Standing Stones

I was born on an island called Arran on the West Coast of Scotland, which is a completely wild place, with nothing much there apart from sea, mountains, deer and sheep. And seals, of course.  Love seals ;)

There is a place called King's Caves on the North side of the island, which is a group of caves hidden along the shoreline.  It's where Robert the Bruce is said to have met the spider, although there are lots of caves in Scotland where he is said to have met the spider.  Maybe he just met a lot of spiders.  Anyway, there is certainly enough room to hide a few horses in these caves.  Inside the caves, mixed in with all the graffiti, are some actual ancient cave paintings which you can see if you bring a torch, which is quite exciting.  What I really love about this place, however, is that some local guy comes down and builds these stone towers all over the shoreline outside the caves (probably, admittedly, because there's not much else to do...)

Arran is a great mecca for geologists, and there are all types of rocks here, from great sculptural sea-whipped sandstone formations to hard granite.

Arran is also littered with Pagan worshipping sites, with fairy dells and standing stones all over the place.  The most famous of these are the great standing stones on Machrie Moor, which are located in a great bleak valley surrounded by mountains.  Depending on the weather and the time of day, they can either feel extremely foreboding and ominous or really sun-warmed and friendly, but it is always apparent how ancient they are, and I have long been fascinated by them.

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Ireland, of course, has lots of standing stones too, and here in Cork we have the Ogham Stones, which are housed in the University College Cork. Stones like these were found all over the coast line of Ireland, as well as in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.  The Irish ones were inscribed in ancient primitive Irish, usually with people's names and the tribes they belonged to.  They are kind of like an ancient form of Who's Who. 

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I started making my own ceramic versions of standing stones, scored and textured like the Ogham stones and vertically jagged like the Arran ones.  I cut them into pieces and fired the pieces separately, then reassembled them so they were not all one colour.  They were saggar-fired in a raku kiln and mounted on slate.

I'm hoping they give off a bit of the brooding presence of the Machrie Moor standing stones. Spooky...;)