Archaeoastronomy from the Air - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 268

F IG . 9.9 Standing stone and kist, Cnoc a' Charragh, Colonsay (Photo by
Chris Stanley, 1982)
there's a very interesting stone with a slab beside it that covers an
empty burial kist (Fig. 9.9 ). When I 'found' the site the Sun hap-
pened to be over a notch in the hills to the west (Fig. 9.10 ) , shining
on the sea and revealing that at that point there's a sea horizon.
Rough bearings confirmed that it marked one of Thom's calendar
dates (Chap. 5 ).
We next tried for the small circle overlooking the microwave
dish of the telephone switching station at Scalisaig, and the pos-
sible sites of two more that I had found. I thought that photo-
graphing them from the air might reveal marks in the ground. But
all of those stones are small ones, by megalithic standards, hard
to see and briefly glimpsed from the air, even at 500 ft. I could see
them because I knew precisely where to look, but Leslie and Chris
could not.
Admittedly I became better at giving directions as the flight
went on, but in planning such missions these are points to keep in
mind. There was no difficulty in spotting the conspicuous hilltop
stone at Garvard, on the south end of Colonsay, although in the