Years and years and years ago, my dad and I visited a nearby abandoned quarry in search of fossils. I literally tripped over our first find, a nice bit of fossilized fern, and he later found a rather nice shark's tooth embedded in a bit of shale. I've always longed to go back, but with one thing or another we've never managed it, and today...we didn't manage it either, instead, heading for a little known rock formation just a little up the hill from the quarry on Craigmaddie Muir.
'The Auld Wives Lift.' -link- -link-
This glacial erratic, placed here rather artistically by a receding glacier during the ice age, has a lot of local folklore associated with it, and the name comes from its so called origin, where three 'old wives' - or witches, depending on where you read it - challenged each other to throw a stone the furthest, and, carrying the stones in their aprons to the moor, duly chucked them, with one landing atop the others. There's a gap between them which you're supposed to climb through if you don't want to end up childless! (something I think I'll pass on, though clambering through the rocks sounds fun!)
They have faces carved into the rock (some folk attribute them to ancient celts, but they're probably much later) and there are some cup and ring marked stones nearby as well as a few chambered cairns. I've always been fascinated by prehistory, especially Scottish prehistory, and as it was so local and my dad had been a few years before, it sounded like the perfect place to go for an afternoon's walk. The quarry was just a short walk from where we'd park the car so we planned to walk to the stones and have a rumamge in the quarry when we got back.
Oh how optimistic we were!
