Inverewe & the Isle of Lewis
This morning we visited the gardens at Inverewe, first started in 1862 by Osgood MacKenzie. This was our first stop on the mainland of Scotland and we enjoyed the gardens through the wet Scottish sunshine.
In Loch Ewe we were able to enjoy a number of birds, the most majestic of which were the many grey herons which roost in the trees along the shore. The garden sits on the wonderful Torridonian sandstone, about 1 billion years old, but which is almost completely undisturbed even after all the episodes of mountain building which created the much younger Scottish Highlands.
During the early afternoon we sailed across the Minch to the Isle of Lewis. Here we found the oldest rocks of the British Isles, and some of the oldest on earth, the 3 billion year old Lewisian gneiss. We landed at Stornoway on the east coast of Lewis and drove across the island to visit the magnificent Standing Stones of Callanish. The drive took us across the glaciated landscape of the island which is covered with lochs and peat bogs.
At Callanish, the 54 large standing stones punctuate the smooth glaciated topography and stand as a dramatic reminder of the people who inhabited the island thousands of years ago. The stones represent several generations of placement and at various times in their history were the site of ceremonial burials and possible astronomical reckoning for the lunar phases. They are themselves made of the same Lewisian gneiss which underlies the entire island and which is one of the most beautiful rocks in the British and Irish Isles.
The rock displays lovely bands of color produced by the response of the rocks to the tremendous pressure and temperature to which they were subjected during metamorphism. During the process of metamorphism the original minerals which made up the initial rock are broken down and the conditions are so extreme that individual ions can migrate though the rock and reassemble themselves to form new minerals characteristic of very high grade metamorphic rocks such as these beautiful gneisses.
Viewing these standing stones in the evening light is an immensely evocative experience and made us appreciate that we today, even with all our technological innovation and self-styled sophistication, are still basically the same sort of people who erected these megalithic monuments, with the same hopes and aspirations, the same questions and the same need for answers.
