Happy Blogoversary - 8,000 Thanks

Sarsen.org is one year old!

One year old tomorrow morning! What started as my humble notepad for my own use mainly has had a great reception with over 8,000 hits in the year.

I started it because I was exploring the route that the Sarsens may have taken to Stonehenge from the Marlborough Downs. I'm very happy with my conclusions and put them together in a pamphlet. The Origin Of The Stonehenge Sarsens Leaflet. It is a conclusion that Mike Parker Pearson had also come to from other evidence as he revealed this year in his book "Stonehenge".

The most important post I think I have made is about the twisted Great Trilithin and how it aligns to the Midwinter Sunrise as well as the Midwinter Sunset, and also obviously the Midsummer opposites. So many people have looked at the stones and have searched for alignments but have missed it. I think I am the first to publish it. More at http://www.sarsen.org/2012/07/stonehenge-resurrection-alignment.html

There is still more to be written on this to bring it all together. So keep on reading.


And the post I am most pleased with was a quick doodle on Woodhenge. It suddenly struck me that all the neolithic trees in postholes we know about are upside down. OK it is only one tree we know about, the one at Seahenge, but what if it was more of them? Somehow it feels right.

There is more to come.

Many thanks for your support and comments.

FGH - The First Wife Stones

The three holes F,G and H are unacknowledged and unknown to most people.

But they are evenly spaced and useful in constructing alignments.
See http://www.sarsen.org/2012/07/stonehenge-resurrection-alignment.html - Station Stone 94 to G and Station Stone 93 to H are parallel and point to the midwinter sunrise.

Cleal provides the information but as to whether they were stoneholes, postholes or bush holes I will leave to you to judge. They are circled in the plan below.

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Woodhenge - Inverted Trees

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As far as I know the only extant neolithic posthole with a large wooden post still in it we have seen is that at Seahenge. The central posthole was surrounded by a timber fence that was also still there, as are other ones such as at Holme II.

And the main feature of this posthole was that the hole contained an inverted tree.

In an idle moment I wondered what Woodhenge would have looked like if it had consisted of a magical upside down tree copse. I rather like it or I think I would have liked it.

Now to find an Art Council Grant form to recreate it....

The Cove Stone Hare of Avebury

Sometime ago I was shown some pictures of "carvings" on some stones at Avebury - including a Hare on a Cove stone. The details are at http://www.sarsen.org/2012/05/carvings-on-cove-stones-of-avebury.html

And here is the Hare emerging out of a long gone garden in a 1957 book Wiltshire by Geoffrey Grigson

As it is now.

Rock Art at Stonehenge

The results from the Laser surface scan of the stones of Stonehenge should be released soon. A little bird toells me that they have found a lot of interesting marks!

This is on Stone 53, on the short side in the gap towards 54. Not a good picture but there are shapes which have been pecked out of the surface. Hopefully the Laser scan will give us a clearer picture of this and the other discoveries.

The Bush Barrow Lozenge Angle

It has been noted before that the Bush Barrow Lozenge has angles that approximate to the angle between the Summer Solstice Sun Rise and the Winter Solstice Sun Rise.

Stonehenge - The Resurrection Alignment

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Image created by Tim Daw from an original from Wikipedia. The image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This large plan of Stonehenge shows all the stoneholes / holes except the postholes. It also includes cremations except those found in the Aubrey Holes. As well as the unexcavated western side it is believed that cremation scrapes were missed by Hawley so it may be incomplete. (See Mike Parker Pearson - Stonehenge 2012 for example)

It highlights Stones 55 and 56 and the Altar Stone (AS) as well as the holes F,G and H.
The latter three are sometimes dismissed as root holes but were thought by the excavators to be stoneholes.

Stones 55 and 56 are skewed at an angle from the Summer Solstice sunrise line (yellow) The centre gap between them is on this line though. That this skewing is original is shown in previous posts - http://www.sarsen.org/2012/07/stone-56-proof-its-position-is-correct.html and http://www.sarsen.org/2012/06/original-position-of-stone-55.html

The rear or outer faces of 55 and 56 are the flattest of any of the sarsens and these worked surfaces would have aligned on the purple line - a line I have fancifully called the Resurrection Line.

This alignment is to the rising of the midwinter solstice sun - and the setting of the summer solstice sun.

Station Stone 93 and Hole H are also on this line.

(Station Stone 94 and Hole G also are approximately on the same alignment but as they are both missing it is harder to be certain.)

The Altar Stone also is similarly aligned, as are two post holes just to the north of it, but along with other features so aligned that is for further investigation.

This alignment has, as far as I can tell, been missed by all previous researchers because it has just been assumed that the Great Trilithon either is or should be symmetrical with the rest of the Trilithon Horseshoe. See below for Hawkins Plan where such an assumption is made.

But it wasn't. The original builders were cleverer than that and it incorporates two separate alignments into one Trilithon, both sunrises and both sunsets.

There is an argument that because the outer ring of Sarsens, especially stone 10, blocks the actual viewing along the alignment, then it cannot exist. Obviously the Great Trilithon was erected before the outer ring and it may follow the positioning of previous wooden posts.

But just as the Priest facing the Altar in a Christian church is facing the rising sun, even though he cannot see it, an alignment can be significant without being an astronomical sighting device.

And why the Resurrection Line? Our incomplete record of cremation remains seems to show a concentration at the end of the line. And completely without evidence I imagine on the morning after the winter solstice, when the sunset was noted with fear and dread that the sun was dying, the next morning the rising of the reborn sun was greeted with celebration and joy. And maybe hope that the dead would also rise again?


Notes:


Hawkins - Stonehenge Decoded Plan via Ancient Skies