Layout and Location - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 104

5. Layout and Location
Despite the perks of the visit - the comforts of Shawfield House,
the charms of Clementina Walkinshaw, who entertained him there
- Prince Charlie was so disgusted with Glasgow that he seriously
considered sacking it. The city may have owed its deliverance to
the kindly Lochiel who was, as teuchter rebels go, a gentleman.
So despite regular but inchoate attempts (every Saturday night)
to demolish the fabric, Glasgow was not put to the sack until the
twentieth century, when Attila the Urban Planner descended on it
like a wolf on the fold.
- The Glasgow Diary, by Donald Saunders, Mostly [ 1 ]
The quotation from Edwin Morgan at the beginning of Chap. 3
appears by personal permission of the poet, a former tutor and an
old friend, like Archie Roy, Euan MacKie and Donald Saunders,
all quoted above. At this point, the story of Neolithic astronomy
becomes personal for me. In the early 1960s one of Professor
Thom's colleagues and supporters was Dr. (now Professor) Archie
Roy, then Senior Lecturer in Astronomy at Glasgow University
(Fig. 5.1 ). He was President of the Scottish Branch of the British
Interplanetary Society, and he and I have known each other since
the first meeting I attended, in April 1962. In 1963, the Branch
became independent as ASTRA, the Association in Scotland to
Research into Astronautics, and I started at University and joined
Archie's Ordinary Astronomy class. In 1964, he lectured on the
astronomical events visible from sites such as the standing stones
at Ballochroy, on the west coast of Kintyre, which are lined up
with the summits of Cara Island and the peak of Ben Corra on Jura,
to mark midsummer and midwinter sunset (Fig. 5.2 ) [ 2 ] .
At the next group tutorial the class was set an exercise that
began: “You are the astronomer on a colonizing expedition which
leaves the Mediterranean in 1800 b.c. and lands in the Mull of