Sighthill Summer Solstice 2010

The summer solstice fell on 21 June,  and the astronomer and SF writer Duncan Lunan organised  a wee trip to his Sighthill Stone Circle  for the sunset - for its remarkable history see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Lunan 

See also 

http://glasgowalbum.blogspot.com/2010/02/sighthill-stone-circle.html

I locked the bike up on  Pinkston Rd on the railings in the distance to walk up to the site across the road bridge (I was briefly tempted to enter the portal that opened up between these trees but I had promised to be back by 11)

The site is up on the left of Pinkston Rd here

Park bench and dead bike

The light looked very promising - unlike a normal Glasgow evening for sure

My Canon Powershot failed to cope with the exposure range between the sun-baked faces and the  late evening - of course I am a rubbish photographer 

Shorter panorama of the previous one

Lovely wee dog belongs to local guy  on left; he became the 'greeter' of the evening

The multistories caught the dying sun beautifully

'One less car'

The chimney on the left is that of the Port Dundas Distillery, 230 ft high. Port Dundas once had the highest chimney in the world (built  1859) at 454 ft, and one called Tennent's Stack  (built 1842) not far behind at 435 ft. It's been argued that standing stones may be (in part) phallic in their meaning, and chimneys are notoriously open to interpretation in phallic terms - so, oh dear, this area has a history of phallic symbolism to spare. Who knows, perhaps the New Agers are right, and there is some confluence of non-Buckfast-fuelled energies at this point.

The sun burned out most of the detail here  - looks not bad in black and white though

Reinforcements arriving on right 

More sun issues - toned down the colour on the Mac

An empty  Buckfast bottle. Buckfast is an English  tonic wine brewed by the monks at Buckfast Abbey. You won't like it; it is alcohol mixed with caffeine and is consumed by genteel old ladies the world over to give their old batteries a surge - except in the West of Scotland, where it is the drink of choice for young neds, aggressive wee boys who roam in groups making life miserable for everyone else.

Note the sun spreading on the stone. ..

. . .as the stone turned red the bottle was put out of its misery and put in a bag to be taken for recycling. It's likely that only very few Buckfast bottles end up being recycled; most end up in landfill, like all too many of the boys who drink it

An old Lewis legend says that the  'Shining One' walks among the stones of Callanish at the Summer solstice

Duncan Lunan, creator of the circle, on right

Duncan  on left; Linda Lunan on right taking pics

Back to the bike and the ever-present smell of the Stinky Ocean under Pinkston Rd. See

http://glasgowalbum.blogspot.com/2010/02/sighthill-stone-circle.html