Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 88

emony was performed then, perhaps it was the priest's task to
watch for the curious youngster who said, “That's a bit to the left
of where it was last year”; included him in the select group watch-
ing the calendar stones in the coming year; and if he or maybe she
showed real promise, sent the person on to Temple Wood, just
as, millennia later, the “lad o' pairts” would be sent to college
in Glasgow or St. Andrews. Whether they then returned to their
own communities, determined to build still more sophisticated
observing sites, or went off to break new ground in communities
still benighted, it is easy to imagine them carrying their ceremo-
nial staffs, carefully wrapped against damage, like the young men
bringing back their personalized hand-axes at the beginning of this
chapter - and that brings us to the geometry of the ancient sites,
and the contentious issue of the Megalithic Yard.
Daniel's article went on to offer his own interpretation:
I see the origin of stone rings this way. First there were cir-
cular clearings in the forests that covered Neolithic Europe
in the fifth and fourth millenniums b.c. We can postulate
that sacred and secular gatherings took place in these clear-
ings. Next, owing to the agency of man's domestic animals
and man himself, the forests disappeared, whereupon artificial
clearings were created by setting posts in a ring as a stage for
similar gatherings. The third phase was the translation of the
wood rings into stone rings. Then finally, as the tour de force
of a succession of what one can only call cathedral architects,
Stonehenge was built in the middle of the third millennium
b.c. and flourished as a temple cum meeting place cum sta-
dium for more than 1,000 years. This brings us back to my
earlier question: does Stonehenge fit the description of mega-
lithic rings in general as sacred and secular meeting places?
The answer seems to be emphatically in the affirmative [ 15 ].
Well, yes, but so what? The ceremonial function of Stone-
henge is so obvious that it would be pointless to deny it (there
will be more to say about that below and in the next chapter). But
that has no bearing on the fact that the layout would have allowed
accurate lunar observations to be made, and the major-standstill
alignment of the Station Stones appears to confirm that they were
made. At Stonehenge and at Brodgar, the Thoms suggest that the
really accurate lunar alignments were not laid out with respect to