Duncan Harley

The flight path into Aberdeen’s Dyce Airport offers spectacular aerial views of the Aberdeenshire landscape. Hills and lochs appear quite different when viewed from ten thousand feet and even familiar features, such as Bennachie, can take on a completely new and unexpected form. One such landscape feature is Place of Origin in the village of Kemnay. Conceived as a piece of landscape art and officially opened by HRH the Duke of Kent in 2006, the sculpture addresses the long and important history of granite quarrying in Aberdeenshire. In its heyday, the quarry at Paradise Hill employed 400 men with much of the quarried stone going to make iconic structures such as Sydney Harbour Bridge and Marischal College in Aberdeen. Ten years in the making, the Place of Origin artwork takes the form of a series of woodland walks and stone built features culminating in a high vantage point where visitors can appreciate the sheer scale of the old quarry workings within the surrounding ...