The Circle, Present and Future - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 283

10. The Circle, Present
and Future
Your stone circle's worthless - it's obsolete .
- Local worthy, Townhead, Glasgow, 2010.
In the aftermath of the aerial archaeology flight, the big dis-
appointment was the truncation of the stones, making the circle
much less spectacular overall (compare Figs. 10.1 and 10.2 ). Before
the cement dried, vandals also managed to scrape up some of it
and smear it on the midsummer sunrise stone, where it remains
to this day (Fig. 10.2a , background).
Salt was rubbed in the wounds soon after, by publication of a
local guidebook saying, “The stones lack any real presence due to
their lack of height.” Other comments over the years have on the
whole been more sympathetic [ 1 ]. I was told that the circle had
acquired a nickname, 'The Cuddies' (horses), because now chil-
dren could sit on them as if on a roundabout. Later I learned that
it's a general name for the three hills, though I haven't found out
how old the name is. If it dates back to the 100 Acre Hill Farm
that's a little curious, since it was a dairy farm, but perhaps horses
were reared there, too. However, stone rings very often take on the
names of their locations.
Another form of laying claim to the circle is somewhat less
welcome, though traditional in its own way. In the Sunday Mail 's
color version of Ewen Bain's cartoon Angus Og, there was an epi-
sode where he was being paid by English tourists to show them
the standing stones on the fictitious island of Drambeg. Seeing
them silhouetted against the sunset, the tweedy woman cried,
“Magnificent! Didn't Landseer paint them on his tour of the Utter
Hebrides?” As the view shifted to the sunlit side of the stones,
covered in graffiti, Angus replied, “No, it was some hooligans from
Lewis at the shinty cup final.”