Last Saturday I
drove out towards the Sidlaw Hills, a few scant miles from my house on
the outskirts of Dundee. My purposes were vague, only to explore a couple of
places I had not seen, possibly investigate one of the local stone circles, and
have a gentle walk in the wild.
The derivation of 'Sidlaw' is not clear. 'Law' is a hill (so
'Sidlaw Hills' is Sid-Hill-Hills). The first part, though, is more difficult.
Some say that 'Sid' means 'seat', and indeed one of the hills is named 'The
King's Seat'. Others have names that come from older languages or blend two, as
indeed 'Sidlaw' may do: Dunsinane, Auchterhouse, Balkello, Balluderan and Craigowl.
The last of these is from Creag gobhal, 'forked hill', despite its name having
meaning in English also. But an alternative derivation of Sidlaw is from Sidhe, the 'fairy folk', the hidden people,
by which the Sidlaws would be the Hills of the Sidhe.
I think I prefer that derivation, though it may owe more to
hope than to linguistic analysis.
Balkello woodland is young, and managed by the Forestry
Commission: the trees were planted only in the 1990s, to create a community
place which contrasts with the farmlands around and uplands beyond. It lies to
the north of the road which connects the villages of Auchterhouse and Tealing.
Just south of the road is a standing stone, the Balkello Stone,
which will be a visit for another day. However, I'd hoped to catch site of a
circle nearby at Balkemback, and find the Pictish carved stone known as
Martin's Stane.
The field in which the circle sits was occupied by many
cows, and would have required climbing over several barbed wire fences: again,
not for this day as the afternoon was wearing on. Views from the roadside,
though, showed the heather coming into its own on the hills behind, and the
plain beyond stretching to the coast - a landscape farmed for thousands of
years, by people who left their marks on the land, clearing fields, creating
cairns, erecting stones to mark places that, perhaps, called especially to
them, building roundhouses and digging souterains, carving on rock and boulder,
building houses of stone and later of brick, then churches for each group of
villages as those became parishes. This landscape is not 'wild', even on the
heights of the Sidlaws, but changed in the interaction of humans and others
through millennia.
Finally, I headed for Martin's Stane, on my way home to Dundee. Some information on this Pictish carved stone is at http://www.scotlandsplaces.gov.uk/record/rcahms/31864/balluderon-st-martins-stone/rcahms
Alas, it was broken long ago, so that only part of the stone
remains, with figures of a horse though the rider is no longer present, with,
below, another rider and horse and a pair of 'Pictish symbols' one of which has
been said locally to be a 'dragon'. Local folklore has therefore created its
own meanings for this stone, linked to place names towards Dundee, but what it
commemorated, or its inscription as 'sacred', may never be known.
The stone, minutes from Balkemback and Balluderan, is in a
field which on my visit held glowing golden barley, waist-high or even higher,
waiting for harvest. There was a narrow trackway across the field, on which I
walked with care for the barley, which let me come close enough to photograph
such of the images as could be seen through the waving grass around the stone
and the barley between it and me. Again, this calls for a visit once the crop
is harvested.
And so, the final images here are of that field and the waving barley, farmer's gold, with the stone visible through its protective railings. That I could not approach closely did not, on this visit, matter: the ripeness of the barley was, for today, enough.
And so, the final images here are of that field and the waving barley, farmer's gold, with the stone visible through its protective railings. That I could not approach closely did not, on this visit, matter: the ripeness of the barley was, for today, enough.
