<< Our Photo Pages >> Callanish 5 - Stone Row / Alignment in Scotland in Isle of Lewis
Submitted by Gerald_Ponting on Monday, 30 September 2002 Page Views: 11992
Neolithic and Bronze AgeSite Name: Callanish 5 Alternative Name: Airigh nam Bidearan; 'Tursachan'; Garynahine, Callanish VCountry: Scotland County: Isle of Lewis Type: Stone Row / Alignment
Nearest Town: Stornoway Nearest Village: Garynahine
Map Ref: NB23432990 Landranger Map Number: 8
Latitude: 58.171011N Longitude: 6.705301W
Condition:
| 5 | Perfect |
| 4 | Almost Perfect |
| 3 | Reasonable but with some damage |
| 2 | Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site |
| 1 | Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks |
| 0 | No data. |
| -1 | Completely destroyed |
| 5 | Superb |
| 4 | Good |
| 3 | Ordinary |
| 2 | Not Good |
| 1 | Awful |
| 0 | No data. |
| 5 | Can be driven to, probably with disabled access |
| 4 | Short walk on a footpath |
| 3 | Requiring a bit more of a walk |
| 2 | A long walk |
| 1 | In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find |
| 0 | No data. |
| 5 | co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates |
| 4 | co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map |
| 3 | co-ordinates scaled from a bad map |
| 2 | co-ordinates of the nearest village |
| 1 | co-ordinates of the nearest town |
| 0 | no data |
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SandyG visited on 2nd Sep 2014 - their rating: Cond: 3 Amb: 4 Access: 3 Road side car parking is available around SX 64338 59550. Walk along the road to NB 23092 30241 then take the track leading east up the hill. Shortly you will arrive at an old shieling which is worth having a look at. From the sheiling head in a south easterly direction across uneven rough pasture to the stone row.
markj99 visited on 3rd Jul 2011 - their rating: Cond: 3 Amb: 4 Access: 3 After a yomp over boggy moorland, it was somewhat underwhelming to find three short stones in a line. Maybe I have been spoilt by Cornish stone rows, up to half a mile long, but I struggled to appreciate the significance of Callenish V.
tom_bullock have visited here
Average ratings for this site from all visit loggers: Condition: 3 Ambience: 4 Access: 3
After visiting site IV, cross the road and walk up the slope to the sheep pens. Nearby there is a ruinou.s beehive house. Site VII is iust beyond the pens. From this point, one of the stones of site V can be seen, situated on the brown moorland and silhouetted on the horizon to the south-east. It is a wilk of about one-third of a mile, (Site VI is also visible from this point, but this stands on a green hillock.)
ALTERNATIVE NAMES : All authors, amazingly, agree about the name of this site. Thom introduced the name Callanish V. While most earlier works have used the spelling airidh, the alternative, airigh, is used here, as it is preferred by Gaelic enperts. Even the English translation of this word may not be familiar to some readers. An airigh or shieling was the summer pasture of the cattle, when they were taken into the moors away from the village and its crops. More particularly, the shieling was the stone dwelling used by the younger members of the family when they tended the cattle - a tradition much loved in Lewis folklore.
In most of the few plans and descriptions of site V which exist, only five stones are shown, none more than a metre high. It is not a spectacular site. Sharbau's plan shows more stones, A survey carried out by Margaret Ponting. Ron Curtis and myself confirmed the exlistence of Sharbau's entra stones, and found others. We suspect that there may be as many as thirty stones at the site.
With about 60 cm depth of peat covering most of the site, some quite sizeable stones have only their tips showing amongst the roots of the heather. Others may be totally buried. The true nature of site V will be discovered only bv major clearance of peat under supervision of archaeologists.
The alignment formed by the three largest stones is one of the most interesting in the Callanish Complex. Alexander Thorn first suggested that the row could have been use for accurate observation of the moonrise at the southern extreme of the major standstill. A group of young astronomers, John Cooke. Clive Ruggles, Roger Few and Guy Morgan, visited Callanish in 1975, to undertake a new survey of the various sites, from an astronomical viewpoint. Their results, published in a highly technical paper in 1977, considered 45 possible alignments at and between the Callanish sites. Of the 45 lines, only this alignment at site V accurately matched an astronomical event. (However, 19 sites give 342 possible inter-site lines. Margaret Ponting and I have shown that 220 of these are inter-visible, so could have been used for astronomical indication. The 45 lines picked by Cooke and friends were chosen on the basis, of criteria which seem to us to be fairly arbitrary. Their conclusion, that one significant line out of 45 studied could easily have been a chance occurrence, was fairly inevitable, given the method which they used.)
Both Thorn and Cooke-'s group published profiles of the distant horizon, as viewed from the row of three stones. Neither was accurate in that both omitted a nearby heathery slope, which obscured the moon for much of its path. This is the kind of accurate moon observatory which could have been used by prehistoric man in the prediction of eclipses.
Other alignments of smaller stones at this site may have indicated other lunar events. The most obvious is the moonrise at the northern extreme of the minor standstill (see map and smaller profile). There is an obvious horizon feature at 55 degrees 25". but it is too small to show on the much reduced profile. Other astronomical indications suggested by Thorn in 1967 are not supported by further study at the site.
Text taken from "The Stones around Callanish" by Gerald Ponting and Margaret Ponting (now Margaret Curtis). home.clara.net/gponting/.
Update October 2019: This stone row is featured on the Stone Rows of Great Britain website - see their entry for Callanish 5, which includes a description, photographs of the alignment and the individual stones, access information and links to other online resources for more information.
The row is also recorded as Canmore ID 4143.
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377m NW 319° Callanish 7* Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry (NB232302)
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2.9km NNW 338° Callanish 3* Stone Circle (NB2251532710)
3.0km NNW 332° Callanish 2* Stone Circle (NB2221432614)
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3.6km NNW 329° Callanish 19* Stone Circle (NB218331)
3.7km N 349° Callanish 10* Stone Circle (NB22973362)
3.8km NW 322° Callanish* Stone Circle (NB2129833013)
3.8km NW 321° Callanish I* Stone Circle (NB2128633009)
4.4km NNW 327° Callanish 16* Standing Stone (Menhir) (NB213338)
4.6km NNW 331° Callanish 13* Standing Stones (NB215341)
5.1km NNW 337° Olcote Kerbed Cairn* Cairn (NB2179634733)
5.4km NNW 336° Callanish 12* Standing Stone (Menhir) (NB2155634967)
5.9km NNW 344° Callanish 11* Standing Stone (Menhir) (NB22233569)
6.0km NNW 333° Cnoc a Phrionnsa* Chambered Cairn (NB211355)
7.3km NW 305° Callanish 15* Standing Stone (Menhir) (NB177345)
8.0km WNW 300° Dun Barraglom Broch or Nuraghe (NB16773435)
8.0km WNW 299° Barraglom Cup-Marked Rock Rock Art (NB167343)
8.0km WNW 297° Callanish 8A* Standing Stone (Menhir) (NB165340)
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