by Knight of Clear Skies » Tue Mar 23, 2021 10:26 am
There are about 1,300 surviving stone circles in the British isles, dating from about 3,300 BC onwards, along with
countless other megaliths. We know very little about how they were used but astronomical alignments are suspected, possibly they were used as calendars as well as ceremonial sites. Some stones may have been aligned to mark the rising or setting of bright stars at particular times of the year. In most cases precise alignments have been lost. Over time weather and animals using them as rubbing posts tends to topple the stones, most we see today have been re-erected sometime over the last couple hundred years.
One thing we can be certain of, the night sky would have played a prominent role in the lives of ancient people.
Here's the Milky Way above
the Hurlers on
Bodmin Moor, Cornwall. I must go back sometime and have a go at a timelapse.
With lockdown, I've been exploring the moors more and keep blundering into archaeological sites. Sometimes I only notice when I check my position on the google maps satellite view, some features are much easier to make out
from the air.
There are about 1,300 surviving stone circles in the British isles, dating from about 3,300 BC onwards, along with [url=https://www.megalithic.co.uk/asb_mapsquare.php?op=map&sq=SX&co=&condition=0&ambience=0&access=0&sitetype=0&order=m_stname&tl=1]countless other megaliths[/url]. We know very little about how they were used but astronomical alignments are suspected, possibly they were used as calendars as well as ceremonial sites. Some stones may have been aligned to mark the rising or setting of bright stars at particular times of the year. In most cases precise alignments have been lost. Over time weather and animals using them as rubbing posts tends to topple the stones, most we see today have been re-erected sometime over the last couple hundred years.
One thing we can be certain of, the night sky would have played a prominent role in the lives of ancient people.
Here's the Milky Way above [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hurlers_(stone_circles)]the Hurlers[/url] on [url=https://www.darksky.org/our-work/conservation/idsp/parks/bodminmoor/]Bodmin Moor[/url], Cornwall. I must go back sometime and have a go at a timelapse.
[img2]https://live.staticflickr.com/647/30826193824_9139e59c78.jpg[/img2]
With lockdown, I've been exploring the moors more and keep blundering into archaeological sites. Sometimes I only notice when I check my position on the google maps satellite view, some features are much easier to make out [url=https://goo.gl/maps/p2voS6fLMrX45n8c9]from the air[/url].