This used to be a scar on the skin of the earth, but look at it now. I'm standing right at the top, looking from the north to the south, along the top of the grass, and through the stones and on to the hills and it's weird but what is that feeling? What is the effect it's having on me?
Even Molly the dog seems to be feeling the atmosphere. Normally, she operates a direct strategy to every problem but today she's taking the long way round, looping round and round the hill below me, tongue lolling, eyes wide; intense. I've never seen her like this before.
Standing at the northernmost end of the site, high up on the wigwam hill, I try to find a word for it: the effect this landscape is having on me. Disturbing? Unsettling? Moving? What would the creator's word be for it? Cosmological? Galactic? Universal?
The creator is Charles Jencks, the architect and gardener, and like many of his other works, this project, which he calls the Multiverse, is a garden and a creative landscape but the shapes have also been inspired by cosmological phenomena; it's like a giant scientific diagram rolled out on the ground and I'm a pinpoint on it.
Do I like it and the effect it's having on me? I'm not sure. Jencks doesn't do pretty or quaint or even gorgeous, which is how I was taught outdoor spaces should be; instead, he takes earth and stone and multiplies the powerful, profound effect they can have on you. I'm feeling it now: landscape on skin and bone and mind.
There's also something else going on here, something that uplifts me and depresses me too, because this site near Sanquhar in Ayrshire, just down the road from my house, used to be an open-cast mine. You can still see some ugly sheets of coal beneath Jencks' stone stars. The past has been partially covered, but not buried.
I should be happy about it. I should be pleased this place has been regenerated in a way that others haven't (many companies have been allowed to abandon their open-cast mines). But maybe some of the melancholia I'm feeling today is because we're still doing this to land – still driving in the trucks and scooping out the coal and leaving the dirt behind and my beautiful Nith Valley has suffered more than others.
So I go back home and do my own bit of landscaping. It's just a little project, in the corner of my garden. I gather stones from around and about and I pile them up in to little walls, separated by strips of earth. I don't know what you'd call it – a rockery, a terrace – but I'm liking the effect. The great stones of the Multiverse have had their effect on me, and now these little stones are doing the same. I'm building a wall, and I'm calm again.
The Multiverse is open from 10am until 6pm every day in August. See www.crawickmultiverse.co.uk
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