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proved without difficulty that by those standards it was not a
house, only a random collection of building materials. (There was
actually some support for this proposition, when a radiator fell off
the living room wall.) John Braithwaite concluded that Thom's
sample was large enough for his conclusions to be established
beyond reasonable doubt.
Nevertheless, there are recurring doubts. It was said that in
at least one case Thom had surveyed a ring and found a good set of
values in megalithic yards - although the site was a modern imita-
tion. One has to point out that, in that case, the site may be a
good
imitation, though, as far as is known, the Glasgow project was the
first of its kind, and the story may be apocryphal. But, in practice,
the megalithic yard is such a universal unit that it is hard to get rid
of it. It was decided to avoid using it at Sighthill, in order to distin-
guish the new circle more clearly from its Neolithic predecessors.
Taking the contour of the hilltop as a guide, an arbitrary diameter
of 20 modern feet was chosen. But eventually it dawned that the
circumference is therefore 62.83 ft, which turns out to be 23.099
MY or 9.24 megalithic rods - not an ideal piece of MY numerology,
but closer than one would have liked.
The problem comes to a head at Avebury, where the great
size of the structure should provide a definitive test. The Thoms
believed that it does, with a perimeter made up of arcs in mega-
lithic rods and adding up to 521 rods in total, all laid out from a
right-angled triangle whose sides were 75, 100 and 125 MY. The
outcome doesn't seem dramatic enough to be wholly convincing,
and Aubrey Burl has quite another explanation for the layout - that
the ditch suffered rapid slumping after its completion and before
the stones of the outer ring were set in place along it.
Thom estimated that “the two inner circles have a diameter of
125 MY, which curiously is exactly 340 ft.” There would be nothing
odd about it if the ancient units, like the modern non-metric ones,
were based on the average dimensions of the human body. Hawk-
ins suggested, in
Beyond Stonehenge
, that the circles might have
been laid out by chains of people so that their differences in size
averaged out. Measurements based on the human body are favored
also by Professor Burl. The Thoms' reply is that statistical analysis
rules out all explanations but the uniform measuring rod; this is
just another way of saying that the measurements are very close
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