Layout and Location - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 116

that was put in would be a repetitive exploration of the city for
spires, chimneys or tower blocks on the horizon from viewpoints
that lay along the midwinter sunrise or sunset bearings. There
would be nothing to show for it, and the only action would be
compressed into a few minutes at the solstice, which could all too
easily be rained out. I would need help only for those few minutes,
furthermore, and I did have some obligations to generate a pro-
posal that would create temporary employment - although so far
there had been no applicants for the vacancies.
We could set ourselves the task of designing a structure around
a single alignment, perhaps a recumbent circle or an ellipse, but
since we weren't planning to hold ceremonies it would be non-
functional and intellectually false. Lastly, if the alignment was
related to the skyline of the city, then new buildings or demo-
lition could totally invalidate it, and Glasgow has seen several
major shifts in planning emphasis over the last couple of decades.
Almost anything apart from the Cathedral was liable to vanish
without warning. To be a real tribute, our alignments should be
determined by the natural skyline and intended to last for as long
as the prehistoric megaliths themselves, to say something to the
future about our knowledge of them, regardless of modern build-
ings flickering in and out of the way for a century or so.
On still another hand, people visiting a park weren't liable
to be interested in where the Sun would rise “if it wasn't for the
´ouses in between.” Taking that principle to absurd lengths, one
might as well build a megalith in a traditional back green, up a
“close,” completely hemmed in by tenements. Indeed, it turned
out that the University of Strathclyde had already done just that
with “Steelhenge,” a modern sculpture inspired by Stonehenge,
but sited in a quadrangle almost entirely surrounded by buildings
(Fig. 5.5 ). It might well be necessary to limit an operational mega-
lith to just one solar alignment, or quadrant if there was room for
the flanking lunar standstills.
One of my first steps was to calculate the theoretical align-
ments for rising and setting at the solstices and lunar standstills.
Initially I did a basic calculation of the rising and setting azimuths
of the midsummer and midwinter Sun on the true horizon at the
latitude of Glasgow, plus the flanking alignments of the lunar
'standstills' generated by the 18.61-year revolution of the nodes of