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Stone circles are intriguing Neolithic monuments that were
built over a period of approximately 2400 years, from around 3400BCE
to 1000BCE. They are widely distributed throughout England, Scotland,
Wales, Ireland and Brittany. There is also an intriguing, isolated example
at a place called Nabta in Egypt, which was built around 6500 years ago.
Study of these monuments is limited by the lack of any contemporary written
records and the damage both accidental and deliberate that many of the
circles have suffered. Damage has been caused by the passage of time;
people looking for free stone and deliberate vandalism often incited
by religious intolerance.
A point worth making at the outset is that stone circles
are often not circular. There are a variety of shapes including true
circles, ellipses, egg shapes and even a rectangle! The different shapes
are distributed throughout the period that the monuments were being built.
It is not clear why particular builders favoured one shape over the others.
Their general understanding of the techniques required to lay out the
comparatively large shapes suggests that they were all capable of building
any of the known shapes. Many of the circles, not all, have astronomical
alignments and are laid out with good accuracy. The accuracy is not as
amazingly high precision as is sometimes suggested, even if it had been
we would not be able to verify this given the ravages of time. It is
important to understand and value the achievements of the Neolithic circle
builders without clouding the issue by making unsupportable claims about
their precision.
This is an appropriate point to introduce an important
person in the investigation of stone circles, Alexander Thom 1894 to
1985. He accurately measured many circles and analysed the results, identifying
several basic types. His work is respected for its thoroughness and intellectual
rigour but his theories are still disputed by many researchers. The fact
that he was a professor of engineering at Oxford University from 1945
to 1961 adds weigh to his work though it is not proof that everything
he said was correct. One intriguing, and hotly disputed, idea that Thom
proposed was that circle builders used a standard unit of linear measurement
that he called a megalithic yard. This unit Thom calculated to be 2.72
feet or 0.83 metres. If the builders used a fixed unit of linear measurement
it poses interesting questions about how this unit was maintained over
a period of 2000 years in a culture that did not have a central government
or any form of written records. On second thoughts the lack of a central
government may have been an advantage!
One thing is certain the builders must have been well organised
at a local level because even the small circles would have taken a lot
of effort to build. This effort is all the more surprising when the short
average life span of the people of the time and the harsh conditions
that they had to endure are taken into account. Building the circles
must have been very important to them. It seems likely that the circles
were focal points for meetings and religious activity. Perhaps it is
as well to reflect on the fact that in many societies there was, and
in some cases still is no real distinction between every day activities
and religion. Burial sites and cremation pits are often found in the
area around the circles suggesting that the sites had sacred significance.
It is also possible that they had some territorial purpose, a way of
the tribe staking its claim on an area. All this is supposition as there
are no written records to explain the organisation and rituals of the
times; however, it is certainly reasonable to claim a high level of organisation,
skill and devotion for the members of the tribe. If you doubt this try
marking out a large circle in a field and mark the four cardinal compass
points without using any modern technology. This includes the magnetic
compass and your watch. I will excuse you the labour of using 1 tonne
blocks of stone to mark the points; they might be hard to find. This
exercise will give you a new perspective on the ‘backward’ tribes that
lived in the United Kingdom over 3000 years ago.
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