Old Stones

We went exploring this afternoon. Not far afield,  just to the hill next to the one we live on. You can  see from the road that there are ruins on the top, but the track is firmly gated and there are lots of warning signs and references to a landfill site. It doesn't sound attractive, so we'd never attempted to walk up there.

Well, it turned out to be rather interesting. We managed to find a low bit of fence to climb over, and then we followed the track uphill towards the remains of what I took to be a tower house. There's one on top of nearly every hill in the Borders, built for protection in the wild, cattle-thieving days of the Late Middle Ages. 

But it became obvious that this was something more recent and more industrial - a huge, rusting tank nearby. Then we came to the lip of an enormous crater. A quarry site, used latterly for landfill, now thankfully covered and abandoned. Above it all stood this massive structure,, I don't know what its purpose was.

So not the picturesque fortress that I'd been hoping for. But we could see for miles and miles.

I consulted Google when we got home. The hill is an old volcano and the rock quarried was a sort of gabbro. All the roads of Roxburghshire were once metalled with it.  In 1938 they tunnelled deep into the hillside and blew away thousands of tons in a public explosion - people came from miles around to see it.  

Many millennia before this, there was a very large hill-fort on the site. The quarrying did for that. More recently, there was a suggestion that the site be restored and turned into an Eden Project of the Borders. I rather like the sound of that!

Thanks, Marlieske, for the DS challenge. I love going out looking for a subject, and I'm very glad I found this one today.