A visit to Callanish Stones…

I took a trip to the stone circle at Callanish this week with family and spent some time looking more closely at the stones. The stones seem to have many alignments with various stages of the moon’s movements, and the circle itself comprises 13 stones, one for each moon cycle in the year.

Each individual rock is different. Some larger, some smaller. Some regular shaped and some quite rough. It made me wonder if the individual stones had meaning for those that built them.

The rock from which they are formed is Lewisian Gneiss, one of the oldest rock types on the planet. It does not always split along straight lines but has a pronounced ‘grain’ to it, like wood. No doubt from the cooling of the molten lava that formed it.

It made me wonder if the Neolithic peoples chose particular stones for each station around the site. Gneiss often has inclusions of crystal in it. Still, the predominance of crystalline inclusions in the megaliths here seems to be higher than you might expect. Maybe stones with crystals were seen to be more powerful, somehow?

We have no way of knowing, 4,500 years later, what the builders of this impressive monument believed, but it’s nice to think that there must have been some sort of plan that led them to place each stone where they did. Even if only for aesthetic reasons.

D J Eastwood

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