20. The geometry of Holme II proved impossible to resolve without the aid of the megalithic inch. Furthermore, without the "inch," Holme II was impossible to build.
We also find that the timber posts respected the Stone Age 10-degree rule. I show those that aim at the cardinal points.
Geometry is based, as is so often the case, on a pair of near-Pythagorean triangles.
21. This Stonehenge model shows what the monument was meant to look like when and if it was ever finished. However, Stonehenge proved too complex to complete, with twin axes only 18 megalithic inches apart and stones already assembled getting in the way of those awaiting assembly.
22. The Society of Antiquaries of London produced this plan of the sarsen and bluestone building to show the result of restoring Stone 56 to the vertical in 1901. This was at a time when the society believed that Stonehenge had a single axis that passed centrally through the gap of the Great Trilithon. We show the primary axis in dotted red.
The diagram appears to be a piecemeal version of Flinders Petrie's 1880 plan, and we have superimposed his plan in red to highlight the differences.
Petrie believed that Stone 10 was correctly placed, which led him to develop a figure for the internal diameter of the sarsen circle of 35.75 megalithic yards. However, we now realise that Stone 10 is misplaced and that Stone 11 is the more accurate. Thirty-six megalithic yards is the currently recognised figure for Stonehenge's inside diameter.
Other points of interest are...
Stone 27 was leaning in towards the middle of the circle in 1901. Petrie's version correctly stands on the 36 MY circle.
Stone 22 fell onto Trilithon Stone 58 sometime between Petrie's survey and 1901.
The 110-foot scale is accurate, but the north arrow is three degrees out.
23. John Wood's 1740 survey of Stonehenge is placed on top of a 1964 aerial photograph.
Professor John North stated that the 56 Aubrey holes were placed on a 104-megalithic-yard-diameter circle. Hawkins claimed it was 105. So, who is right?
Only 32 of the Aubrey holes have been excavated; the remaining 24 were found by thumping the ground with a mallet and listening for the hollow sound excavated soil makes.
Furthermore, to my knowledge, accurate cartesian coordinates of the 32 excavated Aubrey holes have never been made. And those measurements would not be passed on to independent researchers anyway!
However, a vertical photograph of Stonehenge was taken from 1000 feet up in 1963, which shows the painted-white concrete caps that cover the holes. Hawkins presents these photos in both of his books. Presumably, that is how he arrived at 105 for the circle's diameter. Otherwise, scales were not necessary or given.
The architect John Wood produced the most accurate survey of the stone building, which included the Heel Stone and the two remaining Station Stones, 1 and 3.
I have superimposed Wood's survey on top of the 1963 aerial photograph to scale it. According to Wood, the distance from Cypher A - (a small yellow circle) to Cypher R (another yellow circle) is 78.62 MY. (Cypher: Old English)
Interestingly, we can now see that the Slaughter Stone has been moved slightly inward since 1740, when John surveyed it.
More importantly, if not oval, Hawkins was right to claim the Aubrey Circle to measure 105 megalithic yards.
I show some 50-degree lines that the Aubrey holes describe. There would be many more if all 56 positions were known. The position of the posts that mark the Cardinals would be known, too!
Did the station stones define the position of Stonehenge's primary or secondary axis?
It seems more than likely that the four stations were placed on the corners of a rectangle measuring 96 by 40 megalithic yards to give a pair of back-to-back triangles having hypotenuses of 104 MY.
This rectangle's centre point seems to concur with the sarsen circle's centre and the primary axis.
24. The Stonehenge Avenue.
This avenue connects the river Avon to Stonehenge. It starts, not ends, from the West Amesbury henge and, by its geometry, carried a wish that Stonehenge would grow into something much bigger.
It starts at twenty degrees and becomes twice-sized at 40 when it approaches Stonehenge.
Also, the radius of the massive bend starts at 375 Megalithic Yards and grows to 750 before continuing to Stonehenge. Both arcs are straight lifts from Avebury's geometry.
What was the good of the Stonehenge Riverside Project?
The West Amesbury Henge was partially investigated in 2008 when nine of a possible 24 post holes forming a circle were excavated. The circular form of these nine holes is similar to Woodhenge and Stonehenge's Aubrey Holes and is difficult to ignore. They must have held timber posts, not bluestones.
The remaining 15 post holes are closer to the river. Some are in it. Wood survives well when kept wet. Therefore, the 15 unexcavated post positions are begging for further investigation.
Our latest acquisition.
We have successfully deciphered the geometry of Ring C, Site IV, found inside the henge in the middle of the enormous henge at Mount Pleasant in Dorset. Site IV provides compelling evidence that it adheres to the enigmatic megalithic inch, as do rings D and E.
Following the arrangement of all five egg shapes at the heart of Site IV, the beaker people meticulously repositioned many posts. This resulted in the creation of several geometric shapes reminiscent of Stonehenge's artefacts of gold, as seen in the section on Stonehenge gold. This also explains the apparent misplacement of numerous posts.
25. The surveyor, John Wood Senior, famous for having designed the Crescent and Circus in the City of Bath, was the first to properly survey Stonehenge in 1740.
A CAD version (Computer Aided Design) of Wood’s survey, plotted in Megalithic Yards at the rate of 0.83 meters, is shown above.
John Wood Senior used Stonehenge to train his apprentice son, John Wood Junior, in surveying.
Requiring over 800 measurements, Wood’s 1740 survey has never been bettered.
Wood's survey is especially important for being produced before the collapse of Trilithon 4.
This plan was reviewed by somebody (Obviously one of the boys) who reviews books for a magazine about ghosts and has effectively shut my book "Stonehenge 1740 AD" down for working to six decimal places. However, those figures were produced on a calculator, and reducing them to please the awkward while maintaining accuracy would require more trouble than it’s worth.
The Nebra sky disc is an oval or egg based on two circles of 14 and 13 megalithic inch diameters with centres spaced 1.5 megalithic inches apart. A pair of blend radii of nine megalithic inches cast from Pythagorean triangles completes the egg profile.
Here, we see another example of the megalithic yard being divided into eighty parts.
This artefact was buried inside a causewayed enclosure near Nebra in Germany around 1700 BC. However, the tin used in its manufacture and some of its gold came from Cornwall in England.
We do not need to be told why a Bronze Age person, or persons, should want to place the sun and moon inside an egg!
This is my rendition of an artefact of gold held in the Dorset Museum.
Like the Nebra Sky Disc, this artefact represents the cosmos for bringing the Sun, the Moon, and the stars together in one place.
Professionals who have studied the Nebra sky disc say its circle of gold could represent the Sun or a full moon. Why not an orange or a tomato? (Joke.) The same investigators have suggested that the crescent could be a crescent Moon or Sun undergoing an eclipse. Such contradictions get us nowhere. The circle represents the sun. The crescent represents the Moon.
We suspect that the people who built the Nebra sky disc also manufactured the "Dorset sky plate" seen above before returning to Germany.
Eight hundred years before the Nebra sky disc was buried by its owners, a beaker person was buried with beaker pottery beneath Durrington Walls' western bank, only two miles from Stonehenge. Two radiocarbon dates taken from the ashes of a fire proved this person's burial occurred in 2650 BC. This proves that beaker folk were the great geometers who designed the sarsen building of Stonehenge.
This abstract drawing was first published in the book “Stonehenge Secrets” when few understood the thinking behind it. It’s a picture that conveys Neolithic people's thoughts when they built stone circles, drew hieroglyphs on stone, produced expressive artefacts of gold and made chalk phalli.
The image shows a moon-egg being fertilised by the Sun. It would have been more expressive if the fertilising agent had been sunlight, but sunlight proved impossible to draw.
This picture of the sun at the winter solstice is only possible due to stones that fell in 1620.
If we reconstruct the Great Trilithon and Bluestone 67 in front of it, we can demonstrate what Stonehenge looked like in the Bronze Age - The sun disappears.
I’m tired of TV programmes banging on that Stonehenge was aligned on the winter solstice when it was not.
The following is part of a review of last night’s wishy-washy program on Channel 5 Select -- Stonehenge: The Discovery. Sunday, 5 January 2025, starring Dan Snow.
1. The Stonehenge builders wanted visitors to view the winter solstice by walking up the Avenue.
Answer. The winter solstice sunset was not seen when Sarsen 55 of the Great Trilithon and Bluestone 67 were in place. See the Stonehenge reconstruction above.
2. The astronomer Fabio, who appears in the programme, may understand the Neolithic sky but is unaware that the primary axis of Stonehenge did not pass through the gap of the Great Trilithon, which was blocked by the Stonehenge builders when erecting the great trilithon and bluestone 67 in front of it. Furthermore, Fabio failed to photograph the winter solstice due to bad weather.
Instead, the program produced a simulation as if the Great Trilithon and Bluestone 67 never existed.
Further complaints of this program...
1. The Amesbury archer was reeled out yet again.
Answer. The archer came two hundred years too late to have anything to do with the building of Stonehenge.
2. The “Sharp” end of the gold lozenge is 81 degrees to match the solstice.
Answer: It’s 80 degrees.
3. Stonehenge is connected to Woodhenge via Stonehenge Avenue.
Answer. Wrong. Stonehenge connects to the Southern Circle - A complex geometric egg. Wainwright found this egg inside the Durrington Walls henge in 1965. A full-scale model of the Southern Circle was built by the Time Team and was broadcast some years ago. Since then, this diagnostic egg has been conveniently forgotten.
4. The distance from Westwood (where archaeologists claim that Stonehenge's sarsen stones came from) to Stonehenge is eight miles.
Answer. - it's nearer sixteen.
5. Westwood proves the route taken by the sarsens to Stonehenge.
Answer. Unproven.
The Saga of Stone 56: The Great Leaning Stone of Stonehenge. From the out-of-print book "Stonehenge Secrets 2007."
The Duke of Buckingham and his men brought about the demise of the Great Trilithon in 1620 because of digging several deep holes in the middle of Stonehenge. This was told to John Aubrey some forty years after the event by the landowner, Mrs Trotman.
We also know from the reverend Chaldicot that the duke removed a stone, believing it to be the Altar Stone, from the centre of Stonehenge and took it to St James. But we are never likely to know whether this was St James’s Palace Westminster, London, or the village of St James’s. Recent enquiries have been forwarded to the palace, but there is no record of any stone having arrived there.
When the Great Trilithon collapsed, opening up the middle of Stonehenge, Stone 56 remained standing but was leaning at an angle of 12 degrees from the vertical. This angle had increased to fifteen degrees when John Aubrey visited Stonehenge some forty years later.
Stone 56 continued to fall over the next 240 years and has been photographed and painted many times, becoming one of the great icons of Stonehenge.
This is its story, the story of the Great Leaning Stone of Stonehenge, and why so many things rely upon pinpointing the exact date it was disturbed. It is essential to know this date because Professor Atkinson claimed he could see it leaning the wrong way in a watercolour painted fifty-two years before the duke felled it: Atkinson, Stonehenge, page 27.
So, in one fell swoop, Atkinson discredited both the first painting to be made of Stonehenge and the good word of John Aubrey. To make matters even worse, some well-known authors have adopted Atkinson’s opinion in a follow-my-leader fashion.
The painting that has been brought into question was made by an art teacher, Lucas de Heere, who drew Stonehenge from an impossibly high vantage point. This was a popular method at the time.
This section is therefore devoted to proving that the stone, shown to be leaning in the Lucas de Heere watercolour, could not possibly be Stone 56.
Let us record from the outset that John Aubrey said that the Duke of Buckingham felled the Great Trilithon, of which Stone 56 was a member, in 1620, but many have and still do refuse to take Aubrey's word for it, so we will have to look elsewhere for the proof.
When Lt. Col. William Gowland reset Stone 56 upright in 1901, he passed down four recorded angles that plot its slow fall over many years in his journal. These are Gowland’s figures, and my remarks are added to them.
Year 1660: Angle 75 degrees. – John Aubrey visited Stonehenge. Stone 56 then fell a further five degrees up to –
Year 1720: Angle 70degrees – William Stukeley visited Stonehenge. Over the next 150 years, it fell a further four degrees but slowed after contacting Bluestone 68, which supported it.
Year 1870: Angle 66 degrees. It fell another 5.5 degrees in the final 31 years.
The year 1901: Angle 60.5 degrees – restored to the vertical and cemented securely in place.
Imagine how you would feel if you were told that a hole had been dug before a standing stone, yet the stone next to it had collapsed. This dilemma faced John Aubrey in 1660 when discussing Stone 56 with the landowner, Mrs Trotman. Faithful and honest as always, if just a little naïve, John marked the position of this hole on his plan view of Stonehenge as Pi, and he marked the position of the stone as an X and a Zeta. However, he didn’t seem quite able to shake the image of its recumbent fiend, Stone 55, from his mind and seemed unable to differentiate between them. Poor John also seems to have struggled with which hole went where; the duke had dug so many.
We can only sympathise with John Aubrey: Stonehenge will not give up its secrets easily.
It is clear to me, however, that the “Great Stone, 21 feet long, now lying recumbent, and out of the ground” is 56’s fallen partner number 55, the 21-foot dimension being measured from, but not including its clubfoot, Aubrey realising this part to have once been buried below the ground.
Using a piece of string, this 21-foot dimension of Stone 55 was checked and found to be correct. It gave some puzzled hippies sitting on top of it a few laughs when my friend Clive asked if they would kindly move out of the way!
When Lt Col Willian Gowland reset 56 upright in 1901, he excavated around the base of the stone carefully stage by stage, finding it to be poorly filled with a weak chalk mix known to dissolve over time. This soil also showed considerable settlement. The colonel also found a disturbance in it that went down to about three feet deep and might have taken a guess at the original size of this hole but doesn’t seem to have done so.
The hole dug for this stone was part of an earlier setting and was so large that it accommodated both Stone 56 and Bluestone 68, some six to eight feet in front of it.
The graph is drawn partly from the truth and partly from conjecture to show that the Duke of Buckingham’s men felled the Great Trilithon one day in 1620, exactly when John Aubrey said he did.
********
If you run for a bus and bump into an old lady waiting at the bus stop, she will slow you down considerably. A similar situation occurred when trilithon stone number 56 came up against bluestone 68 in front of it. The graph shows that these two stones made contact sometime around 1720 when Dr William Stukeley surveyed Stonehenge.
Because the behaviour of Stone 56 changed considerably after contacting Bluestone 68, we have two different events on the same graph. And since we are trying to discover the year in which 56 first fell, the second event must be considered non-relevant. This leaves only two recorded measurements on which to base our results: that taken in 1660 and again in 1720.
The graph shows that while falling on its own, the “Great Leaning Stone 56” increased its angle by five degrees over 60 years between 1660 and 1720. This part of the graph allows us to work backwards to show the stone was vertical in 1480. However, this doesn’t allow for the amount it fell on the first day. And if more records had been kept of its rate of fall, the graph would have appeared not as a straight line but as a parabola. So, because the rate of fall would have increased as its angle increased, I have attempted to show this as a red curve.
This curve passed through a zero rate-of-slope around the year 1570, and this is the point at which the stone was vertical – or, to put it another way – it was stable. A stable stone doesn’t fall, and this again tells us that it was felled even later.
Conclusion.
The straight green line shows that Stone 56 was felled after 1480, and the curved red line after 1570. But without an increase in the slope of the red line at this point, it must have been felled even later than this. The graph shows us that it most likely fell around 1620, exactly when John Aubrey said it did.
I hope that you are happy now, John.
I don’t think that Col Gowland was too interested to discover the date at which the great trilithon fell because he was too busy dealing with the problem of raising Stone 56 back to the vertical, and in this, he was clearly a very proud man. But he did consider the issue. Apart from noticing that the most damaging effects of the duke's digging had been conducted beneath its partner, his only opinion was that he found nothing to doubt Aubrey’s word. The Col was more interested in trying to prove that the stones of Stonehenge were erected in the Bronze Age and was successful in his quest when discovering the green stain of corroded copper at the base of one of the stones.
But now that we know that John Aubrey was telling the truth, we can begin to believe in the Lucas de Heere painting again. The fall date of the fifth trilithon is unknown, but it was down when Aubrey visited in 1660. This trilithon fell before records began and was down when De Heere visited to paint Stonehenge in 1568. How else would he have known that trilithon uprights have only one tenon if their lintels were all in place?
When Trilithon Five collapsed, its component Stone 60 was left standing even today, its lintel wholly exposed. Its companion, Stone 59, lies completely prone and flat on the ground, the lintel which once crowned the top of Trilithon 5 lies smashed into two or three separate pieces that John called “frustrums.”
We have learned from the fall of the Great Trilithon that deeply embedded stones don’t always fall at once, so perhaps it was Trilithon Stone 59 that was leaning when Lucas de Heere arrived at Stonehenge to paint it.
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