Selecting the Stones - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 178

F IG . 6.19 ( a ) Extraction. ( b ) “Those are nice!” (Alexander Thom). ( c ) The
bowed stone extracted
At our next meeting with Prof. Thom in Dunlop, he reiterated
his opposition to the project. But he couldn't restrain his reaction
to the photographs: “Oh, those are nice,” he said, as he reached
Fig. 6.19b , and he mellowed sufficiently to give his advice on how
they should be placed (Fig. 6.22 ). His first reaction to Bill Jones's
plan was critical. Stabbing at the major standstill alignments with
the stem of his pipe, he demanded, “I hope they're not going to
be opposite? - Because they're not, you know!” I reassured him
that both parallax and refraction would be taken into account,
once we had a proper survey of the alignments (Chap. 7 ; Fig. 6.23 ).
Mollified, he went on to tell us that the largest stones should be
allocated to the lunar sight-lines, because that's how it was done
at the ancient sites.
Using the largest stone of all as a table, and armed with that
information, John and I found it surprisingly straightforward to
assign each stone to a place (Fig. 6.24 ). But by that time the stones
were already at the foot of the Broomhill, on the Pinkston road-
side. Events had begun to move very fast indeed.