Callanish: Navigation by Stone Circles?
Submitted by JR1 on Wednesday, 08 November 2006 Page Views: 6742
Neolithic and Bronze AgeCountry: Scotland County: Isle of Lewis Type: Stone CircleInternal Links:
Frozen bodies waited in anticipation, apart from Lawrence whose internal combustion kept him warm but unfortunately his shorts froze in a way that doesn't bear repeating!
The moon rose, excitement grew, but alas the cloud cover was too thick for the moon to show through, unfortunates that we were, all that way to be frozen half to death. A couple of psychics saw something, but most felt the site was inactive. But it was a hell of a thing to do in terms of Leyhunting, something me and my partner had wanted to do for decades and it could only be done once every 18 years as the moon takes that long to move through its cycle.
The seemingly erratic moon actually follows a very exact orbital pattern and can be relied on to show its face in the correct position throughout its cycle. Its movement plotted in an ephimerus and in that way you may work out the longitude of your current position. Longitude is that difficult measure concerning the ‘imaginary’ lines on the globe, used by sailors for centuries, that run from north to south pole like segments on an orange.
Combine this with Latitude you can find out where you are in the world. Without it your navigation is hit or miss - and usually miss. i.e. set a course for South America, get blown off course, lose all idea of where you are and then hit a reef and sink. In the 1770’s an English fleet lost a third of its number by shipwreck due to errant navigation.
However if you can work out your long and lat to an accurate degree you can arrive at a point within a mile of where you actually wanted to be. Very very clever and a damn site safer. In fact the moon is the sailors’ saviour.
After such an enlightening experience we plotted our way home. The next night was the Lunar Standstill part 2 but no-one wanted to go . However 2 people who shall remain nameless tried to wake everyone up at 2am saying the cloud has gone and a few of us got up, trudged out in even deeper snow (well only 4 inches but it was very cold) and we mini-bussed off to Callanish again. I was being held under threat of excommunication if I didn’t come!
There we were waiting for the moonrise at god knows what time or what god, and guess what, the clouds descended again and the moon was invisible as it moved over the "goddess hill" at the back of Callanish. To our half frozen suprise several of us who were watching the moonrise in our imaginations, saw lights along a path crossing the southern edge of the circle near to the mound.
The sighting was probably different for each of us, but for me it was like a series of coloured lanterns along the crossing path. I went to check it out but then couldn’t see a thing. Something strange happened, whether mass hallucination or the circle waking up to start the next 18 year cycle?
'A lamp to light the way' keyed me back into the problem of navigation and then it was solved. I think I might have an answer to why the stone circles were constructed.
Without Latitude and Longitude, navigation by star and compass are at best hit and miss especially at sea. Without Latitude and Longitude it is almost impossible to know where you are in the world and how to find your way accurately to another location hundreds of miles away, especially by sea which was the quickest way of travelling with a large load or a cargo.
In order to work out positions of sun, stars and moon risings in a clear & precise manner you have to triangulate your positions i.e. at least 3 circles, probably lots more as they learnt to calculate the positions.
The primary importance of stone circles and the original purpose behind their construction was navigation. In the Hebredies it is known that in ancient times the area had large trading fleets. Fast carriage of goods and perhaps the easy carriage of large loads with breakable goods, foodstuffs, passengers, horses and goods for barter with trading of up to 40 tonnes per shipment (a 70ft craft) would make navigation essential.
Yet this was back in 2,000 to 2500 BC, pushing back our ideas of trading between regions by millenia. But that is not all, in order to plot the stars, moon, and sun, the ideas behind plotting them would have had to have sprung into the conscious mind and then there must have been generations of of people painstakingly viewing these phenomena to arrive at the correct conclusions.
How long did it take to come across the idea of using stone circles (wood would rot in a generation at most) to make a permanent record of the path of the moon for generations to come. In the Callanish area there are countless stone circles some buried some half remaining and this shows that a huge amount of experimentation went on to get these readings right. To enable navigation around a continent and maybe, just maybe across the globe.
If I am right this theory would push back the concept of moon based Lat. & Long. Navigation by 3000 years past the build date of the early Callanish Stone Circles to a date previous to 2,500 B.C. The "Isles of the Mighty" deserved its name, just by being able to navigate properly accross the world.
Footnote:
I have been trying to work out the meaning of stone circles for 28 years and now feel I have discovered the founding principle to their building. The idea to build a stone circle would have to have been practical. People of that age were at the mercy of the elements and trading with others gave them essential goods and even perhaps luxuries. The concepts creating the building of stone circles had to be one of practical, sustainable reasoning.
John Rhodes.
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