Mystery above the Laggan’s Loch
THE CYPHER – spoiler, don’t read if you want to solve it yourself
Five of the seven Stanes carry inscriptions. The Giant Axe Head has the Song of Amergin in Runic symbols; the Border Stane has Blake’s Jerusalem and Burns’ Auld Lang Syne; the Meteorite stane carries a notice in Klingon; the Talking Head stane has a poem by Hans Børli; and the Cleft Heart Stane has a world map. Just the Ghost and Gem stanes are sheer. But each of the seven stanes carries a small cypher, and if the code can be cracked they reveal a famous saying.
These are the symbols used in the cypher. The labels are my own and may be incorrect. The star seems obvious; the target like symbol is used to represent the sun; the triple comma looks to be a tomoe or a simplified celtic swirl, it could represent water or earth; the ox-like symbol is very similar to that used to represent the constellation Taurus; the fire symbol seems straightforward; the serpent symbol might be a scorpion, my representation here is not accurate – the original actually looks like a rattle-snake.
There are seven stanes but only six symbols so they are unlikely to represent the stanes themselves.The symbols do not all represent constellations or zodiac signs and I cannot tie them to the four or five ‘elements of nature’ unless a snake can symbolise air. I cannot link them to the six seasons of trees and a brief dip into the symbolism of the number six itself was… unhelpful.
As much as I would have liked these symbols to carry a message of their own, I suspect they have no special meaning. There is certainly none I can find just now.
I spent quite some time trying to imagine what letters the symbols might represent in the cyphers, which was a dead end.
It was when I collected the letters following each symbol that the answer emerged.
FORESTS ARE THE LUNGS OF THE WORLD
