WordPress one has given me a chance to look at all my old photos and it’s obvious that a ton need updating, so I have another project for the summer. With planned trips to the Lake District in England, and the Orkney Islands this summer, I hope to collect some great shots of Swinside, Long Meg, Castlerigg and the Ring of Brogar amongst others.

Hope to see you back here soon!

Well the index anyway. As I mentioned previously, some of my photos are rather old & low-tech but it gives me an incentive to return and re-shoot these sites. I have tons of negatives (as we all do!) from visits to circles in the 90′s so I may even get round to scanning some one of these days….

On to England!

For now at least! That’s the Aberdeenshire index completed and next I’ll move on to the Rest of Scotland pages.

I’m quite pleased with how the site is shaping up, as I’ve only used WordPress for blogs before, not a more traditional website and it’s surprisingly easy. It was tough getting the index the way I wanted it, and while not perfect the use of tables has done the job. If you would like tables on your WP blog I can recommend the TinyMCEAdvanced plugin: installs in seconds and gives you a load of extra options in the Visual Editor, one of which is tables.

Here’s to some sunny Spring weather in the next few weeks & I can start updating the photos and maybe adding some new sites!

I’m transferring over all of my posts and photos from an old static HTML site to this one at the moment, and if one thing has struck me while doing it, it’s how bad some of my old photos are. Leaving aside the fact that some date from 2001 and my original 1MP camera, they are almost all grey and uninspiring with blown-out skies. Yuck.

On the plus side that gives me the incentive to get out there this summer and update them all – assuming we have a nice sunny warm summer that is! I now have a shiny 10MP digital SLR with a wide 10mm lens, the benefits of which you will see on the Tyrebagger & Whitehill pages, and it will be good to use this camera whilst updating the other site pages.

One other unfortunate thing is that a hard drive crash of several months ago, which I thought I’d survived unscathed appears to have cost me all of my photos from the Kilmartin valley from a time when I wasn’t backing up. I know better now…

Anyway enough gloom, I think the site looks great and is much better for being on WordPress, and with plenty of photos to come this summer it will only get better.

Honest.

Hello.

I’ve been running a stone circle website for a few years, but it’s been desperately in need of updating for a while, and as a regular WordPress user I thought I’d see what it could do.

This blog will be infrequently updated, usually just letting you know when I’ve made changes to the site or been out to a new circle. However I’ll check back regularly so feel free to leave me a comment.

Chris.