Modern landforms

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Another place we visited on our trip was the Crawick Multiverse, situated near Dumfries in south-west Scotland. I’m not really sure how exactly to describe this; it’s a vast garden, a landscape restoration project, created from a disused open-cast coal mine which has been transformed into a landscape-scale work of art, intended to represent aspects of the universe. It was the vision of land artist, architect and landscape designer Charles Jencks (1939–2019), who transformed the scars of the post-industrial landscape to a peaceful and contemplative space. So there are various mounds and hills, pools and hollows, stone structures and avenues, made using materials already present at the site and designed to represent the solar system, galaxies, comets and stars. It is somewhat like a modern version of the ancient stone circles and avenues created thousands of years ago. Due to its size it is hard to get a picture that shows much of it, so this is a picture from the leaflet, showing two spiral mounds representing the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies. It’s a lovely place to go for a wander and we all had lots of fun walking round the spiral paths, running along the avenue lined with standing stones, examining the arrangements of stones representing the comets and various stars, climbing up to the very top of the Belvedere to admire the view over the site and the surrounding countryside, and even playing ‘tag’ among the ‘cosmic collisions’! It was a great place to spend an hour or two and a good spur-of-the-moment idea; I had never heard of it before but spotted it on the map as we were deciding what route to take. It’s just a bit of a shame that it is not going to last very long. It would be nice to think it would still be around to intrigue people hundreds of years hence, but since it was created using local materials the standing stones are all huge slabs of shale which are already starting to split apart and flake away. Not quite in the same league as the largest stone circle on mainland Scotland which is just a few miles down the road and is thought to be 4,500 years old, consisting of granite boulders. Those Neolithic people knew how to build things to last! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2025.