An Important Summer 2025 Update from TSC

Times are a’ changing, and so will our crystal, rock, and mineral products list!

As you know, team Stone Circle are committed to creating a better world around the mineral specimen and metaphysical crystal industry. We are not out to bluff, we do not want to work with wholesalers, and we are sticking to our values tooth and nail – but we are also getting older and a little bit worse for wear.

Katriona and Kai getting SOAKED at the Gold Panning Championships in the Mennock Pass, Summer 2025.

Breaking news in the opening months of 2025 as a well-known Scottish rockhound was charged with damaging a historic site. This has sparked industry-wide panic among us self-collectors.

While Nature Scot works to draw up a set of guidelines for safe and ethical collection (which we imagine won’t be too far off our ethos), crystal finders all over the UK are turning their attention to their finds and wondering how likely it is that we will get to keep them, let alone knowing if we will be able to keep collecting in future.

Breaking News for Rockhounds in Scotland

Following this disturbing news we received earlier this week, The Stone Circle are having a moment of reflection to see if we can do better. We have been banging the ethical crystal collecting drum for a long time now, which is kind of why we started selling our finds to begin with. We saw it as better to source your crystals locally than to have them imported from mines far abroad where the ethics of quarrying were questionable or unknown. Now we are wondering if we are wrong in that belief.

A respected and well-known mineral collector and seller was charged by Nature Scot, the government organisation which protects our natural resources. This seller was fined heftily for breaking rocks open in SSSI sites (that’s Sites of Special Scientific Interest). This person has a long history of releasing excellent Scottish minerals to the world… and now has a criminal record for it.

We want to re-emphasise that you should not collect nor smash rocks in SSSIs. If you need further guidance on the current rules, see our previous article on ethical crystal collection. Needless to say, we are anxiously awaiting new sets of rules which Nature Scot are currently working on.

Of course, we see both sides of the coin here at The Stone Circle. We too go out and find Scottish minerals, rocks, and crystals to sell. We might not make a habit of taking a hammer and chisel to SSSI sites (we keep checking the SSSI map before we go anywhere) but we still understand that if the minerals are not taken from the landscape, the rain will erode them back down to sediment and they will be lost.

This is a no-win situation.

It’s Time for Change

It has also got us thinking… are we really as ethical as we could be? Are we destroying our own habitat? Are we encouraging other people to go at things with hammers? Are we getting too old to be throwing ourselves into rivers and hanging off cliffs anyway?

Whichever way you swing it, we need to start making some changes. We need to ensure we are neither breaking laws ourselves nor encouraging other people to do so. We need to start thinking of what happens when we cannot get out to collect rocks any longer.

Of course, we have been extra careful of what and where we collect since a throwaway comment on TikTok about beachcombing in the early days. We have been absolutely strict with ourselves on following the rules.

Despite being certain that we have done no wrong, those of you who follow us avidly will know that Katriona has OCD. There is no punchline, she just has it. This means that she now has to go back over every little thing ever written, listed, sold, uploaded, or looked at funny, with a fine toothed comb to make sure that we stay as ethical as possible.

So far we have covered TikTok, released a statement, and are in the middle of updating the website. You can listen to Katriona's statement on TikTok if you are so inclined.

What’s New at The Stone Circle

To this end, we will be making changes. What sort of changes? You ask. Simple ones.

• You may notice more international crystals, rocks, and minerals on the website.

• These will be recycled, second-hand, or sourced from mines we trust.

• We are now actively seeking to rock swap with international rockhounds to bring you the best mineral specimens we can find, worldwide.

• You can now contact us to sell us your old crystal collection – a form to do so will appear on the site shortly.

• The home page will be changed to reflect the new ethos – we want to be the best rockhounding blog on the internet and the biggest buyer and seller of pre-loved rocks in the UK.

• The menu will change to reflect options in shopping giving you a choice between mineral specimens in the raw, tumbled stones, or metaphysical/healing crystals. This way those committed specimen collectors do not need to see the spooky stuff, and the wicca based following we have know where to buy their incense.

• We will be adding a bunch of metaphysical items. These will be things like tarot cards, pendulums, runestones, and other crystal-related paraphernalia. These are items which have always called tp us but which we never felt free enough to sell before.

• We will continue to invest in rock polishing equipment, sharing both rough and polished stones for crystal collectors of the UK.

  
  

Ethical collection will remain at the core of our values. We will also focus as much as possible on Scottish rocks – but we will buy them from other collectors and only self-collect when it is necessary. This is something we have been doing for the last two years already but that we feel this would be a good time to start shouting about .

A Big Thank You for Supporting Us So Far

All that is left is to give you a big thank you for making the Stone Circle what it is today. This started out as a seller turning over crystals to pay for petrol to get out to the next hunt. It has turned into a part time career and I love my job! I have already promised a handful of you that I will not stop collecting Scottish rocks, I am just going to collect a lot of other crystals too.

Having bought up our first few crystal collections and waiting for them in the post – we are excited. This is a new chapter. An evolution which will help us and also help spark change in the crystal community. The rocks will be here when we are all dead, after all, so who really owns who?

Now all we need to do is remember which crystals you can put in soap and which you can’t…

Katriona