Archaeoastronomy from the Air - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 278

F IG . 9.21 Surviving stone of the flattened circle, Circle 1, with smaller Cir-
cle 4 to the south (Photos by Chris Stanley, 1982)
comparable with the larger blocks at Stonehenge (Fig. 9.21 ).
There's also a small ring to the south of it. East of the flattened
ring, another large circle or egg has been even more badly dam-
aged, and the remains of one stone still lie where it broke during
an attempt to make it into a millstone (Fig. 9.22 ). A single stone to
the west, the centers of the two large rings, and the southernmost
of two small ellipses to the east, point to sunrise at the equinoxes.
The ellipses, found by Roy himself and subsequently excavated by
Aubrey Burl, were the first to be found in Britain (Fig. 9.23 ) . About
26 are now known, including MacKie's excavation of the Cultoon
ring on Islay (Chaps. 4 and 8 ), showing that the ancient Britons
had discovered the ellipse 2,000 years before the Greeks around
600 b.c.
As mentioned above, ASTRA, the Association in Scotland in
Research into Astronautics, was founded (originally as a Scottish
branch of the British Interplanetary Society) in 1953 by the late
Prof. Oscar Schwiglhofer from Transylvania. At that time Oscar's
astronomical research included the history of Sir Thomas Mak-
dougall Brisbane, who had an observatory in Largs, Ayrshire, in the