stones and stories.

patterns of the stone.

People have often asked what it feels like to stand among the stones, expecting an answer rooted in spirituality or mystery. While I have never experienced them in that way, I am struck by something else: their immense age and the quiet permanence of their presence.

Recently, I returned to the Callanish Stones after several years. Although the stones appeared much as I remembered them, I found myself photographing them once again. Afterwards, looking back through years of images, I noticed the same pattern repeating itself. Time and again I had been drawn to Lewissian Gneiss: the weathered rock of the coastline, exposed bedrock, drystone walls, and the ruins of abandoned crofts. I had been documenting the same material for years without ever consciously deciding to do so. Somehow, it always felt significant.

We often think of stone as a building material; something extracted, shaped and assembled into architecture. However, stone has a much longer story. Lewissian Gneiss, formed almost three billion years ago, is among the oldest rocks in Europe. Long before it became walls, houses or monuments, it was the landscape itself. It has witnessed changing coastlines, shifting climates, generations of settlement, crofting, abandonment and return. Architecture becomes only one chapter within the life of the material.

Perhaps this is what makes places like Callanish so compelling. The stones are estimated to have stood for around five thousand years, quietly outlasting every generation that has gathered around them. Human lives are measured in decades; buildings, if they are fortunate, in centuries. The stones exist on an entirely different timescale. Faced with something that has endured for so long, we instinctively search for ways to understand it.

Some explanations are rooted in science. Archaeological research has shown that the monument was carefully positioned in relation to the movements of the sun and, most significantly, the moon during the major lunar standstill, revealing an extraordinary understanding of the sky. Others are rooted in oral tradition. One of my favourite local stories tells of Na Fir Bhrèige, - the False Men of Callanish - giants who refused to convert to Christianity and were turned to stone where they stood. These are not competing narratives, but entirely different ways of reading the same landscape. One measures the heavens; the other speaks to cultural memory.

Together they reveal a deeply human desire to make sense of places that endure beyond our own lifetime.

the stones imagined as giants.

Looking back through family photographs, I realised that my own relationship with Callanish also stretches further than my own memory. There are photographs of my great-grandmother standing among the stones, and decades later another of my cousins and me occupying almost the same ground. Between those images, generations have come and gone, yet the stones appear almost unchanged. They have quietly witnessed our own family history becoming another small layer within a much longer story.

Throughout the Hebrides, the same Lewissian Gneiss appears as exposed bedrock, drystone walls, blackhouses, abandoned crofts and standing stones. The material remains constant while the lives surrounding it continue to change. Buildings do not begin the story of a place; they inherit it.

archival image at the stones.

The standing stones continue to gather people, just as croft houses once gathered families around the hearth. ( although the stones cast a much larger net, gathering up to 150,000 people annually!). Their purpose may differ, but both become places where stories accumulate through repeated acts of occupation. Meaning is not contained within the stone itself, it is built slowly through return.

Each generation leaves another layer behind, while the material quietly remains.

The stones contain a way of continuing an existing dialogue between landscape, people and time. The material already belongs.

Looking back through those photographs, I realise I was never really documenting rocks, I was documenting continuity. Perhaps that is why people continue to return to them. They remind us that we occupy simply one moment within a landscape that has been recording time for far longer than we can comprehend.

archival image at stones.

[for further readings and understandings of topics touched on in this post please read my other posts.]

on regionalism and the rural lens. 

materiality and memory.

architecture of absence.

on the edge.