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Recording Your Heritage Online

Event ID 567212

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Recording Your Heritage Online

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/567212

Standing Stones, c.3,000 bc A ring of gneiss slabs surrounding a central monolith, with an avenue running north and single rows extending south, east and west. Erected on land that had already been cultivated, this remarkable ritualistic monument, older than Stonehenge, was originally just one row running southwards. Some 1,000 years later a crypt or chambered cairn was added in the centre. This was despoiled some 500 years later and then transformed into a house, an indication of the mixed uses to which the site has been put over the millennia. The long process by which it became enveloped in a blanket of peat began around 800 bc. The full extent of this awesome henge was not revealed again until 1857/8, when Sir James Matheson removed 1.5 m of bog. Callanish is the focus of an important group of stones and circles, part of the immensely rich prehistoric heritage of the Hebridean archipelago, which falls outwith the remit of this book.

Calanais Visitors' Centre, Michael Leybourne, Western Isles Council Technical Services Consultancy, 1995 Low-lying, kidney-shaped gallery carefully sited in the fall of the land, fusing new form and function with elements of the local vernacular. A curving timber clerestory offers sweeping views over the mountain fields and drowned valleys of this primeval landscape.

Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk

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