Stonehenge Simplified Pt2

Fig SS5: Fifty-six pits set in a circle around the inside of the bank are thought to have once held Welsh bluestones that became earmarked for a different purpose and were therefore eventually removed. For now, though, let’s introduce just two of them - pits 56 and 28. The probable bluestones that once stood in them helped retain the solstice sun clockwise and clear of the moon-arc as shown.

 

Fig SS6: Here is the real thing as found by partial excavation. Completing the full 56 Aubrey hole-positions shows Stonehenge as it originally was; and how it remained for the first 500 years of its life.

Mike Pitts, current editor of British Archaeology Magazine wrote: 56 is a number that represents the moon. We will find out why, later.

 

 That should have been it, Stonehenge completed, but it clearly wasn’t: for if the simple intention was to bring the sun and moon together, it was, as a sort of folly, clearly doomed to failure. So, after 500 static years when little of importance took place, some massive sarsen stones were collected from the downs near Avebury to be set up in the very centre of the earthwork.

Fig SS7: Stonehenge 2500 BC and a change of heart. The stone circle erected in the centre of the earthen bank and ditch. It’s convenient at this point to imagine the sarsen circle as if it stood alone, to demonstrate that there would be nothing to stop solstice sunlight passing right through and out the back!

FIG SS8: So to prevent this, the Grand Trilithon was offset by half-a-megalithic-yard so that Stone 55 of the trilithon could block the sun’s progress and prevent it from leaving.

Preventing sunlight from escaping in this way forced it to bounce around Stonehenge’s flattened and polished internal walls like a modern-day laser. But in order to believe this to be proven fact, we will need to gather some extra proofs of what others were doing elsewhere at the time, and even many years before. All these proofs will be given to you later.

 

Fig SS9: Avebury’s Cove. This is how we know for certain that people of around 3000BC had used stones to reflect sunlight onto the moon. People shown here are identifying the ‘Backstone’ by standing alongside it in this picture, but the reflective surface that faces the solstice and the major standstill of the moon is on the other side.

Fig SS10: with camera positioned parallel to the right-hand stone and ‘normal’ to the ‘Backstone’ proves the solstice sun to fall 5-degrees short of the Cove that is set in the middle of Avebury’s northern circle of stones, a circle that Dr William Stukeley called a “Lunar Temple.”

However, the moon travels 10-degrees further north than the sun and her rising is helpfully marked by the druid who demonstrates where the moon will appear every 18.6-years, given good weather.

Fig SS11: And this is how the Cove worked. Many Years before Stonehenge was built, Avebury folk set the Backstone of the Cove exactly midway between the solstice and the major standstill in an attempt to catch the attention of the moon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig SS12: let’s return to Stonehenge. The sarsen and bluestone structure built in the middle of the henge earthwork shows several stones acting as possible impedances to the passage of the summer solstice sun.

 

Fig SS13: And this picture places the stone circle in the middle of the henge where it belongs.

There is much that can be said about the above image, but to do so would be to miss the big picture: for it was at about this time, around 2500BC that Stonehenge was connected to a massive parent henge some 500 metres in diameter, and known as Durrington Walls, by two Avenues and a river.