Archaeoastronomy from the Air - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 277

F IG . 9.20 Fingal's Cauldron Stones, Circle 5, Machrie Moor, Isle of Arran
concern with Neolithic astronomy was still settling about his
shoulders. On my last visit to Dunlop with their copies of the
aerial archaeology slides, Dr. Thom was friendly but inconsolable,
and the Professor was imprisoned in the house he'd built himself,
having broken his hip in a fall. It was a cold winter, and pneumo-
nia, 'the old man's friend,' was waiting in the wings. It was the last
time I was to see either of them in this world.
Roy's request was the megalithic complex at Tormore, on
Arran in the Firth of Clyde. As stated in the quotation from his
scientific thriller Deadlight , at the start of Chap. 1 , the site has
dozens of hut circles (stone walls with openings, once roofed with
branches), but the main interest was the remains of astronomical
structures. From a stone to the south the double ring of Fingal's
Cauldron Stones - a perfect circle within a flattened one - lines
up with the center of a flattened circle of the same shape to the
northeast to mark the midsummer sunrise in a notch in the hills
(Fig. 9.20 ).
All but one of the stones in the flattened circle have been
reduced to stumps, but the survivor is 18 ft tall by 5 ft by 2,