Glenshee, Perthshire, Scotland
October 17, 2015
I have long wanted to visit the namesake of my farm, Glenshee, in Scotland, and on my recent trip I decided to take a detour from my itinerary and do just that. Glenshee has a few amenities for tourists including a ski area for winter sport enthusiasts. Deer hunting also seems to be one of the draws to the area at certain times of the year, as I encountered a few hunters in my travels through the glen. But for the most part it is a relatively sleepy, out of the way place, which is part of what makes it so appealing to me.
The “shee” in the name is from sidh, the same gaelic word that gives us “banshee”. In layman’s terms, “glen shee” means something like “fairy glen,” and with its rugged landscape, green fields, and high, concealing mountains, it’s easy to imagine supernatural forces at work here. There are also a handful of stone monuments including a rare four-poster stone circle.
I went in search of the stone circle on my arrival, as I had a guide book that mentioned its existence, but had no directions on how to find it. I asked at the main hotel in the area, and no one had ever heard of it, though one woman there directed me to a standing stone behind the local church. It was in my search for this that I encountered an incredibly generous older gentleman from the area who was doing repairs on a cottage. I asked for directions and he kindly shared his wealth of knowledge about local history, legends, and geography, ultimately giving me directions up a long, unmarked farm road to the site of the stone circle. But meeting a kindred spirit and learning firsthand about Glenshee and it’s folk history was the highlight of my day.
Standing Stone
According to the helpful man I spoke to, local legend had it that the stone, erected here behind the Glenshee parish church—or rather, the church was erected in front of the stone—has symmetrical grooves on either side of it from the chains where church fathers used to bind witches to be burned. He couldn’t commit to the story’s accuracy, but there is no denying the notches on the stone. He also told me of a legend that claimed the original location of the church had been stopped and started several times because, each time construction was begun, fairies came in the night and moved all the materials across the glen. So, perhaps there was a battle of faiths in the fairy glen in one form or another during the past…
Stone Circle
I couldn’t find specific dates, but four poster stone circles generally seem to date to the Bronze Age rather than the Neolithic, and are more common in Scotland—and Perthshire in particular. They are sometimes associated with cist burials or cairns (common in Bronze Age, rare or unheard of in Neolithic contexts.) So we are dealing with a cultural innovation of some kind here due to the migrations of new people into the region, adopting and adapting the megalithic culture to their own needs.
According to my kind guide, local legend has long held that the mound on which the circle rests is none other than the grave of the legendary hero Diarmuid after his death during the fateful boar hunt. The Scottish clan Campbell claims descent from Diarmuid. This circle is built on what looks like an artificial mound, but it was excavated in 1894 down over 20 feet in hopes of finding evidence of a burial, and it turned out the hill was a natural glacial formation that was an otherwise ideal building site for a ritual structure.
The stones align roughly to the cardinal points, with all about the same height except the eastern stone, which sits less than half the height of the others The views from this vantage point extend over a vast portion of Glenshee and, before the church was erected, likely included the standing stone.
As always, there is no real way of knowing why or how these sites were used, but they were constructed for a very real purpose, in a tradition that continued in a diverse array of forms for thousands of years, encompassing both the Neolithic and the Bronze Age when an incoming migration of people adopted and adapted the practice of the stone circles for themselves. On the face of it, they are simple things—just a solitary stone protruding from the earth or a rough grouping of boulders in some cases. But something about the places they mark and the spaces they create captured the imaginations of people 5,000 years ago, and continues to do so today.
