New Views over Megalithia

[PeterC]

Do excuse my absence…

“I didn't realise Merrivale is slap bang on the road that runs straight through the middle of this megalithic zone, next to the main burg. Why the hell else to site it there if it isn't the man distribution centre?”

I don’t have a problem with it being a distribution centre but not for stone. I think my main problem is the idea of it being a megalith distribution centre on Dartmoor; why travel any distance to get your stone if you could just get one off the ground at your feet. Dartmoor is littered with granite, anyone clearing a site to put their new megalithic monument would have to move several hundred Merrivale size stones before beginning construction. Would you then lug a load of heavy stones from Merrivale to set up your site? Unless Merrivale stones are ‘special’ stones…….hmm. Maybe for non local megalithics who wanted the ‘Dartmoor look’ for their own non -Dartmoor site and we’re passing through?

Are the stones at Carnac/Merrivale placed upright so you can see how it would look in its final location, like a showroom?

Ps. I like the Stonehenge roof idea

[Mick Harper]

Dartmoor is littered with granite, anyone clearing a site to put their new megalithic monument would have to move several hundred Merrivale size stones before beginning construction.

Coupla points. Is this really true? I don't know what sized megaliths we're talking about (my head is rather full of the ones featured on This is Spinal Tap) but I wouldn't have thought Merrivale-sized ones would be very abundant. But more generally we had envisaged Merrivale as serving a wider area, just as Carnac does with an even wider one. But then there would be no reason to be in the centre of Dartmoor. I suppose you could argue that 'dressing' the stone would be a specialised function but this seems a bit lame. Cheaper to send the dressers.

Also the uprightness is a problem. Ooh, you are full of it. The showrom aspect would be served by having a single 'show-stone' so, yes, we need a good reason. Which I haven't got. Why don't you absent yourself a bit longer next time?

[hvered]

I assumed Merrivale, being sited on the main crossing point of Dartmoor and accessible from the Ridgeway, the longest trading/droving route, was a distribution centre for tin. Granite mined at Merrivale may have been another commodity, the mine being so convenient to get to/from.

[Boreades]

Dartmoor has surfaced again.

The Stone Circle That Maps The Horizon (Dartmoor, UK)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC8BxosbMyw

With an entertaining but informative analogue of archeo layers in the landscape. By making a cake.

[Mick Harper]

The link works if you cut and paste the URL but not if you click on it. I will investigate if this at our end, we've been having some problems.

[Boreades]

My New Zealand cousin (Kiri Te Glen Borrydale) sends news of megaliths in the land of the long white cloud. It's the Kaimanawa Wall. Opinions about its origins are divided.

YouTube video says maybe man-made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTe8BZQ17ak

Ancient Origins hedges its bets
https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient ... land-00153

Wokepedia follows the orthodozy (natural rocks)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaimanawa_Range

As does this:
https://skeptics.nz/journal/issues/41/a ... anawa-wall

The orthodozy still includes the official line that the first people in New Zealand were the Maoris, c.1200AD. Even though some Maori elders still say they weren't the first, and there was an indigenous population that pre-dated the arrival of the Maoris.

What say TME?

[Boreades]

A newly-discovered henge at Crowland in Norfolk.

You can read more, after wading past the ritual hermits and the local abbey that got rich on the proceeds.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 24.2332853

[Boreades]

Spot the new assumptions and logical fallacies.

The six-tonne Altar Stone at the heart of Stonehenge came from the far north of Scotland rather than south-west Wales as previously thought, new analysis has found.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c207lqdn755o

[Mick Harper]

I couldn't. Could you spell it out?

[hvered]

The Megalithic Portal has a fuller report on the suspected Scottish origin of the Stonehenge Altar Stone though the scientists, assuming their conclusions are correct, admit to still being puzzled over the means of transport

This is a genuinely shocking result, but if plate tectonics and atomic physics are correct - and there is no indication they are not - then the Altar Stone is Scottish. What we don't know is how or why it travelled the length of Britain to its current location as a significant part of the Stonehenge monument.

In passing, the article makes an interesting observation about the make-up of Steep Holm, an island halfway between Birkbeck Island on the Bristol Channel at Weston-Super-Mare and Sully Island, a causewayed tidal island, at Swanbridge, South Wales.

The prevailing almost century old belief was that the Altar Stone and a companion sandstone now known as the Lower Palaeozoic Sandstone were collected from the shores of Milford Haven (the exact outcrop for the Lower Palaeozoic Sandstone on the shore-line was identified by Sir Kingsley Dunham the leading geologist of the day). They were said to have been shipped or rafted from there along the Severn Estuary to Somerset and then punted down rivers to Salisbury Plain, together with the Preseli bluestones. Claimed proofs of this route included dropped/lost bluestones found on Steep Holm and rumoured orthostats resting on the bottom of Milford Harbour.

In the two decades since, piece by piece, detailed petrographical and geochemical work has shown all this to be unlikely. The Steep Holm rocks are nothing like any rock associated with Stonehenge or even Salisbury Plain, they may even be ship’s ballast.

https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146415628

We noted elsewhere that Weston-Super-Mare is the western terminus, or start, of the coast-to-coast route connecting the English Channel to the Bristol Channel. The southern end of Weston Bay is overlooked by Breen Down and the northern end is marked by Worlebury 'hillfort' overlooking Birnbeck Island, formerly a causeway tidal island before the pier was built. Birnbeck Pier is the only pier that connects an island to the mainland.