I went to Forgue and parked at the Walter Scott hall (in use but closed when I was there). I walked up past the school and into the woods. On reflection, it seems a strange place to put a school – right up a hill on the edge of a village – but I suppose back in the day there were a lot of kids coming down the hill from crofts and farms, unlike today. As a sidenote, there are two churches in Forgue and they are both placed on gorgeous sites across the burn from each other and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are built on top of more ancient monuments.
It was a nice walk up the hill through the trees, beech and pine. I walked past the “turn off” over the fence to Raich stone circle, which I visited on the way back. I carried on up the track with trees on one side and fields on the other, until using the OS app it was judged time to take a right down a track, sticking to the countours of the hill. This led me along a winding path until the OS app told me i was next to the circle, so I advanced 5 metres into a mess of fallen trees and torn up earth (see pix). Checked the app again, turned round and the quartz encrusted stone was right behind me! I was excited at first because I thoguht it was a massive chunk of quartz (as at Auchmaliddie, which I’d love to visit), but having look at other pix it seems to only have a wee bit on top. Pretty though.
But yeah the site was an impenetrable, indecipherable mess, with trees blocking everything from access to view. Frankly I see this as the responsibility of the land owner to sort out since they should be maintaining an ancient monument on “their” land. I don’t think these trees came down that recently and I noticed the track was being kept clear in any case, so there are people about. To sum up: I found the three stones of the smashed recumbent with difficulty, had a picnic, it started raining, I left. And that was it.
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