Sunday, 2 February 2025

The Combined Viewshed of the Tor and Cuckoo Stones.

 The new paper on the Tor and Cuckoo Stone* posits that: "The intervisibility of the two stones is likely to have been an essential feature of their locations, near the boundaries of their respective overlapping viewsheds,... the DTM indicates that a transect drawn between the two stones  passes close to the apex of a meander in the River Avon at a point where it is approximately equidistant from each stone and potentially intervisible, both from and towards both stones.

The paper has shows their individual viewsheds but not them combined. Simply overlaying the two figures and tweaking the colours gives the combined viewshed. 


Click to enlarge - all rights remain with the original paper


The mustard colour shows where both stones would be visible from, I thought they might have acted as pillars visible either side from the route through the landscape but that doesn't seem to be. But the apex of the river meander could be important. More to ponder on.

*HARDING, P. et al. (2025) ‘Earliest Movement of Sarsen Into the Stonehenge Landscape: New Insights from Geochemical and Visibility Analysis of the Cuckoo Stone and Tor Stone’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, pp. 1–23. doi:10.1017/ppr.2024.13.

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