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A bibliophile’s Shangri-La

26 01 2026

“A book can be loved to death and not die.
Look at how this one refuses to close. Place the weight
of the world on it and it may stop demanding attention.”

– Z R Ghani, ‘The Art of Cloying’

So, in case you hadn’t already noticed, I’m a bit of a book nerd. I was not one of those kids that was taught to read at school, I’d already figured it out by then. Mostly because I couldn’t get other people to read enough stories to me and I was forced to take matters into my own hands. If people wouldn’t read to me often enough to suit my whims, then clearly the only thing to be done was to do it for myself!

Irritatingly, when I got to school, they insisted on “teaching” me to read all over again. And then they put me on a programme of scaled reading books. We moved a fair bit and I went to three different primary schools. And in each one I had to read the exact same books. Roger Red Hat, Billy Blue Hat and Johnny Yellow Hat were the worst form of torture for a child that was happily reading paperbacks at home. By the time I was doing this for the third time, I had whinged enough for mum to intervene. She stomped into school and told them they needed to let me free read because I was way beyond the limits of their (very limited) reading programme. Having reluctantly agreed, they were somewhat miffed when on the first day I rocked up with a battered copy of The Lord of the Rings that I was reading for the second time. My teacher at the time told me I couldn’t possibly be reading it and insisted that I read out loud to him to prove I could. It took two pages of fluent reading for him to finally back down and accept that I really didn’t need to know about children in coloured hats!

From that point forwards, there were no limits. Our house was full of books and I was both allowed and encouraged to read whatever I wanted. There were never limits of what I could choose; if it was on the shelves, I was welcome to give it a go. There were some mistakes along the way; in hindsight, Fahrenheit 451 at age 11 ish was probably a mistake. I never finished it, and haven’t ever gone back to it since.

Now I have my own house, there are just as many books in it. If I’m being completely honest, there might even be more! I have a towering TBR pile and about six books on the go at any given time. And that’s just the paper ones; my Kindle is also stuffed full of titles. Not that any of this stops me shopping for more … if anything, it just gives me an incentive to read more (such a hardship!).

A while ago, I heard about a place I was sure I wanted to visit. Just outside London, there’s a magical* book warehouse that opens to the public on two weekends a month. Called 66 Books, it sells everything at 70% off retail value. I visited for the very first time on my way back from Angers in November and it was the stuff that dreams are made on. A giant, two storey warehouse, packed with towering shelves, stuffed with books of every size, shape, colour, and genre you can imagine. Fiction. Non-fiction. Classics. Modern fiction. Cookbooks**. Sci-Fi. Crime. Fantasy. Nature Writing. You name it, they have it. The downside was the two hour queue in the freezing temperatures to get through the door, but the result was absolutely worth the pain.

*I mean, it must be magic, right?

**A definite weakness of mine – is there anything better than travel writing mixed with recipes?

I went again this past weekend with my friends … they might have been slightly miffed that I went without them the first time 🤷‍♀️. To avoid the queues, we stayed in Chigwell on Friday night and set off at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning. It worked … a ten minute queue (because we arrived before the doors opened) and we were in! The stock was different this time and filling my basket was not a difficult process. Last time, I had concentrated primarily on an aisle of non-fiction titles that could have been put together just for me. This time, I was determined to give myself some fiction to read … I need some slightly easier to read content at the moment. My brain is so fried from work, that anything complicated goes in one ear and out the other in seconds.

One large basket of books and a grand total of £48 later, my TBR pile has doubled and my anticipation levels are through the roof.

Hilariously, when we went into Hemel Hempstead for brunch, we walked past a Waterstones and just had to stop for a look. Ah well, if this is the worst I’m ever addicted to, I’ll take it as a win!

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Categories : appreciation, books, connections, details, fiction, friends, friendship, knowledge, literature, moments, observation, people, positivity, stories, words

In search of a stone circle …

3 11 2025

“Roads? Who spoke of roads? We go by the moor and the hills, and tread granite and heather as the Druids did before us.”

– Daphne du Maurier, ‘Jamaica Inn’

You know how this goes … as soon as I see an annotation on a map that looks interesting, there’s nothing else to be done until I’ve been to have a look in real life. It’s a rule. And if I’m honest, it’s never steered me wrong! I mean, sure, sometimes what I find is a bit underwhelming, but the journey to look has always been a good experience. Who was it that said, “it’s not the destination, its the journey”? Ralph Waldo Emerson, I think. And he was right; the experience of going somewhere is the best bit. The bit when you’ve arrived is just icing on the cake.

This time, the annotation read ‘Nine Stones Stone Circle’ … in that weird, slightly illegible Gothic script the Ordnance Survey uses for such annotations. Nearby, there was a note of ‘Crow Stones’ and a ‘Cairn’. Was there any doubt? Of course we were going to explore.

We set off on a sunny-ish day. Honestly, that’s really the best you can hope for in Scotland at this time of year. It isn’t actively hammering down so we count it as a good day and head on out. We drive up in to the Lammermuirs, along roads covered in drifts of sunshine yellow larch needles and flanked by gloriously autumnal beeches. The roads in the Borders are frequently lined with both beech trees and beech hedges, and at this end of the year, they are showing at their absolute best. When the sun hits the leaves, they glow fiercely like banked embers about to burst into fresh flames. I constantly want to stop and take photos, but am categorically told that this is not the road to stop on! I’ll admit that there are some elements of left and right, up and down that might render such actions more dangerous than sensible, but there’s hardly any traffic ….

Meandering past Whiteadder reservoir, I marvel at how low the water level is. Last time I remember coming up this way, the water levels were much higher, with the road going over a wide stretch of water as it rounded the final bend. Today, there’s barely a trickle running beneath us as we round the same bend, testament to exactly how warm and dry the summer was this year. Even in Scotland.

The road climbs further up in to the hills. Despite the multitude of signs that tell us to drive carefully because of the wildlife on the road, the most we see are pigeons, rooks, pheasants, and partridges. All of which eventually remove themselves from the road, but do it in very different ways at totally different speeds. The rooks launch skywards lazily at the first sight of us rounding the bend. The pigeons lurk in the corners, almost perfectly camouflaged against the tarmac until the very last second when they explosively flap up across the road in front of the car. I jump every time and mutter curses. The pheasants, as they always do, dither indecisively on the verges, never knowing if they’ve made the right choice of direction. Sometimes, they make a last second sprint for the other side; risking life and limb because they can’t make up their minds. The partridges panic as the car approaches and fly, en masse, along the road in front of us before settling back in the carriageway and looking relieved … until they notice that we’re still there and repeat the whole process. Idiot things.

We follow the road up and down as it traverses hills and crosses burns. Or at least the spaces where burns will be in a couple of weeks of slightly soggy weather conditions. The signposted ford is conspicuous in its absence for the moment though. Probably for the best. We drive upwards until we reach Johnscleugh and a convenient pull-in at the bottom of a grassy track that leads even more upwards onto the moor. The bracken up here has faded to a burnished bronze, the heather is a deep chocolate brown and the shaggy grass is tipped with gold. The sky above us is mostly grey, with occasional patches of a pale, watery blue. It’s eyewateringly cold (at least to me, who may have developed some slightly soft southerner tendencies) and I fasten myself into my big coat while giving thanks for the thermal undershirt I actually remembered to wear.

As we stomp briskly up the hill, hands buried deep in our pockets, and shoulders hunched to keep our collars up round our ears, I’m startled by an odd sound. Glancing up quickly, I see a black grouse whirring away over the hill. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a grouse before (Scotch whisky ads excluded), and I certainly haven’t ever heard their call. Who knew they sounded like small, angry dogs?!

Its blowing a hoolie up here, the wind finding every tiny gap in my clothing, and making it much harder to get up the hill than it really needs to be. Some of the lower clouds bring a spattering of rain that beats against our faces and makes the temperature feel much colder than it really is. We’re not entirely sure which path will get us to the circle, so we’re working on instinct now. We know that it’s supposed to be just down from the summit so we follow a right hand fork that runs upwards. I’m assuming that the circle should be fairly obvious. I mean, they’re standing stones … how hard can they be to find?

Turns out that the answer to that question is “very, very difficult”. We quarter the hillside, wading through hip high heather and scanning in all directions for any sign of stone. Who knew that heather grew that tall?* It’s incredibly springy and tries to throw you on the floor if you step on it wrong. I’m also having a dawning realisation that it could quite happily swallow up quite sizeable stones without noticeable effort. Maybe this is a fools errand. There are cleared patches (I’m assuming grouse management) filled with the twisted, bleached skeletons of heather plants. They’re oddly stone coloured from a distance, and trick us more than once. We find some pictures on a website describing the site and resort to lining up pylons and coverts of conifers on the far hillside. Left a bit. Right a bit. Uphill. Downhill.

*Even looking at my photos, it’s difficult to believe that it’s so deep, but I promise you, looks can be very deceiving!!

After almost forty five minutes of searching, we finally get a tiny glimpse of stone. We gallop downhill towards it, and find our goal just a few feet away from a track. If we’d only stayed on the original path instead of forking off and climbing to higher ground, we’d have found the stones within minutes. Oops!

The circle is more of a jagged oval of nine stones that are fifty to sixty centimetres high. There are a couple of larger ones that may have fallen and are now lying on their sides in the rough grass. We can’t work out why the circle is sited here; it’s not on the top of the hill where I expected it to be. It’s tucked into the lee of the slope and apparently not particularly visible from any distance. Why was it here? Who put it here? What was it for? When was it placed?

Most of these questions remain unanswered; the best I can do on dates is that Trove.scot has it listed as prehistoric, possibly Neolithic or Bronze Age. An index card from Historic Environment Scotland (dated to 1958) records evidence of uneven digging in the centre of the circle, while another references a historic source (from 1853) which states that “it is believed that some treasure is hidden beneath these stones and various attempts, all unsuccessful, have been made to find it.” Sadly, that’s the sum of the information I can find. Nothing further about the nature of the treasure and from where the story originated. Just enough to make it interesting, but not enough to clarify. In my head, ghostly processions of people wend their way slowly up the slope, bundled in cloaks, to celebrate the turning of the seasons and to watch the stars turning above the hillside.

Having spent so long searching for the circle, we decide not to go looking for the Crow Stones today; they’re supposed to be much closer to Kingside Burn and we aren’t sure we wanted our feet to get any wetter. They’re also supposed to be even shorter stones and the heather isn’t getting any shorter towards the bottom of the hill! We decide to quit while we’re ahead and turn our faces back towards the car. Somehow, we’re still walking into the wind. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it’s certainly true. Grouse are still barking at intervals, starting up furiously from the undergrowth as we pass.

We reach the car with chilled faces and hands. Have we got time for one more exploration before we head home? There’s an annotation on the map just up the road that looks like it might be fun ….