Autumn Equinox Sunrise at Waun Mawn standing stone

Just returned from a successful observation of the equinox sunrise taken from the sole remaining standing stone at Waun Mawn.

The time of the equinox astronomically was only an hour away from the sunrise, so this is the closest exactitude one could ever hopefully wish for, and as you can see, it affirms everything I’ve been proposing with regards this site’s most likely function.

This is the site in the Preseli Hills, where a prototype Stonehenge circle has recently been proposed, later transported to make the original outer ring of bluestones, at Stonehenge. See my discussion here.

Primer for PLATONIC THINKING

Any attempt to ‘explain’ Plato will inevitably expose the cultural bifurcation caused by the split between what the modern world calls spirit and matter, that fundamental polarity that has lain deep and uneasily in human consciousness and whose duality has been fully played out during our Age of Pisces. From Classical Greece onwards, spirit and matter have been adversaries within a historical creation story, and mankind’s allotment has been to face and deal with this dual dragon, having the fiery breath of fundamentalist polarity, and has most recently chosen matter as its friend and abandoned spirit as superstitious.

Plato’s works are of crucial importance in describing a cosmology which offers humankind the chance to believe in and even interact with higher intelligences. In The Sleepwalkers, the materialist Arthur Koestler is not keen on Plato. He attacks him and Platonists in general for their non-scientific and passive view of the world, which he claims held back the ancient world even though those Greek empiricists appear to have kick-started both the scientific process and logical methodology remarkably well from the sixth to the fourth century BC.

Meanwhile, Richard Tarnas, in The Passion of the Western Mind, unlike Koestler, has read and understood his astrology and his metaphysics, is pro-Plato and places him as a philosopher who saw this possibility of building of a relationship with Higher Intelligence and that scientific experimentation is not the sole way forward if one wishes to understand the workings of the Cosmos.

To Plato, it hardly mattered if one improved one’s lot by understanding how a lever worked or what made an elephant able to stand up. What mattered was that one understood that all things ‘under the Moon’ belonged to the sublunary world representing the imperfect mortal world, a distortion or false picture of the cosmic perfection of Divine Mind. Man’s task was ultimately to be able to understand, even reflect back, that perfect Form, the creative Idea that lay behind mortal experience of the senses – the Form.

The Idea precedes the Form.

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Royal Sacred Landscape Geometry

Getting Wise about the Royal Mile

Preface

It was a big shock for me to discover that the three capital cities of the UK mainland, London, Edinburgh and Cardiff define the corners of a huge right angled triangle. In each case, the corner of the triangle is accurately close to the Royal palace and/or  Castles of those places.

The three capitals that define the United Kingdom, with the exception of Northern Ireland, define a 5-12-13 triangle, with Cardiff’s Castle mound defining the right angle.

This is no ordinary triangle, for its side lengths fall into the ratios of five to twelve to thirteen, this shape familiar to geometers and termed the second Pythagorean (right-angled) triangle, or simply, “a 5:12:13”. It is no accidental or coincidental triangle either, having its roots, as a symbol of life on earth, going well back into prehistoric times.

introduction

The continuing media news story concerns itself with the late Queen’s recent passing and the decision to transport Her Majesty’s coffin from Balmoral to Edinburgh, in order that the coffin can lie in state in St Giles’ Cathedral, on the Royal Mile, and thence to Buckingham Palace and finally Westminster Palace prior to  internment at Windsor on Monday 22nd October 2022.  There has been no explanation or understanding of the greater significance of all of this action, although one BBC correspondent was heard to say “Edinburgh Castle is a mile or so from Holyrood Palace, along the Royal Mile”.

These two Royal monuments are not ‘about a mile or so apart‘ at all. This  display of metrological ignorance stems from the regrettable fact that most moderns have never been told or have thought unimportant something that is very important about our legacy from ancient times. In a country that is perhaps obsessed with its historical roots, we appear to have lost akmost all contact with some of the more relevant sources of own remarkable origins. Interested.. Read on!

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Legal Success for Stonehenge Alliance is great news, but…

The recent legal halting to the original plans for a tunnel to cut under the Stonehenge landscape may have slowed down one process of degrading the archaeological value of the monument’s extensive landscape, but it’s a temporary pause, and plans are again back underway.

This massive road works within the landscape of Stonehenge is not the only degradation threat that is going on at England’s ‘National Temple’. In this post I want to point out another threat to our understanding of this monument, one which increasingly restricts the future interpretation of the design of the monument, what it was for, and what it represented.

Drayton’s poem, Polyolbion, concerns the fate of those who located and placed the stones at Stonehenge, and well sums up the subject of this article,

“Ill did those mighty men to trust thee with their story;  Thou hast forgot their names who reared thee for their glory.”

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The Original Bluestone Circle, yes or no?

Waun Mawn – is this the site of the Original Bluestone Circle?

a) How to find the site

The Waun Mawn sites are accessed from the B4229 Eglwyswrw to Haverfordwest road, along a gated farm track by the cattle grid at Tafarn y Bwlch ( Lat 51*58′; Long 4* 47′). During the recent Documentary The Lost Circle Revealed, shown on February 12th we saw evidence that supports the old folk legend that an original bluestone stone circle was once taken from the Preseli Hills of West Wales to Stonehenge. I would like to suggest some comments that may be useful in assessing this evidence and clearing up some unfortunate confusions that appear to have been made in the presentation of the material.

During the week following the documentary I  received and answered over 90 emails , and one of the main issues raised by these correspondences was a confusion as to just which of the involved stones formed the Waun Mawn referred to during the documentary. The OS map shows three separate areas where standing stones are marked. Below, I have included photographs of all three sites. The OS Map allocates this ‘title’ to the higher reaches of the prominent hill Cnwc y Hydd, yet there are extensive peat bogs down to the lower levels, and mawn means ‘peat’ in Welsh.

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The Recent Passing of Dr Euan MacKie

The recent passing of Dr Euan MacKie, together with the earlier passing (in April) of Dr Aubrey Burl,  and that of professor Keith Critchlow, brings to an end those stalwarts who were part of the surge of interest, during the 1960s and 70s, in archaeoastronomy, earth mysteries and a general quest to connect to our ancestors, to better understand the ancient world so as to include the new data that was pouring in from the work of those three professors, Gerald Hawkins, Alexander Thom, Fred Hoyle and those such as John Michell, whose lot it was to become part of, if not found, an alternative way of exploring  our ancient and prehistoric past, often tabbed  ‘the lunatic fringe’  within archaeological circles.

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Durrington Walls Pit Ring – Part Two

Part Two: Redefining the Stonehenge Landscape

Durrington Walls Pit Ring is by far the largest known example of a megalithic egg, when compared with other existing types of ‘egg’, such as Woodhenge (Type II, Thom, 1967), just south of Durrington;  Allen Water, near Hawick,(Type I, Thom, 1967 ); and Castell Mawr henge in Pembrokeshire (Type III, Heath, 1916), adjacent to the ‘bluestone’ outcrops of Preseli, in West Wales. Other surviving examples of ‘Type III’ eggs, which have semi-elliptical ‘blunt’ ends, include Hirnant cairn circle in Montgomeryshire (Type III Hoyle, 1977), and Glasserton Mains rock art, on the Machan peninsula, Dumfries and Galloway (Morris and Bailey, 1967).

In Part One, the map of the pits around Durrington Walls was shown to clearly define the known geometry of a circular ended Type II egg, based on the locations of the many pits that make up the ‘pit ring’ discovery at Durrington. This geometry was compared with that of Castell Mawr.

Part Two shifts the focus to a metrological analysis of the shape of this pit ring, exploring its apparent properties and the relationship between Stonehenge and Durrington Walls pit ring ,  whose centre is located at a distance of just under 2 miles to the north-east of Stonehenge.

A New Circle around Stonehenge.

Stonehenge displays some similar qualities to the pit ring in that both monuments have identifiable centres and both have connections with megalithic constructions beyond their enclosing ‘walls’or ditch and bank, which extend out into the wider landscape. My earlier posts on Woodhenge provide a good example of such an extension to Stonehenge. Both monuments are also redolent with geometrical and metrological information, the kind of evidence that I routinely work with.

The investigation here identifies and quantifies these similarities, and  concludes by identifying a possible further large circle, concentric to, but set well beyond the present boundaries of Stonehenge’s bluestone, sarsen and Aubrey circles, and analysis will suggest a highly significant underlying purpose for such a circle’s existence. 

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Exploring Durrington Walls Pit Ring

Part One:  Joining up the Dots

For pandemic reasons, the 2020 summer solstice sunrise gathering at Stonehenge was cancelled . The awesome sight of the rising sun over the Heel stone in line with the monument’s axis and the ‘avenue’ was replaced by an important discovery: A  huge ring of very deep and very wide pits had been discovered in the chalky subsoil around Durrington Walls, just two miles northeast of Stonehenge and a little north of Woodhenge.

The discovery of these pits is of great significance, and came in the form of a report of an on-going investigation report, the result of years of work by large team of archaeologists from many universities, and other specialists.

Due to the site’s proximity to Stonehenge – which is just under three miles to the southwest of Durrington Walls, the PR guys clearly thought it a good time to announce the launch at the summer solstice. The Guardian clearly thought so, coming on strong with this catchy title,

” Vast neolithic circle of deep shafts found near Stonehenge : prehistoric structure spanning 1.2 miles in diameter is masterpiece of engineering, say archaeologists.”

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