To reach Sighthill from the city centre you're best to walk. Pass the train station and the bus station and patches of waste ground until you come to the footbridge over the motorway, where dense and slender railings of brown steel curve above head height; it feels like squeezing along the gills of a mushroom.
The drivers, below, following exit signs, will likely not glance to their right and see, up on the hill, Glasgow's only stone circle.
"There it is," said Stuart. "I love that it's here."
Stuart Braithwaite plays guitar in the rock band Mogwai. Their music has a drama and sublimity that makes it the ideal soundtrack to visiting such places. But that was not why he had come along today. This was a family matter. Stuart's late father, John Braithwaite, a maker of telescopes, was one of two men who, in the late 1970s, created the circle for Sighthill, a large housing estate in the north of the city.
Scottish musician Stuart Braithwaite of the band Mogwai walks with his dog Prince (Image: ANDY BUCHANAN)
"To me, it feels almost like a monument to my dad," Stuart explained. "He was very proud of this. He was obsessed with astronomy and Neolithic stones and community, and all sorts of things that this place embodies. So it holds a lot for me emotionally, but even just as a Glaswegian, I think it's great. Weird things like the standing stones give the city its soul."
The circle is a ring of sixteen stones, unevenly spaced, and a seventeenth in the centre. The tallest looks about six feet. Some are marked with old graffiti: a few Chinese characters and fading declarations of love. They sit on top of a steep grassy mound, right next to new housing: low-rise flats of brown brick. I could see people through their windows - vacuuming, typing on laptops, talking on the phone. They seemed quite used to having a stone circle as a neighbour.
A Stone circle created in the 70's in Sighthill Park with is to be removed and the area to be used for housing. (Image: Marc Turner)
Mirroring the stones
You might think that it would feel out of place and out of time in Scotland's biggest city. In fact, the circle sits beautifully within a vertical landscape. Tower blocks, the cathedral spire and hospital chimney, the obelisks of the Victorian cemetery, even the wind turbines on surrounding hills - all seem to mirror the stones.
I had been here before. Sort of.
The Sighthill circle was erected on the spring equinox, 1979, the stones having been quarried in Kilsyth, east of Glasgow, and lowered into place by a Royal Navy helicopter, an operation codenamed Megalithic Lift; photographs taken at the time suggest a vibe somewhere between Spinal Tap and Apocalypse Now. The project had come about as part of the Callaghan government's job creation scheme. Money was given to the local authority to create a number of temporary posts, the idea being to get Glaswegians off the dole and doing interesting and useful work.
A workman walks through standing stones after the restoration of a circle of standing stones, known as the Sighthill Circle, which were removed temporarily to make way for a £250 million regeneration project in Glasgow. (Image: PA)
A young science and sci-fi writer named Duncan Lunan had been put in charge of the Parks Department's Astronomy Project, in which role he hit upon a plan to create a contemporary equivalent of Callanish or Stonehenge: standing stones aligned with the sun and moon and thus able to mark the passing seasons.
It would be the first such structure to be built in Britain for 3,500 years. He was given a map, an official car and a giant brass compass - and went off to find a suitable site. Trudging through gales and rain, through the winter of discontent, he visited Priesthill, Ruchill, Maryhill, Castlemilk and the Cathkin Braes before settling on Sighthill, impressed by the sweeping vista of the skyline. Lunan's friend John Braithwaite, with his astronomical expertise and optics skills, became the project's technical supervisor.
Duncan Lunan pictured at the standing stones of Sighthill Park - aka the Sighthill Circle at their new home in the £250million Sighthill TRA (Transformational Regeneration Area). The stones were originally erected close their new home in 1979 by the (Image: Colin Mearns)
The Sighthill housing scheme was built in the 1960s, constructed on what had been factory and railway land. The waste products of industrial history seeped into stories children told each other about this new place where they lived. A sulphurous pool of chemical effluent?
That was the Stinky Ocean. A high, steep bing, said to be made from heaped bone and slag, was Jack's Mountain. It was much favoured as a playground, though you had to mind; everyone knew that the devil lived on top. A stone circle in such a place was just another tale. Indeed, the circle was given its own local nickname: The Cuddies.
No one seems to know why, but as "cuddy" is Scots for horse, it may come from cowboy games, with kids 'riding' on the stones.
Long history
Storytelling like this is a way of interpreting a place that you do not understand and making it your own. It has a long history. Think of the names given by Christian societies to pre-Christian sites. The Devil's Arrows in Yorkshire; Long Meg and Her Daughters in Cumbria. The Dwarfie Stane on Hoy. The Cuddies is part of that tradition.
Peter's new book (Image: Supplied)
As the years passed, the backstory of the Sighthill circle was forgotten. Cutbacks by the new Conservative government meant that there was never any signage explaining when and why it was created. It was probably not Margaret Thatcher's intention to create an air of mystery and enchantment, but that was the result. Many assumed that the stones really were ancient.
Untethered from its origins, invisible even from nearby paths, the site drifted into obscurity. The park in which it had been built grew wild; long grass, self-seeded bushes, hawks and owls and deer. The circle, hidden in this urban jungle, was a good place to start fires, listen to music and get drunk. But some people still found it special.
The stones became a family shrine to a local woman - a mother and grandmother - whose ashes were scattered there. They also became significant for pagans. One midsummer evening, more than a decade ago, I attended a solstice ritual at the circle. The air was heavy with incense, lit to welcome the ancestral spirits, and citronella - to deter midges.
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"I know they are not ancient stones, but to us they mean a hell of a lot," a woman in a scarlet cloak told me after the ceremony. "We could make a temple anywhere, but this circle speaks to us. It should be left alone. Let it grow as old as Stonehenge. It would break my heart to see it moved."
Heartbreak seemed likely. Sighthill was to be redeveloped. Already many of the high flats had been demolished. The land around the stone circle needed to be made level in order to build new housing. The stones would have to be dug out, the site flattened. The circle would cease to exist.
A workman walks through standing stones after the restoration of a circle of standing stones, known as the Sighthill Circle, which were removed temporarily to make way for a £250 million regeneration project in Glasgow. (Image: PA)
A campaign to save the stones attracted support from many who felt that something of Glasgow's widdershins spirit would be lost if the circle was destroyed. Among them was Stuart Braithwaite, who organised an awareness-raising concert.
The idea of the stones being chucked in a skip was especially hurtful as his father had died just the year before. He said he would chain himself to a bulldozer if need be.
'That circle is mine'
For Duncan Lunan, the circle's designer, the proposed demolition felt personal. "They say in your life you should love somebody and build something," he told me at the time. "Well, I have done both. That circle is mine and it's not a trivial thing. I feel I carved it out of the air. You would have thought that unless the glaciers came back nothing could harm it, but I wasn't thinking in terms of deliberate destruction by the council for whom it was originally created."
In the end, a compromise was reached. The stones were dug out and the ground landscaped. However, the council, recognising the strength of public feeling, agreed that the circle could be reconstructed, using the original stones, at a new location close by - and that Lunan would be tasked with ensuring that the megaliths were placed in positions marking the summer and winter solstices and other astronomical events.
That is why I say I had been there before, sort of. The Sighthill circle I visited with Stuart Braithwaite both was and was not the Sighthill circle built in 1979. The stones were the same, and their arrangement worked in the same way, but it was not the same, not quite.
Here was a twenty-first-century structure based on a twentieth-century structure based on a prehistoric idea. It had, as the archaeologist Kenny Brophy observed, "a fascinating complicated temporality, which is an academic way of saying it's totally f***ed up".
Brophy, a lecturer at Glasgow University, styles himself the Urban Prehistorian. He's interested in prehistoric sites found in non-rural contexts - such as Balfarg Henge, a Neolithic enclosure excavated in the late 1970s and then repurposed as green space in a suburb of Glenrothes. Wooden posts marking the circumference of a prehistoric circle are now used by local kids playing football. "Wear patterns caused by a relentlessly diving keeper are often evident between these uprights," Brophy has written. I think we can trust his interpretation of the physical evidence; he supports Hamilton Accies and thus knows all about a goalie being kept busy.
We met at the Sighthill stones a few weeks after my visit with Stuart Braithwaite. It was a very cold morning in January, but he had got there early and was busy taking pictures. I don't think it would be going too far to say he has fallen for the place.
Author Duncan Lunan(l) and Stuart Braithwaite chatting next to standing stones after the restoration of a circle of standing stones, known as the Sighthill Circle, which were removed temporarily to make way for a £250 million regeneration project (Image: PA)
"Sighthill was ignored by archaeologists for a long time because it's too recent," he said as we did our best to huddle out of the wind. "But it's absolutely of interest to us because it's a stone circle. It doesn't matter if it was made last week, or a hundred years ago, or 5,000 years ago - it's a stone circle and that's cool."
Buckfast cap
Brophy has been observing the circle since 2013, applying formal archaeological methods just as he would to an ancient site. On the day after the final equinox celebration before the circle was dismantled, he documented the ashes of fires, pieces of charred wood, scraps of newspaper, empty crisp bags and the cap from a bottle of Buckfast. He noted, too, that some of the stones were marked with handprints left by people who had, for some reason, first covered their palms with wet clay. "I could have, had I wanted, taken fingerprints," he wrote on his blog. "I could have, had I wanted, sampled for DNA."
The last time Brophy had been at the Cuddies was the winter solstice. He was there - "Just me and the rain and the clouds" - while I was hundreds of miles south with the gathered thousands at Stonehenge. He had also been there for the summer solstice, watching the sun rise over the stone positioned to mark that event. "That was awesome, incredible, a really special moment. I was surprised how emotional I felt."
I was curious about that reaction. If you witness a sunrise at Stonehenge or the Ring of Brodgar, there's a history of awe baked into those places; people expect to have their minds blown and would be disappointed if they were not. But that's hardly the case in Glasgow, and still less with a stone circle that's effectively new. So why, I asked Brophy, did he feel so strongly as the day grew light?
A workman walks through standing stones after the restoration of a circle of standing stones, known as the Sighthill Circle, which were removed temporarily to make way for a £250 million regeneration project in Glasgow. (Image: PA)
"I don't know," he replied. "As an archaeologist, you're not really supposed to have empathy for the prehistoric people. But that connection of stone and sun felt deeply connected to human practices. It was primal, I suppose.
"Despite the fact that I know the stones were only put there in 2019 and they are set in concrete and came from a quarry in Kilsyth, everything about the sunrise was powerful. Duncan has created something magical here. This place really works. And it doesn't just work in an archaeo-astronomical sense, it works at a deep-rooted human emotional level. Nothing about this is authentic, it doesn't make any sense as a prehistoric monument, but it makes sense as a place to create magical experiences - and there's nothing wrong with that."