A Scottish Experience

Brian and I decided to have a 'Scottish day' by visiting Glen Innes, a small town of c. 6000 people about 100 km north of Armidale. He and I wanted to have a look at the higher parts of the Tablelands and some of the piles of stones lying around, plus some of the  architecture in the town itself.

This region has considerable Celtic connection judging by the various place names we encountered. North of Guyra we came across Llangothlin, where we turned off the New England highway and ascended via narrow country lanes to Ben Lomond. This tiny community lies, as you can see, at 1363 m (or c. 4400 feet), but doesn't quite resemble its namesake! From there it was down-hill along dirt roads to Glencoe, another tiny place with little more than the Red Lion pub - itself an attempt to construct an English pub in the outback.

Glen Innes is a nice town with some impressive buildings, a few of which are shown here.

After a short walk around the main street we headed to Celtic standing stones, which I reported in an earlier blog posting. Brian tried to extract Excalibur from its rock, but unsuccessfully. Then we walked up Tynwald Hill to get a view over the stones, which - like many European examples - can serve as an observatory for judging the seasons..

At the top of Tynwald Hill we found a curved wall containing stones brought in from various historic sites in Scotland. A few are shown here and I presume that many more bits of rock will be added over time.

The it was on to a Stonehenge which is many millions of years older than its more famous version on Salisbury Plain. Our Stonehenge was created by nature alone!

AS