1. Avebury is an internal device, too. (But that's another story!)
"I observed further, that as these stones generally have a rough and a smoother side, they took care to place the most sightly side of the stone inward, towards the included area." Avebury, a temple to the British Druids. Stukeley W, 1727.
Above is one of many of Professor Alexander Thom's stone circle surveys that I have corrected. This is made possible because Thom did not know that stone circles were/are internal devices, and no one seems to have told him. So, while Thom's surveys are pretty accurate, every one of his suggested profiles, which pass through the center of the stones, are wrong! And there are plenty of them!
Thom's corrected plans have been peppered around this and its sister site, Avebury decoded.
Thom's plan of the stone circle seen above can be found near a village known as Boat of Garten in Scotland and is arguably the most important of all Thom's surveys. The outer ring of stones is based on four tiny Pythagorean triangles with sides measuring only 36, 48, and 60 Megalithic Inches and is particularly relevant to the small triangle in the middle of the plan of Stonehenge that follows. Both monuments prove the Megalithic Inch as one-fortieth of a Megalithic Yard. Furthermore, a cove of three stones, seen in the middle of Boat of Garten's stone ring, is styled like Avebury's Beckhampton Cove and proves contact with Scottish Aviemore by folks who undoubtedly had the wheel. Also, note how two stones, colored pink, are placed to mark out north and south with great accuracy, precisely as at Stonehenge.
I understand that one of Boat of Garten's stones is pure white, likely consisting of quartz. I don't know which stone this is, but being reflective, it's almost sure to be the 'Back-stone' of the Cove.
2. Aubrey Hole 7. This is where the cremated human bones from 30 of the 56 Aubrey Holes were stored in 1947.
So, what do we know about the Aubrey Holes? The Stonehengers modified them several times, so we only know how they ended up. Hawley showed them to be reasonably accurate circles, which varied in size from 30 to 70 inches in diameter. Also, the Aubrey Holes were unconvincingly shallow at depths ranging from 24 to 45 inches deep.
Lt. Col. Hawley excavated 30 of them in 1920 and noted that their bases were compacted hard as if some heavy object had stood in them for a very long time. However, these were not likely to be bluestones, for the bottoms of most Aubrey Holes are flat, whereas the bluestones are anything but!
We know that the Stonehenger's filled in a section of the henge ditch to aim the causeway more accurately at the moon, and this filling was rammed hard, too. Put another way, this section of the ditch and the circular bases of the Aubrey Holes were the results of pounding away at the ground, similar to Pile driving. Perhaps this was meant to isolate the cremated bones from "Underground deities, such as the gods of the underworld.". ---Precisely opposite to Atkinson's hypothesis!
Hawley also noted damage to some holes likely caused by the removal of a stone. Atkinson appears to have overlooked this.
Hundreds of timber posts were used at Stonehenge; some established alignments on the sun and moon, and others were components of engines for lifting and moving. So, the Aubrey Holes likely started life as smaller affairs, similar to the 180 timber posts found at Site IV in the middle of Mount Pleasant Henge in Dorset. Site IV posts stood in much smaller holes, only 20 inches in diameter by 15 inches deep. The posts were only 13 inches in diameter.
All this is not to mention the veritable "forest" of fine posts discovered inside Coneybury Henge, which overlooked Stonehenge.
2.1 A Seahenge survey: But not one of Alexander Thom's.
It's been a year or two since my sister and I visited the Seahenge mock-up in the Kings Lyn Museum, Norfolk. Mainly, we were there with a tape measure to measure the length of its central axis so I could produce a survey to resolve its underlying geometry. However, the measurement obtained from the mock-up was an unhelpful 7.25 Megalithic Yards.
Well, that's all in the past because the plan produced by Maisey Taylor, which scales to 8.2 MY and is seen above, is the more accurate. This does not change the fact that this survey, produced jointly by archaeology and the Time Team, is corrupt.
Starting the count of the timber posts from 10 caused the count to be one short at 55 and not the proper 56. We know from the 56 Aubrey Holes that this number represents the moon. So, this is deliberate misrepresentation.
Also, to confuse still things further, the reader might note that 43 is dropped out and taken for the use of the undersized post, which ought to be classed as 42. My numbers shown in red are correct.
The geometry...
Seahenge is based on a pair of back-to-back half-size 3:4:5 Pythagorean triangles. So, Seahenge is based on the Megalithic Yard. Equally important is the 0.3 offset from which the 4-radius arc is cast. 0.3 MY is 12 MI and is another proof of the megalithic inch.
Holme II, placed elsewhere on this site, also proves the megalithic inch.
3. Draw a 36 Megalithic Yard diameter circle. Next, draw a vertical line for North-south and divide the circle into ninety equal parts. Allow two divisions for each of the thirty sarsen-stone uprights that people intended to place around the outside of the ring, starting with stones 26 and 11, to further establish the North-south line as shown. These stones will have their best faces pointing inward towards the center.
4. Draw Stonehenge’s axis to pass centrally between what will become stones 1 and 30 and stones 15 and 16. This axis obeys the Stone Age 10-degree rule by being exactly 50 degrees clockwise from the north.
5. From the center of the circle, construct a 3:4:5 Pythagorean triangle that measures 18 by 24 by 30 Megalithic Inches, as shown in the inset, and use this triangle to place Stonehenge’s secondary axis 18 Megalithic Inches to the northwest of the primary. Stonehenge now has two axes
6. We can now see that the stone building has two centers separated by the tiny triangle's hypotenuse of 30 Megalithic Inches. The tiny green circle shown marks the center of what is popularly known as the bluestone horseshoe. Bluestone 70 of the "horseshoe" is an enigma because no two plans agree on where it should go. However, according to Flinders Petrie, the arc around which the builders erected this "horseshoe" measures 14.5 megalithic yards. So, to help clarify things, we have superimposed Petrie’s Stone 70, seen colored red, on top of John Wood’s survey of Stone 70.
Further thoughts to help explain what occurs when people try to complete a folly long after its design was laid down!
Stone 16 of the outer circle should be on the primary axis. But, in a change of heart, the procrastinating builders decided to shift it towards the secondary axis to increase the amount of winter solstice sunlight that could reach the worked rear face of Stone 56.
Stone 10 should also be on the primary axis, but people mistakenly placed it on the secondary.
Stone 11 is clearly not as big as the original designer intended and needs further investigation to find out why not. Perhaps it was placed by someone who decided that the stone building should be aligned on the exact solstice, after all! But would I want archaeologists to investigate why this stone is so tiny when they are entirely beyond trust? No, I would not!
7. You could, of course, go with this corrupt version instead!
This plan of the Stonehenge sarsen and bluestone building was published in the British Archaeology Magazine when the British Museum opened its doors for its 2022 Stonehenge exhibition. This plan contradicts everything they and we have learned about Stonehenge.
The solstice line points 49 degrees clockwise from the north because that is what the solstice did 5,000 years ago. But look closely, and you will see it bears no relationship to the monument itself. The authors of this plan have skewed the axis to fit the stone structure, just as Professor Thom skewed his plans for Stonehenge and Woodhenge.
The white circle seen passing through the middle of the stones of the outer ring is equally corrupt. No other plan shows it this way. This is an archaeological wish to destroy the Megalithic Yard, which is so vital to the hypothesis of Stonehenge. Just as its discoverer, Professor Thom, killed it off when he went "over to the other side" in 1967. You can see the proof of this later.
Finally, consider the useless small scales adopted by archaeologists. Meaningful scales would be many times larger.
8. The actual geometry of the Stone circle known as Allen Water near Hawick, with its exact dimensions superimposed on a faded-out version of Thom's original.
This plan was found on page 142 of the book "Alexander Thom, Cracking the Stone Age Code: Secrets of the circle builders" by Robin Heath.
Based on a pair of near-Pythagorean triangles, the hypotenuse of 8.514 was almost certainly considered to be 8.5. But perhaps the most critical measurement was the blend radius of 18 My, which equals the internal radius of Stonehenge's outer sarsen circle.
9. Stonehenge simplified diagrammatically.
In a vain search for the impossible, the design of Stonehenge was changed several times. Here we describe the last version as we find it today.
The final Stonehenge was a glorified cove of upright sarsen stones with lintels, placed inside a circle of thirty sarsens, also lintled, with an oval setting of twenty-four Welsh bluestones thrown in for good measure.
The modus operandi of coves was first exploited by the henge builders of Avebury, where they had a pair of them. Avebury’s main cove looked like a rectangular box with one side of the box left open to admit the sun and moon during solstices and standstills.
Avebury’s coves are five hundred years older than that at Stonehenge -- so you might expect Stonehenge’s version to be more splendid. And it is. Known as the ‘Trilithon Horseshoe,’ Stonehenge’s Cove is open to the northeast to catch and amplify high-altitude summer solstice sunlight, as is already explained.
*****
The design mandate.
From a central stake, a circle of thirty-six megalithic yards diameter was scribed in the grass for thirty sarsens (dragged overland from near Avebury - or so we are told) to be assembled around this circle with their best faces placed inward. Short rows of stakes were then set to function as kicking blocks that accurately position those stones when raised upright.
Thirty pits with stakes were needed to complete the outer circle of sarsen stones. However, the builders postponed the completion of the sarsen circle when less than half was built so they could get on with making the cove of five trilithons.
Folded tracings prove that Stonehenge is an asymmetric monument that gave it not one axis but two. These axes are separated by the tiniest of tiny triangles. The triangle at the heart of Stonehenge is proportion to 3:4:5, the simplest of all Pythagorean triangles, as are the triangles that form the basis of Avebury's geometry. At its heart, Stonehenge is based on the Megalithic Inch, which is one-fortieth of a Megalithic Yard. This triangle measures a mere 18 by 24 by 30 Mi - where 18 MI equals 14.7 imperial inches, 37.34 cm.
Stonehenge’s Cove is asymmetrical. Most stones are set on the primary axis, but the Great Trilithon is based on the secondary. This offset allowed the Great Trilithon to prevent incoming sunlight (which should be regarded as a narrow shaft of light) from passing right through and out the back of the building. Trilithon 4 was also moved over, but this was to make room for some bluestones in the Oval. This was an oval of twenty-four bluestones. Only nineteen of those stones remain today, and all of them are in the southwest. This has caused the Oval to be described as a ‘Horseshoe.’
Like the rest of the building, the Oval is an internal device where the inside faces of its stones are placed around geometry made up of a pair of 14.5 megalithic-yard diameter circles whose centers are three megalithic-yards apart.
The number three was the most critical Stone Age number because it represented the family. This can be proven in several ways, especially at Durrington Walls' Southern Circle, with its timber posts placed in threes.
This was not the only message that the Oval hoped to pass on. Adding 14.5 to 14.5, we get twenty-nine, and, adding this to the number of stones in the sarsen circle, we get 59, which is the number of moon cycles in two months. But the real message of conjoined circles is of a coming together, particularly of the sun and moon.
Then there is "Evidence of sexual dimorphism," Darvill: Stonehenge, The Biography of a Landscape. In plain English... Stonehenge's Stone 49 is male, and 31 is female... Like Avebury's male and female cove-stones and the dimorphic pair inside the long barrow known as Waylands Smithy. These, too, are male and female. (Take a look at the old Smithy on-site photograph to prove it!)
10. Arminghall Henge 3,150 BC is one of the monuments which set the prehistoric 10-degree standard and caused Stonehenge's axis to point 50 degrees from the north.
Less than two miles southeast of Norwich city center in Norfolk, this henge set prehistoric standards that others had to follow. Its principles were adopted at Avebury, Stonehenge, Woodhenge, and, as we shall see, a host of others.
Having discovered Woodhenge, near Stonehenge, while flying over it, Flight lieutenant Insall went looking for similar monuments and found the Arminghall henge in 1928. It was another five years before it was excavated, and then only partially by some G. Clark who, incidentally, found no sign of burial.
While pretty much flattened these days, the inner ditch of the henge is plain to see by the ring of nettles growing upon it. What a pity, though, a shame in fact that a garden hedge blocks the view south to where the southernmost sun and moon set behind the spur known as Chapel Hill. I have lost count of the vistas available to Stone Age man, which have become blocked off. Some of these blockades must be deliberate!
Professor Wainwright mentioned the Arminghall Henge in his 1971 book 'Durrington Walls' because he could not understand the discovery of Rustication-Ware-type-pottery in such an old monument. This would not matter so much were it not for Wainwright finding rusticated pottery - some of it Beaker - when excavating the Durrington Walls Henge - a much later monument.
Charcoal found together with Beaker sherds, and tested twice by C14, proves that Beaker Folk built the western bank of the Durrington Walls henge in 2,650 BC. This date would be pushed back further still if tested today.
Again, while archaeologists today might date a monument by the pottery they dig up - be it Beaker, Peterborough Ware, Grooved Ware, or whatever... what really binds Britain's monuments together are mechanics, astronomy, geometry, mathematics, measurements, and human biology. Reproduction, that is!
11. Professionals have attempted to establish an axis of symmetry based on Arminghall's eight timber posts in the shape of a horseshoe, oval, or open-ended egg. Yet even though there is no axis of symmetry to be found, they got together and agreed on an azimuth of 223 degrees. (Azimuth = clockwise from north.)
Here we will propose an alternative solution.
Chapel Hill is the northern spur of a more significant hill that runs south of it. A careful study of this hill and its southerly terrain has shown that three peaks manage to appear above and to the sides of the spur when viewed from the henge. Two of these peaks produce a pair of notches in the horizon through which the southernmost sun and moon come to the ground when viewed from the henge. A third notch forms a 40-degree west-of-south alignment (Azimuth 220) with the henge.
This monument raises further the likelihood that a German tribe, possibly the Michaelsburger’s - those inventors of long-necked beakers - entered the country via Yarmouth and the river Yare. The Michaelsburgers went missing when the Rhine changed its course, leaving their mountain-top retreat exposed and separated from their land. This made it difficult to tend their crops.
I would call the Arminghall Henge - the Woodhenge of Norwich - after Woodhenge near Stonehenge. However, one does wonder what the original builders called it, especially since the archaeological term ‘henge’ converts to Womb – believe it!
The Arminghall Henge (we still must call it that) is famous for its eight massive posts in the shape of a horseshoe placed at its center and is somewhat similar in style to Stonehenge's trilithons. Probably standing at least 3 meters high, the near one-megalithic-yard-diameter posts of the Arminghall henge were so heavy that they required long tapering ramps to help in their erection. Once erected, those posts were likely topped with lintels to help stabilize them, like with Stonehenge.
As previously stated, much work has been done to figure out what this arrangement of posts points at, especially since the setting winter solstice sun could once be seen to slide down the side of Chapel Hill as if to take a drink from the river Yare.
Timber posts apart - the central area was found to be clean of debris with no trace of a grave. Conversely, the ditch contained copious charcoal, broken pottery, and many flints.
12. Arminghall's post positions are shown together with a pair of uprights (colored brown) to demonstrate how those alignments were made. And it's every bit as accurate as the sights of a rifle. At ground level, alignments between pairs of posts are tangential to their diameters.
Since Arminghall's posts divide the compass into 10-degree lots, it is logical to assume that the primary alignment of the henge follows suit with this order of 10s. Furthermore, the terrain proves it does!
So, our early geometers had found that no matter where they lived, from Scotland to Lands end, the angle between north and east could be made to present an angle of 90 degrees, as did the angle between east and south, south and west, west and north. The problem was that the sun and moon refused to conform to these precise angles.
Only one place in England, north to south, produces a 90-degree angle between the sun and moon, and that is at Stonehenge's latitude. This is the primary reason Stonehenge is built where it is and why early folks were prepared to drag the massive sarsens 20 miles south to make it.
The choice of longitude was set by the Great cursus half a mile north of Stonehenge, built 500 years earlier. The Great cursus was created to challenge the six-mile-long Dorset cursus. See the report on the Dorsett Cursus later.
The Great cursus was built to take in more countryside, east to west, than the mere limit of its earthworks. The cursus is trained on the massive ridge of hills some three miles to its east, and Stonehenge did likewise by aiming at the north end of Sidbury Hill.
13. Chapel Hill Spur. Thanks to the offending garden hedge south of the Arminghall henge, this photograph had to be taken further south and is off a little to one side of the monument’s axis. Nevertheless, it does tell us all we need to know.
A railway cutting passes right through the middle of the spur these days, and where this cutting is approached from the west (to the right of this photo), the rail is elevated to match its height. This is seen through a gap in the trees and below a distant rooftop. The railway prevents the sun from reaching ground level and the river Yare these days. (Have they no respect?)
Of greater importance is a distant landmass that manages to appear over the top and to the left of the peak of Chapel Hill, forming a notch that the 220-azimuth axis of the monument points at. This landmass can be seen beyond the row of telegraph poles and through another gap in the treeline.
It's impossible to make it out in this photograph, but the busy A47 passes over the third landmass to the left of the Chapel Hill spur, and this is where the southernmost setting moon will come to ground in 2024. Get out there, somebody, and photograph it.
This is something that I wrote and forgot about in my 2007 book 'Stonehenge Secrets.’ (Sorry, but it is out of print): - Far bigger than Arminghall, a setting of timber posts, 24 in all, and designed on similar principles, was found not far from Norwich at Godmanchester. Presumably discovered because of gravel extraction, Godmanchester and its cursus have been dated to 3,800BC. I want to do a follow-up on Godmanchester one day, especially if I can wrest its coordinates from the authorities.
14. This is another of Professor Thom's surveys after correction and some fading of the central area. This one is of the Castle Rigg stone circle near Keswick in the Lake District.
Classified by Thom as a 'Type A flattened circle,' it is based on four sides of a hexagon. Once again, we see how Thom failed to support his Megalithic Yard by producing a profile that passes through the middle of the stones. We can also see from the above that the geometry is much simpler than Thom supposed by the 5 MY offset, which marks the centers of the two 18 MY diameter circles.
Type A flattened circles and their blend radii are assumed by Thom to be cast from point A on the hexagon. CAD proves this not to be strictly true. However, any errors produced in the positioning of A and the blend arc size cast from it are so minor as to be negligible.
15. Stonehenge and its Heel Stone. 3rd July 2016.
Note how low-altitude sunlight illuminates the stones, and compare this with Avebury's Cove, where this phenomenon was first noticed!
A brass plaque, recently fitted by English Heritage and embedded in the grass, marks Stonehenge's primary axis. This is the axis of the outer circle and is shown colored red.
The aqua line marks the secondary axis, which once passed centrally through the gap of the Great trilithon. These axes are 18 megalithic inches apart (14.7 imperial inches).
Standing like an antenna or satellite dish facing the moon, the Heel Stone points some 11 degrees more northerly than Stonehenge's axes and therefore aims at where the northernmost moon rises out of the Larkhill Causewayed Enclosure every 19 years. The proof of the Heel Stone's alignment can be gleaned from John Wood's highly accurate 1740 survey of Stonehenge. The Heel Stone was revered and unique and was placed in the middle of a circular ditch filled with bluestone fragments.
The last time the moon visited her northernmost position - named "The Major Standstill" by Professor Alexander Thom, was way back in 2005/2006, and was an opportunity missed. The next Major Standstill will therefore take place in late 2024. The good news is that when the time comes, the moon will stick around for a year or more and, weather permitting, should put in a showing or two.
Hopefully, photographers will be allowed to enter Stonehenge during the many unsociable hours needed to get those pictures of the northernmost moonrise. But I doubt it. If not, you photographers get yourselves off to some other monument instead - there are plenty more good targets in these pages.
In our search for further proof of the hypothesis of Stonehenge, we will be looking for more ways of bringing the sun, the moon, and a star, or stars, together in one place.
16. Stonehenge’s Heel Stone.
Note how the Heel Stone's axis - the axis normal to its front face - crosses Stonehenge's primary and secondary axes and the 49-degree solstice of the Neolithic sun. Is there a better way of bringing the sun and moon together? Furthermore, this was deliberate; Neolithic man put the Heel stone in place -- not nature.
We find the same cross-over principle at Durrington Walls, where the incoming summer solstice sunset crosses the axes of several timber-built eggs that the Southern Circle is composed of.
17. Stone Age folk did not make Blueprints, but if they had, one blueprint would have appeared as seen above...
The point of showing this plan of Stonehenge once again is to prove it to be asymmetrical. The comparison is made by superimposing the actual in yellow on top of a symmetrical version shown in dotted white.
Except for Stone 10, the stones of the sarsen circle fit snuggly around a thirty-six megalithic yard diameter circle. Most modern surveys agree with this 36 MY dimension. But none have dared to say so!
The Altar stone, Stone 80, is placed on the secondary axis. This unique, six-megalithic-yard-long, micaceous, green-colored stone never stood upright but was skewed some 10 degrees to reflect sunlight onto the male-type Bluestone 49 just inside the entrance of the sarsen circle. This pronounces Stonehenge as male. (Congrats, it's a boy!)
Also, on the secondary axis are... The fourth Trilithon, the Oval of twenty-four bluestones (Still called a horseshoe of nineteen stones for convenience) and a VIP inhumation.
No one in their right mind would build something so complex to bury their dead!
18. Five thousand five hundred cold winters, from the Stone Age to global warming.
This story starts on a sunny spring morning, many years ago, when a Stone Age farmer called Brennos was to be seen busily preparing a patch of land and making it ready to sow barley seed for a harvest he desperately hoped to get. It was challenging work controlling the plow drawn along by a pair of powerful oxen when the leather twine holding the contrivance together suddenly broke, and the whole thing fell apart. Having to repair the device so often was tedious work for Brennos, but he faithfully tied its components together again and continued with his task.
This is good soil, Brennos thought, as he recalled the bumper crop he had grown the year before; it was worth the effort of reclaiming the land from the trees that once grew there. His wife and children, who followed along behind him, were busily engaged with the task of sowing seeds for the harvest the whole family dearly hoped they might get.
This was the year 3,500 BC: The place? - The Kennet valley, in what would one day become the Kingdom of Wessex.
Brennos had many friends who preferred to trap prey to feed their families, which was no bad thing, for combined with Brennos's ability to grow wheat and barley, beans, and peas, his family usually managed to maintain a well-balanced diet. Even so, Brennos’s friends still marveled over his abilities as a farmer. Brennos understood only too well what they meant. Some years, if the weather were cold, his crops would likely fail. And if it were unseasonably wet at harvest time, his produce would rot in the ground. Nor was Brennos saved from the constant worry of having to keep seed in good condition for the following year's crop. Were it not for the sun that traveled far to the south every winter; he would not have had this problem; ripe seed would be available for immediate sowing.
Brennos stopped to consider the work they had done that day. The oxen had drawn the plow, which had turned the field into regimented lines of shallow furrows, his wife had placed seeds upon the bottom, and his children had sprinkled fine soil to cover them. Together they had covered about half an acre during the day. Not a bad day's work, Brennos thought, and he hoped the sun and rain would be kind to his family by bringing them a rich and plentiful harvest. As the light began to fade, Brennos unhitched the plow and returned the oxen to their pens, taking a moment to give each beast a grateful pat upon their bony heads.
Finding their way home in the dark was fraught with danger, so his family stayed together in a tightly knit group, and his boy, who took up the rear, carried a fiery torch in case a wild animal should mount an attack upon them.
Sometimes the light of the moon would help a little, but on this night, there was no moon to be seen. Thankfully, one of their colleagues had built a fire and kept it alight to help guide them through the ditches surrounding the hilltop enclosure they call home. Once settled, they were offered bread and cheese, which they washed down with warm goats’ milk.
As always, Brennos became more than a little sad when recalling so many of his friends who had passed away the previous winter. That winter had been no worse than any other, but it showed no one any sympathy, and when a mysterious illness swept up through the whole country, many of his weaker friends succumbed to it. To cheer him, some would tell a joke, others would tell a story or two, and some would recall stories of their folklore.
Later that night, the clouds that blanketed the sky began to clear, and the moon could be seen looking down on the group huddled around the fire below her.
And as usual, Brennos's friends tried to explain the reasons for the moon.
The moon had monthly cycles, occasionally turning red, as did his wife, which made Brennos feel sure that the moon was female. He often observed the moon and his wife as they passed through their cycles, month after month and year after year. The whole group, too, was aware of how the moon waxed and waned and changed her shape, night after night, from a ‘C’ to a ‘D’ to an ‘O’ and back again. To Brennos, the moon was a live person; he could see she had a face that never seemed to smile. Strange, Brennos thought, how she was forever avoiding the sun. When the sun went down, so she would rise, only to disappear again before he could rise the following day. She would sometimes appear during the day, but not until she had made herself invisible to him, for she was so utterly shy. She seemed to want to keep as far from him as possible. If only I could bring the sun and moon together, Brennos thought. They might get to like one another. The moon might even conceive a child.
Brennos was brought back to reality by one of his friends who noticed him looking up at the sky, as he often did. This friend suggested they might build a massive mound of significant length (A long barrow) with a portal and chambers at one end to catch equinoctial sunlight and moonlight and as somewhere to inter their deceased colleagues.
They knew of a pleasant place with a commanding view on the other side of the Kennet Valley, and everyone agreed to build the mound there. Who knows what might happen?
They also decided it would be better to construct the chambers from enormous stones if only they could find some way to move them. Brennos doubted whether such large stones could be moved; they were so big, but everyone decided to try. First, they gained experience by moving the medium-sized ones around by turning them into rollers clad in wood. This effectively turned them into giant wheels. Other folks made their way to the strangely named hilltops of Overton and Fyfield Downs, where they could find the choicest stones. Milling around the largest, they looked under them and around them. These stones exceeded twenty tonnes in weight, and the transportation of just one, having to cross a river and drag up a hill, was an enormous task. Some of Brennos’s group chopped down some trees and stripped them of their branches and bark, thus turning them into long wooden posts. Then, using these large posts as levers, with small stones for fulcrums, managed to release the stones from their beds and drag them to the site.
First, they built the walls to make five small rooms, each leading off from a central entrance passageway. Next, they excavated the chalk from a pair of ditches on each side of the mound and used it to make it still higher. Then they laid massive capping stones across the top to form the roof. More chalk was taken from the ditches until the whole structure appeared from above like a gleaming white 330-foot-long trapezium set against a pea-green landscape.
Brennos held a lighted brand against one wall to demonstrate to his friends how sarsen stones reflect the light. "Imagine, he said, what might happen when sun and moonlight enter the tomb. Brennos and his friends were justifiably proud of the Long Barrow they had built and oversaw the building of several more.
Many years later, the portal of this long barrow was sealed up with large blocking stones after receiving a murdered beaker man, together with his fashionable lozenge-decorated beaker. This accurately dates the event to around 2500 BC. Monuments such as this mound, or tumulus, known as ‘The West Kennet Long Barrow,’ were decommissioned by command. Perhaps the murdered beaker man, found with an arrow in his back, disagreed!
Brennos and his family continued to plow and sow the land to ensure the success of their crops. How well everything grows, Brennos thought, when the sun is shining, life is so much better in the summertime. He wished he could have two harvests a year instead of just one, so he could provide year-long for his family without worrying about storing seeds and taking the risk of them rotting away every winter. He so wished the sun could be with him all year round.
Brennos held a few grains of barley in the palm of his hand. Within these seeds, he knew, was the very essence of life, and he realized why he had chosen to be a farmer. He also knew that he only had to bury these seeds a little below the surface of the soil, where they were kept warm and sheltered for a while, and the spark of life would begin.
Brennos wondered where the sun came from. It came from out of the ground in various places, stony ground too, but no one had ever discovered any holes from where it could have emerged. Clearly, the sun did not need a hole to exit from; he was, without a doubt, capable of passing through anything. Equally clear, too, was that the sun traveled underground during the night and probably stayed beneath the knolls of Britain, of which Brennos knew several. The rain also puzzled Brennos because it fell from the smoke that the sun made in the sky. This made him wonder if rain, too, emerged from the ground. He knew of some folks who had dug deep pits, hoping to find the sun but had discovered a water source instead. Others had found choice flint and were in the process of mining it.
Brennos reflected upon their folklore that told of when his ancestors had tried to simulate the sun. It was said that they had cut down hundreds of large trees and turned their trunks into posts to describe a succession of ever-increasing circles. This giant structure was more than three hundred feet in diameter by six men high. According to this legend, they had infilled the gaps between the posts with lots of combustible material and set the whole thing alight.
This legend is based on fact. About 6,000 years ago, a large assembly of over four hundred massive timber posts that radiated outwards in ever-increasing circles was built at Stanton Drew. - See report later. Magnetometry readings taken a few years ago proved that this circle of tree trunks was subsequently burnt to the ground. Sometime later, this massive fire was superseded by a henge and Britain's second largest stone circle.
Brennos looked up at the sun and wondered if the legend was true. Each post must have weighed about the same as thirty-five men and would have stood in a hole deeper than the height of a man.
Brennos held up his thumb, with arm outstretched, and tried to gauge the sun for size. His thumbnail completely covered its disc and was six times larger, so he thought the sun was not massively huge. He also realized that the sun could not be reached from the top of Waden Hill, so it had to be larger than this. Brennos could also see that the sun was higher than the clouds, which Brennos thought was smoke produced by the sun’s fire, which hung around in the sky.
After considering the problem at length, Brennos decided that the sun was a disc, or sphere, of about 1500 megalithic yards in diameter (4,083 feet), and it had somehow become self-sustaining.
To be continued...
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Britain’s first farmers, living in the south of England, treated Wiltshire’s extensive Chalk Massive like a vast whiteboard on which to scribe their designs. That is how Stonehenge started, just three circles of pure white chalk appearing through the lush green grass. The circles were complete except for two causeways, the most extensive pointing northeast towards the most northerly risings of the sun and moon. The center-point of those circles was chosen for one main reason. This reason is well known, and several authors have already written about it. Stonehenge stands on latitude 51, the one place where the sun and moon make an angle of 90 degrees. So, Stonehenge started by obeying the Stone Age 10-degree rule. There is only one reason archaeologists have raised the question of why Stonehenge is built where it is. And it’s just another red herring to divert us from the question of WHY.
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But where does the moon fit in with all this? With a half orb, 40-degree azimuth in Wiltshire, the Major Standstill of the moon already obeys the 10-degree rule. Witness Avebury’s West Kennet and Beckhampton’s avenues, which follow it too. So, a piece of high ground, a mile or so to the northeast of Stonehenge, to what is known today as Larkhill, was recognized as a suitable place for more timber posts to track the moon and further establish its northernmost position. This turning point, not unlike a terminus, occurs every 18.61-years. However, while this 18.61-year event is near enough, it is not dead accurate, and the Stonehengers knew it. Hence, a further fifty-four posts were added to the Aubrey Circle to represent the 56-year frequency of the moon - the time it takes for the moon to return to the same place from where it started. Even this is not dead accurate, but never mind! Because we now have a fabulous piece of theatre designed to bring the sun, the moon, and the top-most star of the Southern Cross - the red Gamma Crucis - which was still visible from Wiltshire 5,000 years ago - together in one place.
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Here are a couple of quotes from the book Stonehenge Decoded...
"I set up my eight-millimeter movie camera with telephoto lens trained down the axis line so as to include in its field the sarsen circle archway through which the distant heel stone could be seen. We waited. Suddenly, in the band of brightness to the northeast we saw it - the first red flash of the sun, rising just over the tip of the heel stone!" Gerald S Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded, P 93.
Two points to be made here are... Hawkins believed that Stonehenge's primary axis passes centrally through the gap of the Great Trilithon. It does not. Consequently, his camera was not placed on Stonehenge's primary axis. Furthermore, the sun does not rise "just over the tip of the Heel stone" on the summer solstice morning.
Quote... "We had deliberately planned our visit for June 12, nine days before the solstice, because we feared that on the day itself, the crowd would make it impossible to set up a camera on the correct alignment and have an unobstructed view.
"Stonehenge Decoded,” Page 92.
The problem of crowds that get in the way and make it impossible to place a camera on Stonehenge's axis still applies today! The sun rises 'just over the tip' of the Heel Stone twice in June... not on solstice morning, but about five days before and five days after!
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Here we hope to convince you that Stonehenge was built by people who believed the sun to be male, the moon to be female, and the stars to be potential children. This alone should tell you what Stonehenge was meant to be.
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This site deals with everything our ancestors got up to that made them think they might have a way of guaranteeing them the three essentials of life - Food, water, and heat. Food, in the form of staples, they could grow, and water was plentiful. They needed a second sun to warm them in winter and grow out-of-season crops. It was not that difficult, surely? -- Or so they thought. As already mentioned, some folks had built a sun simulator from 450 tree trucks set in nine ever-increasing circles at Stanton Drew. But having set it alight, it proved nowhere near hot enough. So, they thought the sun had to be made of stone. But how to get stone to burn? And how to get it to fly? Those were the problems they faced!
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As mentioned above, Picture 1 was taken while standing in the middle of Stonehenge’s solstice doorway between pillars 1 and 30 - "The Grand Entrance" - as William Stukeley called it. The photo shows how the sun has surpassed Stonehenge's axes by some distance to the north. According to the astronomer the late Professor John North, the first flash of the sun in 2,500 BC was 48.5-degrees clockwise from the north - a full 1.5 degrees past Stonehenge's axis. It was further north still in 3,000 BC when Stonehenge was started!
I could not understand why the sun in Picture 1 appears so far to the left of the Heel stone, so I wrote to Wessex Archaeology and asked if they could explain why the sun is not where it should be. That was at least ten years ago, and I now know why. Stonehenge is not perfectly aligned on the solstices - not the summer or the winter. As a proven internal device with the best faces of stones dressed and pointing inward, the sarsen and bluestone building was designed to arrest and trap sunlight inside it. Its builders hoped to light up the whole of Stonehenge like the sun lights up the Back-stone of Avebury's Cove - see photo later. This leaves us wondering - did they know they were adopting modern-day LASER techniques?
Picture 1 also shows how the moon travels about 10 degrees further north than the sun. So, the sun goes nowhere where the moon has not already been.
Cremated human bones were fetched from pyres lit alongside the Durrington Walls timber-built Southern Circle exit and placed alongside the fifty-six timber posts, which stood in the Aubrey Holes. The Stonehenger’s believed that cremation released the spirits of the dead. And, by burying those spirits inside Durrington Walls’s Midden,' yet taking the bones to Stonehenge - those spirits would have to travel the Avon umbilical to join them!
The West Amesbury Henge, dubbed “Bluestonehenge,” having circular post holes, was a timber henge, not stone. Here we will call it "The West Amesbury Timber Henge."
This henge, built on the bank of the river Avon, marks the start of the avenue that takes the spirits of the dead overland via Stonehenge Avenue to Stonehenge. This circle of some twenty timbers measures 12 megalithic yards. So, The West Amesbury Timber Henge was one-third the size of Stonehenge. This size, together with the increasing radii of the large curve in the Stonehenge Avenue, is further proof of a wish for Stonehenge to grow.
The largest radius in the bend of Stonehenge Avenue scales to 750 megalithic yards. This radius can also be found at Durrington Walls, Avebury, and Windmill Hill.
Caution! The following paragraph was written before the war in Ukraine and the destruction of the gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, and is not meant to upset anyone.
The only hypothesis that fits all the known facts is a prehistoric wish to give birth to a baby sun. Those who dispute it should spend a killer winter outside without the benefits of gas fires to keep warm and electric lights with which to read a book and light your way. And if that is not enough, try growing out-of-season wheat, barley, and vegetables. Or try picking blackberries and hazel nuts, long rotted and fallen off the trees.
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