Giving back to the earth ceremony. Avebury 2002

‘THEY’ don’t know what Stonehenge was.

The word ‘they’ in a context such as the above, is used to refer to almost anyone with a university education, but especially to professors of archaeology. Laughably, ‘THEY’ is another word for expert!

But a chance meeting in a pub with a young lady, who claims to be pagan, seems to prove that pagans know more about Stonehenge than the ‘THEY’ do.

She was asked, not by me, about a tattoo on the top of her arm. “Why would you want a tattoo on your shoulder”, was the remark.

“Because I like it” was the reply.

So I asked her “what is it supposed to be”?

“It’s a picture of the moon, she said, because the moon is female”

But dear reader, you and I know very well that most people today refer to the moon, and its obvious face, as being ‘The man in the moon’, and have done for many years past.

So I asked this young lady “do you not believe in the man in the moon”? Actually I was only teasing, and simply searching her out - because I knew she was right.

“That’s rubbish, she said, the moon sometimes turns red, and she has monthlies, the same as I do” - meaning her.

I was impressed by this young ladies knowledge, and wondered what else she knew.

I asked “What is that in the middle of the tattoo”

“That is the sun, came the reply, and he is male”.

The next question I put to her was pretty obvious, really - “If the moon is female and the sun is male, what do you think would happen if they ever came to together”?

Rapidly came a reply, “but they never do come together” she said.

Now some might call it rationale--or thinking outside of the box, for the obvious next step would be to find some way of bringing them together to make the moon pregnant.

Well, so far, she didn’t seem particularly impressed or interested in what I had to say, but my next statement finally stirred her into action.

“What if I told you that people of the stone age were ambitious enough to believe that they could bring the sun and moon together”?

She rose out of her seat, came over and whispered in my ear...“we meet in a pub--which will remain nameless--every second Tuesday of the month--come along, you will enjoy it, and you might learn something.

I can’t wait.

Footnote:

The ‘THEY’ were told seven years ago what Stonehenge was, AND where the proof came from. I have told the ‘THEY’ many times since. I doubt if even one ‘THEY’ doesn’t know by now that Stonehenge was mankind’s attempt to build a baby sun. Its time ‘THEY’ owned up to knowing it!

Somerset Levels

My attempts to find the bluestone route produced these photos taken of the River Brue; I think it was. Photo’s taken in the year 2002.

 

Glastonbury Tor can be seen in this one.

There are lots of rivers and drains covering the Somerset Levels; it's going to take a lot more than a little dredging to put it right!

Further work to refine the geometry and form of the stone setting that once surrounded Avebury’s Cove, has proved to be based on Professor Thom’s egg-shaped circle type 2, seen in 'Megalithic sites in Britain,' by A Thom1967, page 29. The sides of the pair of triangles, from which the geometry was generated, measures 24, 32, and 40 megalithic yards—an eight times 3, 4, 5 triangle.

 

Centred on the inner side of the easternmost stone of the Cove that I have always claimed to be male, this egg was based on the simplest of all Pythagorean triangles. Professor Thom found no less than 10 of them, so no wonder this type of egg was emulated throughout the land! This one makes eleven. I now find its alignment slightly more anticlockwise than previously stated, and perhaps by as much as 1.5 degrees. Well, no one said resolving it was going to be easy!

Same Cherwell Hill: different moon.

I made a mistake with todays Avebury entry - Sorry. The egg that surrounds Avebury’s Cove is aligned on the equinox.  Different alignment and time, yes, but the equinox is when the moon slithers down the northern slope of Cherhill when seen from the Cove, not the minor moon as stated.

Avebury’s egg must surely have been the motivator that caused the Stonehenger’s to copy and align the Stonehenge Great Cursus on the equinox too.

AVEBURY’S EGG.

Elsewhere on this blog can be found an analytical plan view of Windmill Hill, showing how two of its axes are aligned on Cherhill Hill to track the sun as he approaches the winter solstice, and also to observe the moon as she comes up to her minor standstill.
      Avebury’s Cove is aligned midway between the summer solstice of the sun and the major standstill of the moon. That we know. What is little known is that Avebury’s Cove stands inside a setting of stones that take the shape of an egg. Clearly sticking to the traditions started on Windmill Hill, the builders also aligned Avebury’s “egg” on Cherhill Hill.
       Recent geophysical surveys and parchmark evidence have confirmed that the setting of standing stones here (the northern inner circle) is far from circular, enclosing what can best be described as an ‘egg’ shape with its long axis aligned north-east-south west (Ucko et al. 1991, 221 Bewley et al, 1996) in AVEBURY: Gillings & Pollard.2004.
        I make Avebury’s egg azimuth to be 269-degrees; so if some of the present day buildings were removed, we would be able to see the minor moon as she goes to ground sliding down the northern side of Cherhill Hill.

 

Avebury’s geometry presented here is an amalgam of Professor Thom’s survey co-ordinates combined with the stone positions produced by the Ordinance Survey.
      All measurements are in megalithic yards. (= 0.8297m) Also, I make the Southern Circle 126 My diameter, not the oft-published 125.

Silbury Hill: the Hill that stole Stonehenge’s Crown.

Tony Robinson..... All that anyone has ever found inside it is earth. Me: Not true. It’s true to say that people did bring soil from far-away places and built a small mound which became its core, but Silbury is mainly chalk. That is why, when the many exploratory tunnels recently threatened its collapse, chalk was used to stuff and seal it--And for good too, if archaeologists have their way. Don't want anyone prying!

Tony Robinson: But there isn’t any water here, is there? ....Da!

Me.... you should have seen it before it was built, Tony, for this mound hides two of the biggest moat-like ditches that flooded on a regular basis, and both were as large and as deep as to put Stonehenge’s ditch to utter shame.

The source of the river Kennet lies near the village of Winterbourne Basset, and is several miles to the north of Silbury hill. The northern section of the Kennet, or Winterbourne as some prefer to call it, flooded the plain around Silbury in 2001-- I think it was-- Not the Swallow-Head Spring, because that lies further downstream. So, for Jim Leary to claim the Swallow Spring as the source of the Kennet is totally wrong, it merely contributes to it, as does another spring a few hundred yards further along.

 

According to jimmy boy, Silbury was built as a way of worshiping the Swallow-Head Spring. What tosh!

Me.....That must be why Silbury was given nine triangular sides!

 

 

This is what I wrote in my book “Stonehengeology: Prehistoric Wiltshire Unravelled” 2012.

Where did Stonehenge’s missing stones go?

Thanks to Dr William Stukeley, we know how Avebury’s stones were destroyed. Some were destroyed in the Middle Ages by puritanical Christians’ who regarded the stones as pagan. Pits were dug alongside and the stones cast in and covered over. One poor fellow, a barber-surgeon, it is said, stood beneath a stone when it fell. His body was not recovered until Stone 9 of Avebury’s outer ring was reset by Alexander Keiller, the Scottish marmalade millionaire who owned Avebury in 1938.

The destruction continued into the seventeenth century by residents who built a church; St James; and a chapel from them. They also built houses and walls, and farmers used them when constructing their barns. Being harder than granite saved many of them from being smashed, and that is why several have survived. Another method of destruction was to topple them into a fiery pit of hay and straw, and when thoroughly heated, doused with cold water to shock and fracture, when mallets and sledge-hammers completed the job.

However, none of these methods of destruction has ever been found at Stonehenge - save perhaps for the Slaughter Stone. Indeed, it would seem that the only people capable of dismantling Stonehenge in the way that it was dismantled are the people who built it in the first place! But why would they destroy something as magnificent as Stonehenge unless it was perceived to be a failure, and had found something better? Silbury Hill-- the mound that grew and grew.

Stonehenge was for a long time regarded by archaeologists as the ‘flagship’ to the many stone circles, possibly 1,000 of them or more that were built while the fashion lasted. This no longer holds true. The real flagship that took the mantle from Stonehenge is the massive 130 foot high man-made geometric mound built near Avebury.

We know that Silbury contains many sarsens spread throughout its structure, enough of them to convince me that many of Stonehenge’s stones were returned from whence they came, and for that very purpose. We also know that sarsen stones were mixed in with the chalk revetment at the top (meaning a late date) and throughout the whole of the mound.

Sarsens were seeded right through Silbury’s primary mound like raisins in a cake - Magnus Magnusson.

One sarsen stone from the summit even appears to have been knapped into a rough sub-oval shape before being lightly pecked and ground, as if making a quernstone, and then, quite deliberately, split by a single blow. The Story of Silbury Hill. By Jim Leary and David Field of English Heritage.

I don’t suppose that everyone agreed to the deliberate destruction of Stonehenge and put up considerable resistance. I can well believe that some tried rebuilding Stonehenge as fast as it was being destroyed. Is that why Stone 10 of the sarsen circle is misplaced, and 11 is only half size? And is that why a beaker man was murdered and placed in the West Kennet long barrow before it was sealed up for good?

And was Stonehenge ever finished? Unless archaeologists excavate the remainder of its outer circle, or part of it, and in a truthful way, we might never know!

Professor Atkinson found a piece of Stonehenge bluestone on Silbury’s summit when excavating there in 1970. Somehow along the way, this piece of Welsh bluestone, known as ‘spotted dolerite,’ was allowed to become lost. This loss caused much debate and archaeological scepticism. Many said it wasn’t bluestone; others said that Atkinson did not find it in a secure context anyway. Others said it proved the bluestones to have been transported from South Wales to Wiltshire - formally the Kingdom of Wessex - by glacial action.

Atkinson’s bluestone has since been found hiding away in the Alexander Keiller museum at Avebury. A further three pieces were found on Silbury’s summit by the archaeologist Jim Leary during rescue operations to prevent further collapse of Silbury’s many tunnels. These three pieces were found to be part of the same block as that found by Atkinson.

Wake Up Folks, Archaeologists Are Lying.

Woodhenge: a monument consisting of some 160 tree-trunks that Stone Age people built near Stonehenge.

Professor Alexander Thom called Woodhenge an Egg. A GPS survey made in 2008 proved that egg to point at the Moon. What do you think you would get if that egg were to hatch out?