Archaeoastronomy from the Air - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 260

and lectured on them to the Archaeological Society of Glasgow
in December 1981. Although he was skeptical about Mann's
findings and archaeoastronomy in general, it turned out that we
had another enquiry in common. While I had been investigating
the standing stones on Colonsay as a check on Thom's theories
(Chap. 5 ), Dr. Ritchie was also making a survey of them for more
general research purposes.
I therefore passed on Leslie Banks' offer to Dr. Ritchie as well.
As the Thatcher government's cuts had taken hold, the Ancient
Monuments Commission no longer had any budget for excava-
tions, much less for aerial photography, so he took our tentative
flight plan around to every department inviting requests. The
result was rather daunting: 18 targets at 12 locations! On top of all
that we also had three target requests from the astronomy section
of the Ayrshire Branch of ASTRA. It was starting to seem that the
flight could make a real contribution to the field, and Leslie Banks
agreed to give the requests priority. I was to handle the liaison,
obtaining plans of the target sites and drawing up the suggested
flight plan. But not knowing that I would be navigating the air-
craft, I hadn't brought my file with me, nor the relevant Ordnance
Survey maps.
July 28, 1982, started off bright and sunny, but there was
haze moving across the country from the east coast. Driving from
Wishaw to Glasgow Airport I came back into sunshine, but by the
time the Cessna was in the air the airport and the city were over-
cast. We were not allowed to fly below 1,500 ft over the city, and
the photographer, Chris Stanley, winner of the 1981 Vinten Prize
for aerial photography, doubted whether the Sighthill photos would
come out. He couldn't get a reading on his light meter at all. I had
a Kodak Bantam Colorsnap Mark 1, which was beginning to show
its age; the pictures taken under the overcast came out reasonably
well (Fig. 9.2 ), but Chris's close-ups were impressive (Fig. 9.3 ), and
for the rest of the trip unsurprisingly he had the edge.
I had made an appointment with the Parks Department man-
agement to explain about the flight and urge that the stone circle
should now be landscaped into Sighthill Park. The site had been
left to its own devices for 3 years and was now grassed over, but the
bank on the south arc of the circle had never been stabilized and
had now washed away downhill, so the stones on that side were