29/08/2026
I'd go as far as to say that Lewis and Harris are my favourite places on earth and these standing stones are absolutely magnificent!!! I will probably get slated for saying this but I've never been pulled to visit Stonehenge, admittedly I have never been but I don't think it could ever hold the magic of Callanish Stone Circle in the Isle of Lewis. It's like something out of this world for me! I long to return there one day ❤️
They are five thousand years old, they stand on a ridge on the Isle of Lewis, and for most of the last three thousand years you could barely see them. 🏴
The stones at Calanais went up around three thousand years before Christ, which puts them roughly two thousand years ahead of the great sarsen circle at Stonehenge and comfortably older than the pyramids at Giza. Thirteen stones stand in a ring around a tall central monolith, and out of that ring run four arms, one of them a double avenue nearly ninety metres long. Seen from above it reads as a rough cross, which is almost certainly coincidence and has been confusing people for centuries.
They are Lewisian gneiss, some of the oldest rock on the surface of the earth, banded and streaked and blade thin. A small chambered tomb sits inside the circle, added later by people who already found the place ancient.
Then the climate turned wetter, the peat began to grow, and it kept growing at roughly a centimetre a decade until the stones were buried to shoulder height. Generations of islanders lived alongside a set of dark stumps in a bog with no real idea what was underneath them.
In 1857 the landowner had the peat cut away. Around five feet of it came off, and the monument stood up out of the ground at full height for the first time in thousands of years.
There is a Lewis tradition that the stones are giants who refused to convert and were turned to rock for it, and another that a white cow came out of the sea to save the island from famine. Both of those stories were being told while the stones were still half buried. 🌾
People kept telling stories about them even when they could not see them properly. That is exactly what memory does when the evidence is under the ground.