Scottish panorama Summer solstice at Crawick Multiverse, a cosmic experience

CRAWICK Multiverse may not contain Scotland’s oldest stone circles and earthworks – in fact they are probably among the youngest at less than a decade old – but the magic and the drama of this landscape, created by revered land artist Charles Jencks, makes it an ideal spot to celebrate the summer solstice, 21st century style.

The fact that the site, in Dumfries and Galloway, is hosting a morning solstice event, starting at 4am, just in time for that 4.29 sunrise, as well as morning activities and entertainment from 8.30am to 12.30pm, adds to its allure as one of Scotland’s key destinations to see in the longest day, which, at Crawick, is 17 hours 20 minutes of light, but in the far north of Lerwick, stretches to nearly 19 hours.

Unlike Stonehenge in England or the Neolithic stone circles of Scotland, Crawick has no long, enigmatic history. Rather, this ambitious representation of the multiverse and universe, of galaxies Andromeda and the Milky Way, as well as the Sun, the “navel” of the earth, comet collisons and galactic superclusters, in earth and stone, is made on what was considered a scar on the landscape – an abandoned open-cast coal mine. Jencks made a pig’s ear into a silk purse, healed a landscape with art.

The American artist and architectural historian, who had already made his Garden of Cosmic Speculation, was commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch, who owns the land, to transform the site. Among the nine landforms are two mountains which rise up as a pair, Andromeda and the Milky Way. It has been said these two will eventually collide, in about 4 billion years. But we don’t have to worry about all that now.

The solstice moment itself is 10.13am, the moment when the sun reaches its greatest height in 2022 in the northern hemisphere, the result of the way the Earth’s axis tilts as it travels around our star, altering the amount of light that falls on parts of the world. That tilt is the source of our seasons and solstice moment symbolises the beginning of astronomical summer here, though for many it may feel as if we are already well into midsummer.

Of course, those seeking a solstice experience can go elsewhere, find somewhere closer to home, a beach, a hill, a circle of stones, a park with a view – but wherever you go, take that sense of those heavenly bodies, the cosmic, with you. The solstice is a reminder, of the continuity of things, and our own place as tiny bodies in a vast universe.