For almost a year now I’ve travelled by bus, car, underground and on foot, cataloguing the oddest corners of Glasgow. I’ve climbed barbed wire fences, walked along the edges of motorways, staggered up hills with my camera kit and sheltered from the rain in more cemeteries than I care to remember. I’ve walked around housing schemes, visited parks and shopping malls, peed on sacred ground, in fields and in woods. I’ve set up my camera in places where murders…

Out of the blue, last summer brought an email from a man claiming to own half of the Cochno Stone, the most elusive of all the places mentioned by Harry Bell in his Gazetteer of Sites. My search for the Cochno, or Druid Stone, features in an earlier blog. The stone, arguably the most significant cup-and-ring marked stone in existence, became something of a lost cause for me.

Measuring 55 by 35…

Thanks go to the Glad Cafe, to my friend, Gary Lewis and to the wonderful audience who came along last Friday to watch the film. To see such a large-ish and diverse crowd on a rare sunny evening was something of a relief and judging by the positive comments it was not only well-received – I’m still getting emails about it today – plainly it blew some folk away.

It’s no idle boast. This is getting to be a…

When I embarked on TDP back in 2007 often I got lost while out on field trips despite having a map. Anyone following my journey knows that the most elusive of my destinations was the site of Cochno/Druid Stone. Of all the places mentioned by Harry Bell in his Network of Aligned Sites, at a psychic level it seemed as if the Stone was taunting me. Eight years later and it’s still a lost cause.

Bear with me. This is…

“I came here to find the past and I found the future.”

Stevie Cafferty bounds up to me on a wooded path just off the Cochno Road. He’s wearing a brown T-shirt with a Celtic knot motif that matches his brown eyes. There’s something of the urban shaman about Stevie – brimming with energy, he fires on all psychic cylinders as he gestures towards the surrounding outcrops, talking of the whereabouts of cup-and-ring marked stones in the area, stones…

Yesterday I posted a short video about the recent test dig at the Cochno Stone on Vimeo.

Here’s a link – Revealing the Cochno Stone

Back in early September I didn’t intend to do anything other than record the dig for archival purposes since a wholesale excavation and replication of the Stone has yet to be determined. But having shot over three days I realised the value of making a video not because I’ve been commissioned – I haven’t -…

To mark a decade since work began on The Devil’s Plantation I’m writing this post as a coda to sum up my feelings about the project and how for the last four years events have conspired to keep me involved.

Made with the support of the Scottish Arts Council’s Creative Scotland Awards in 2007, the project was originally proposed as a film until the SAC informed me that as a filmmaker I couldn’t practice in my own field (unlike writers,…