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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Travel
Stuart Kenny

Beam me up, Scotland: a journey into outer space in Dumfries and Galloway

Crawick Multiverse in Dumfries and Galloway - an aerial view of rolling hills, with large mounds in the foreground, with stone circles on top of them
‘Huge, spiralling mounds of earth’ … Crawick Multiverse in Dumfries and Galloway. Photograph: Mike Bolam

The sun warms my face as I pause between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies to gaze at the rolling hills of Dumfries and Galloway beyond. I am not, surprisingly enough, in outer space. I’m at the Crawick Multiverse, a cosmos-themed land art installation in the south of Scotland that was built on the site of an old open-cast coal mine and is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year.

The galaxies here are huge, spiralling mounds of earth, their perimeters reaching out towards one another but never quite touching.

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