Summer solstice

Solstice sunrise

The summer solstice and, for once, a sunny day. Having seen solstice sunrises when the sky, sea and shore looked like paint shop shade card - light grey, dark grey and brown - it was great to have a mid-summer day that lived up to its name.

In recognition of the day, I headed off to the Lammermuirs to seek out the stone circles that still dot the grouse moors. These enigmatic stones must have witnessed thousands of solstices and possibly been part of their celebration.

The Whitadder Water

A tramp up from the Whitadder took me towards Nine Stanes rig passing a circle of stones between two tumuli. The moors are defaced by the march of pylons across the landscape and the new invaders, the wind farms.

Stone circle and tumuli

Despite their presence, the bird life thrives, at least until someone with a gun comes and blows them out the sky or some gamekeeper decides that some others might pose a threat to those that are going to be blown out of the sky so they have to be eliminated first... and we think we live in a civilised society.

Today was different. The grouse were telling me to "go-back, go-back" and luring me away from their chicks with the broken wing trick. The oystercatchers were piping their shrill deterrence and the curlew were adding their eerie whoops. There were golden plover, lapwing, snipe, sky larks, pipits.... and me.

The Nine Stanes

I found the nine stones, now recumbent having been disturbed in the past by digging for non-existent treasure and wondered about the folk who erected them and the other circles on the rig, Why nine stones? There are a number of nine stone circles...and twelve stone ones. Were the numbers significant?

We will never know the reason for the stones. They probably had a calendrical and astronomical purpose so the solstice may well have featured n their use. Today, it did.

The stone circle  and tumuli from Nine Stanes rig

The Sun and the Moon

 

4am

The summer solstice saw an early rising to be at the Knowe above the beach to see day break.

As the end of what must have been a prehistoric processional way, it is an ideal site for a view of the eastern horizon

A low bank of cloud hid the actual sunrise. but the magenta sky was an augur of good weather.

The sun just breaking over the cloud bank

It was also a full moon.

This was the Flower Moon or the Honey Moon or, by association, the Mead Moon for each is dependent on the previous.The bees go to the flowers to make honey for us to make mead.

It is the Strawberry Moon in America

A Honey Coloured Moon

 

In the U.K. it is the Flower Moon or, in the Celtic calendar, the Moon of the Horses or the Oak Moon.

'Full moons come,
Full moons go,
softening nights
with their silver glow.
They pass in silence
all untamed,
but as they travel
they are named. *

The bees have been slow to forage this year with the cold wet weather not to their liking but the cotoneaster against the south facing wall of the garden was buzzing with an assembly of mason bees, white-tailed and carder bees with a good representation from the honey bees as well. The cold weather seems to have inhibited the swallows as there are far fewer this year.

When we first came to this house, many years ago, the huge gean or bird cherry in the garden would be humming with bees when in flower but they are no longer heard.

Let's hope the Honey Moon will bring them out again.

*

Rhyme from 'When the Moon is Full' a book for young children by Penny Pollack

Summer solstice 2015

Today, being the summer solstice, the longest day, I took myself to the highest point of the headland to witness the sunrise over the sea. 0425h was the appointed time and, with something of a struggle, I roused from my slumbers to drive up the winding path to the lighthouse.

Unfortunately, the bank of cloud on the horizon spoiled the effect, masking the actual sunrise. Still, the sky was infused with subtle colours as the rays filtered through, turquoises, pinks, and mauves, and all to the continuous accompaniment of cawing and screaming from the colonies of guillemots. kittiwakes and razorbills on the cliffs beneath.

I met charming young couple waiting, like me, for the sun rise, who said they had seen dolphins or maybe porpoises off-shore earlier but they had gone by the time I arrived.

Back home, I read in yesterday's news that a 2500 year old, Bronze Age “sun disc” made from gold, was to be on show in Wiltshire. I couldn't help wondering if the owner of the disc had risen from his bed and trekked to some high point at sunrise on the longest day, two and a half millennia ago and what the sunrise had meant to him or her. 

Lack of sleep can make you fanciful!

For some, it is just another working day!

Solstice

Summer solstice stirred the old pagan soul and drove me from sleep at 4 a.m. to the beach to see the sunrise.

The Knowe

There is a mound at the south end that noses into the North Sea. 

 I know it is a fluvio-glacial deposit pushed up by ancient snows and melt-water when the world was a lot younger but it does have a symmetry that suggests the hand of man.

It is at the end of a winding right-of-way that starts at the site of our 14^th century priory, itself built on earlier religious foundations. 

The priory site was probably a pagan sacred place standing, as it does, on the high ground between two streams.

 In post-Roman Britain, the legendary king., Lucius was reported by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Christian chronicler, to have deliberately converted all the old temples to churches. This is supported as historical fact by the discussion in the famous letter from Pope Gregory to Augustine preaching among the Anglo-Saxons ,advising him not to destroy the pagan sites but to convert them to Christian churches. 

 There are Anglo-Saxon graves near the Priory.

 The Angles of Northumbria probably took over the site from their Brythonic predecessors and they from earlier peoples.

The sunrise

The processional way from the old shrine to the beach and the knowe is still there.

Not proof but I like to think so.

The brightening sky

 

Today was a bit disappointing as it was for the hordes that descended on Stonehenge.  The skies were overcast and no sun could be seen at the eastern horizon.    Still the beach was deserted apart from the cries of the terns fishing and the chorus of birdsong.  The fluting of the whaups* and the piping of the sea pyats* gave an eerie cadence to the air, an atmosphere that wouldn’t have been found in the bustle around the stones at the world heritage site. 

I left to return home wondering if I was right and folk had once processed down to the hill to see the sunrise.  If not then it should have happened.

Daybreak

Back in the prosaic, everyday world of the Lowland Scot, the thoughts will be typically downbeat… “ Aye, the nights’ll be drawing in now”.

As P.G. Wodehouse put it … It’s never hard to distinguish a Scotsman from a ray of sunshine.

*  A whaup is a curlew and a sea-pyat is an oystercatcher.