New Views over Megalithia

[Boreades]

Not far away is Nunthorpe named after a group of Cistercian nuns who had been evicted from Hutton Lowcross at Guisborough for 'rowdy behaviour'. The same thing happened at 'Thorpe' as it was known and they were evicted again to Baysdale which has Knights' Templar and Hospitaller connections.

We knew the monks at Fountains Abbey were a rough lot, but, gorblimey, the nuns were at it as well?

What was it about these Yorkshire Cistercians? Too early to blame it on Captain Boycott.

[Mick Harper]

Hi-tech scans of the South Downs landscape have revealed industrial-scale farming networks that could force archaeologists to rethink their view of Britain before the Romans arrived.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z4EZuOZxvY

Tissie's reference a few days back to the Daily Mail article entirely sums up what TME is all about. Basically it's to overthrow the 'Classical' paradigm and the consequent dismissal of the Iron Age in relation to (in this case) the Romans. It is perfectly clear from this pic that the Ancient Brits were highly structured without being (technically speaking) civilised. As Applied Epistemologists would put it "without writing there's no history, without history there's no historians, without historians there's 'nothing but archaeology'."

If you look at the map in the Daily Mail piece, gaze avidly at Portsmouth harbour(s) and remind yourself they ain't natural.

[Boreades]

We had the German Stonehenge.

Und now ve have ze German Woodhenge.

Pömmelte Kultstätte Timber Circle in Saxony-Anhalt. 115 Meter diameter woodhenge which was excavated by Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. The site dating to 2250 BCE was discovered in 1991 thanks to areal photography.

Not to be confused with:

A huge early Celtic calendar construction has been discovered in the royal tomb of Magdalenenberg, nearby Villingen-Schwenningen in Germany's Black Forest. This discovery was made by researchers at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum at Mainz in Germany when they evaluated old excavation plans. The order of the burials around the central royal tomb fits exactly with the sky constellations of the Northern hemisphere.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 074624.htm

Go dig.

[Boreades]

People who (say) dash down the M4 from London to Devon and Cornwall without stopping at Chateau Boreades and other places in Wiltshire are really missing a great deal. Present company excepted.

Just this weekend, I had the honour and privilege of explaining to a few more Megalithic Pilgrims wos 'appnin with all these places called Castles when there's no trace of a castle or even a poxy little hill fort. It inspired me to thoughts of updating the TME map of hilltop enclosures in Wiltshire. Then I discovered that someone has very kindly done the hard work already and produced a Google Map of them all. There are loads.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mi ... mzGFllus08

There are so many that it defies my usual explanation of "think of them as the megalithic-era equivalent of motorway service stations, on the trade routes"

I'm thinking of revising my patter to "think of them as the megalithic-era equivalent of out-of-town superstores and trading estates".

How does that grab the panel?

[Mick Harper]

There doesn't seem that many. Try a larger map and smaller circles. Actually that can be rather important since leylines were undermined when it turned out the thickness of a pencil line on an OS map was a material consideration. However, there does seem rather too many for truckstop purposes ie every ten? fifteen? miles along a droving route - unless droving routes were particularly thick on the ground which is perfectly possible in grassy Wiltshire.

The alternative -- that they are kraals -- would seem to make them too few but on the other hand we have to remember that the hill in hillforts is (according to TME) an accidental by-product of differential erosion so we don't know how many there were originally.

[TisILeclerc]

Couldn't see anything with those links Borry.

Perhaps I'm on goggle's black list unless my computer's not up to it.

Perhaps hillforts were observatories? Each one manned by a megalithic Patrick Moore. Daoists in China keep a look on the stars from their eyries in the mountains so why couldn't our lot?

Here's one of a Hollywood fairy tale castle with observatory.



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... nwall.html

By the way. How far back in time do these hillforts go? Are they stone age, bronze age, iron age or a mixture of all three?

Something must have been on the mind of these ancient people going out of their way to stick stones up everywhere they went and then hillforts to go with them. Or was it just time on their hands?

[Boreades]

Couldn't see anything with those links Borry.
Perhaps I'm on goggle's black list unless my computer's not up to it.

For Tisi's tizzy computer, here's a snapshot of the Google Maps page.

[Boreades]

Perhaps hillforts were observatories? Each one manned by a megalithic Patrick Moore. Daoists in China keep a look on the stars from their eyries in the mountains so why couldn't our lot?

That there were observatories would make sense. It's not just us TME crackpots who says so, a few astro-archaeologists reckon that's what Silbury Hill and Merlin's Mound were all about. Artificially constructed to give the Watchers the exact artificial horizon they wanted for consistent measurements. And in a safe snug place away from the ever-increasing number of shopkeepers, peasants and pilgrims in the henges and hilltop enclosures.

[TisILeclerc]

Didn't someone put a link up once about how there's a theory that various landmarks and monuments were terrestrial maps of the heavens?

Are there any 'star signs' in the landscape? Could be a useful learning tool for megalithic astronomers in training.

A bit like London taxi drivers doing the 'knowledge' or whatever they call it. They could have walked the landscape through the connecting 'stars' in each constellation to imprint the shape in their memory?

[Mick Harper]

I don't buy any of this archaeo-astronomy stuff apart from some very basic navigational direction aids which certainly don't require 'hillforts' every dozen miles. Though having just spent a week under the glowering lee of Brent Knoll I can certainly say that artificial mounds were used as navigational aids. My objection is always the basic "Why?" So Arcturus Major crosses the slope of Silbury Hill every nineteen years. Big deal.