I had never heard of Duddo until Margaret@BooksPlease blogged about it recently, do have a look at her very interesting post, her photos are better than mine too, here. I’m still getting used to the new camera, well that’s my excuse anyway!
Thanks Margaret, we would never have found the Duddo Stone Circle on our own, it’s fairly off the beaten track.

Lorraine was asking how long it took for us to get to York from Scotland and I have to say that I’m not exactly sure, somewhere between 3 and 4 hours I think, because we stopped off at Duddo on the way there. The sign on the gate which you go through to get to Duddo says that it’s about an hour long walk there and back – and it was for us anyway. It’s an easy walk if you’re fairly fit, along the edges of fields of crops which had recently germinated, and we had a lovely day for it.

Although Duddo is in Northumberland and so is now definitely part of England, I think of it as historically Scottish as it’s north of Hadrian’s Wall. It was obviously a very important place for Neolithic/Bronze Age inhabitants. The whole thing is a bit of a mystery but they do know that it dates from about 2,000 BC. Cremated human remains were found in the centre of the stone circle, it might have been a place of worship and burial or for sacrifices, or both.

It’s an impressive spot today, just imagine what it must have been like all those years ago.

It’s thought that these massive grooves have been worn into the stone by the weather over the centuries, they look spookily like they’re man-made though.

This one is actually the smallest stone but it’s still about 5 feet in height, as you can see there are lovely hills in the background. We were lucky in that there were no other sight-seers there and we had the place all to ourselves, which made it all the more magical for me. I count myself as being a fairly hard and cynical person but I definitely felt that there was a special atmosphere at the stone circle and I walked around them touching them all.

Can’t you feel it? I said to Jack. That’s the Viking in you. They’re just stones – he replied.

That’s the scientist in you! – I said. Honestly there’s nae romance in that man of mine.

I think Duddo would be quite bleak in grey weather but it was very pleasant on a blue sky day. There was quite a lot of fighter jet activity, some of it too high up to see but you could certainly hear them and a couple of jets did pass over us, very low. It’s a very rural and sparsely populated part of Britain at Duddo, which makes it a good training airspace for them I suppose. It does seem a bit weird though when all that state of the art metal, costing millions of pounds flies over a Bronze Age structure.