stolinskie

It must’ve been around 2019 that I was here. As others have said, it’s an impressive site in terms of size and feeling in spite of a drab location.

I went here in late 2024 – it’s a cool site which was fairly easy to find using the OS map, although of course I ended up on the wrong side of the burn and had to scale the steepest edge. The problem is that so many of the trees have now fallen over that it’s impenetrable. I couldn’t even walk around the ditch completely. In a way that’s nature at work, in a way it’s a shame to see an ancient site becoming inaccessible. Of course on a longer time scale it doesn’t matter, the trees will prob all be gone in decades!

I love going to ancient sites and experiencing what happens when I get there (if I get there). Sometimes as with Castle Rigg, I am left underwhelmed and thinking it probably wasn’t the right time to visit; on the flipside, my visit to Upper Lagmore came exactly at the right and put me in a good mood for 2025. Then there’s a place like Avebury that just gets better on every visit!

Whilst poking around at Lagmore East, I spied Upper Lagmore up the hill and worked out a possible route. I ended up walking back past my car parked in the golf club / distillery car park, up a small track over the burn and then going down the minor road looking for a way over the barbed wire fence. I hopped it down at the field corner by the A road then zigzagged up the hill.

When I got to the site, I felt watched and was quite confused trying to work out what exactly I was looking at, thinking it must have been a place that had been used and re-used. Then the clouds cleared and wow! a rainbow came out. I wandered from stone to stone, appreciating its location in the landscape. The surrounding hills are beautiful and you can’t see the river but you know it’s near. Plus there’s a great view down to East Lagmore – I imagined (without evidence) that there was probably another stone circle somewhere previously, perhaps up the hill where now a derelict farmhouse stands, or perhaps past East Lagmore at the hunting lodge.

An amazing place!

Lovely hill, extremely windy when I went up in December. I ascended up a path from the quarry side and beside a gate saw a bunch of stones which seemed to me could well be a former stone circle, although I cannot find anything on the old maps to confirm that. The stones are piled up at 57.664767, -2.715907.

As an aside I was using peakfinder.com to identify the hills I could see, what a great tool!

I went there the other day, have to say there isn’t much to see. There’s some trees fallen over on top of the cairn, which seems like it could be two ring cairns rather than a long cairn. Whilst some cairns are quite impressive, this one is rather hidden away in the gorse.