On 2010-12-06 11:53, davidmorgan wrote:
From Barney:

I'm new to this portal, and have joined to ask this question quite seriously. Stone has always fascinated me, and regular visits to cup & ring marked sites near Kilmartin, & megaliths etc in Brittany + local sites in Derbyshire have finally forced me to read up on the subjects.

Aubrey Burl notes that stone circles appeared with the celts and at the same time as farming developed (instead of mere hunter-gathering). Having recently downloaded a Celtic tree Calendar it occurred to me how important it would be to a neolithic farming community to know what time of year it was and when to plant different crops.

The celts didn't write stuff down, so they would have had to read the season by reading the path of the sun. Certainly the maritime climate in the British Isles can be very misleading - you'd have to have a reliable calendar. Interestingly certain modern day mystics (I'm not using this word pejoratively; I just mean I don't understand some of it) who use the Celtic Tree Calendar regard the position of the lunar cycle (& even the constellations - that's the bit I don't follow) as important to the success of germination & growth of different types of plants. It sounds a bit wacky, but it does seem to work for some people - & anyway, last week everyone would have laughed if you'd said that the relative length of your fingers affected you propensity to prostrate cancer.

Most stone circles are aligned to the sun. moon etc. Some have had their stones moved & realigned (perhaps they got it wrong the first time & had to correct things). This could also account for why there were (& quite amazingly still are -) so many small stone circles - local calendars. Considering how re-useable stone is, it is amazing that so many defunct & non-understood stone circles still survive after 3 - 4 thousand years. Originally the whole celtic ( perhaps I should say farming neolithic - celtic is shorter) world would (I believe) have been covered in wood or stone circles. Until the use of a written calendar was well established, the stone circles would still have been useful and have to be kept. The survivors are in hilly and more remote parts of the country, very roughly where bits of Celtic culture have survived.

The centre piece of the community in the early industrial age was the clock tower on the town hall - it kept the time (originally communicated across the settlement by chimes) to ensure everyone got to work on time so production would be maximised. The stone henge would have been the centre of the early celtic farming community, ensuring that everyone planted their crops at the optimum time so there would be plenty, & no need to fight over insufficient food supplies.

My thesis is naively un-academic, but could it be true?? Could the reason for the elevated position of the Druids be that they were the brotherhood that developed the understanding of reading the seasons from the position of sun (& probably moon & planets). This would have been immensely important to a people who died if their crops failed through being planted at the wrong time.

Barney