Diary of a Deckhand

Stenness is the other ancient ring of stones famous in Orkney. Having visited there a few times i always get the feeling that people step off the tour bus, snap a few token piccies and then jump back on to go to Brodgar just up the road, a much more intact and well known ring of stones. I find the stones at Stenness much more....i dont know.....meaningful. They look fragile, thin slivers of time embedded in the close cropped grass. The gnomon of an enourmous sundial, ticking away the years of the millennia as if they were seconds. And the people who know about these things tell us what these places meant all that time ago, but since the day those stones were slid into the soil it has made it a place of people. Human beings gather there to do whatever it is they want to, the meanings lost under the endless skies.
I wonder how long they will last and find it almost comforting to know they will be standing many years after i have shuffled off this mortal coil (probably with my trouser leg bottoms dragging in the mud and odd socks as usual). The pock marked surfaces resist the wind and the rain like a stubborn reminder to the weather that people live here too and that Orkney is not the place where gale force winds come on their holidays and try to lift roofs off barns and blow over bins. Maybe the stones were the equivalent to carving your name on a tree trunk. Now it is a place where i can point my camera and take striking images of a unique and beautiful place.