Pre-history in Scotland - A Trip Back in Time

When I travel to Europe, I'm always amazed at how old some of the buildings are, but then am even more amazed by structures that have survived that are thousands of years old. In Inverness, we went to one such place called Clava Cairns. It's very near to the Culloden Battlefield. To get there, you have to travel a short way down a single track road, it's a good thing it's short as you can see the cars coming back out along the road and therefore know not to try to enter as the only pullout is at the car park for the cairns. 

It's pretty amazing that these people understood the movements of the sun and moon enough to build these ring cairns so that on the summer solstice the sun would shine into the cairn. 

To find and move all these stones would have taken quite a bit of effort and certainly a lot of time. I would have thought that simpler structures would have sufficed.

We spent about an hour walking around the four cairns and other stones that were there. On our way out, we saw this little resident. He didn't see to be afraid of all the large humans around him. 

On the Isle of Arran, we had thought to go the Machrie Moor Standing Stones but when you only have one full day to visit the island's attractions, walking an hour to see some Neolithic standing stones would really have taken up too much time. Instead we decided to go see a cairn that's just off the highway. It was only about a five minute walk up the hill.

By not walking for hours to the standing stones, we had enough time to visit Lochranza castle and to stop at the the Arran distillery before heading back to Brodick.

At the distillery, we all had a bite to eat and did a little shopping in the gift shop. I sampled some Arran Gold, a cream liqueur made with single malt whisky. It was really good, better than Bailey's but unfortunately I can't buy it here.

On getting back to Brodick, we went out to dinner, only to find that our ferry the next day had been cancelled due to an engine problem but that's a story for another day. 

I hope you enjoyed this trip back in time. My brother said, good thing you didn't touch the stones. Not being an Outlander fan, I didn't understand that's how they travel in time. But we had touched the stones so I guess we really had travelled in time when you think of the thousands of years they've been there.