The Circle, Present and Future - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 284

F IG . 10.1 Author at the midsummer sunrise stone, originally one of the
lowest in the circle. The midwinter sunrise arc, downhill on the far side of
the circle, was then taller than head height (Photo by John Gilmour, sum-
mer 1979)
The Sighthill circle quickly acquired similar decoration.
After accepting my article on “Solar Events at Sighthill” for the
Griffith Observer , Dr. Ed Krupp visited Sighthill Park and took his
own photographs to accompany it, with captions “Symbolic pic-
tographs or undecipherable hieroglyphics have been added by an
intrusive barbarian people…. The stones themselves display fur-
ther evidence of invasion by a later, intractable tribe of philistines
[ 2 ] .” At first we were advised by the Parks Department to investi-
gate cleaning and adding protective coatings for the stones.
After 10 years of the Clean Air Act, enacted to stop the killer
smogs of the 1960s, Glasgow was beginning to shed the grime of
the Industrial Revolution and centuries of coal fires. As the natural
colors of the stone buildings began to show, their beauty became
apparent. Sir John Betjeman had not been insane to call it the most
beautiful Edwardian city in Britain. Going about the city during
the project, John Braithwaite and I were repeatedly taken aback by
the splendor of buildings we had taken for granted when they were
all a uniform black.
The sometimes destructive fad for active stone cleaning did
not sweep the city until a decade later, in the context of Glasgow's