Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 56

again if the Moon landings really happened. “If we were going to
fake it, why would we fake it nine times ?”
Finding these alignments in passage graves shows a connec-
tion with the theme of death and rebirth, so universally found in
the mythologies of agricultural societies. It's sometimes argued
that the emphasis on midsummer sunrise is a latter-day, pseudo-
druidical romantic notion, while what counted for Neolithic farm-
ers was the northward turning of the Sun after the winter solstice
and the guarantee that spring and summer would indeed return.
Against that, others argue that the midwinter solstice marked the
onset of the worst time of the year, when the weather worsened,
the stores ran out, livestock starved or were slaughtered, and cold,
hunger and disease took their annual toll of the populace. At this
distance the belief structure and the way in which it changed (if
at all) are very hard to trace; but it is fascinating to note that very
soon after their appearance the apparently astronomical elements
took on a “life” of their own - architecturally and, perhaps, meta-
phorically.
Around 3000 b.c. a large circle was built at Ballynoe, east of
the mountains of Mourne. Within it there was a smaller circle
enclosing an inner crescent of stones, a small mound, and sev-
eral stone cists, rather than the huge burial mound of Newgrange.
Between 3000 and 2500 b.c. a large stone henge, “the Lios,” was
erected in Limerick; its precise function is uncertain, but it was
not primarily a burial place and may have been a ritual center used
also as a lunar observatory. If so, it was one of the earliest.
The passage of the great tomb of Maes Howe in Orkney
(Fig. 4.11a, b ) was oriented to midwinter sunrise, but the sight-
lines around it marked other major calendar dates [ 7 ]. “Maes
Howe's builders were also astronomers,” says Neil Oliver in A
History of Ancient Britain [ 8 ] . Its construction was contemporary
with the stone village of Skara Brae and was followed in 3100 b.c.
by the circle of Stenness (Fig. 4.12 ), with the highest stones any-
where apart from Stonehenge. Stenness was followed around 2500
b.c. by another great ring at Brodgar or Brogar (Fig. 4.13 ), where the
Thoms believed that accurate lunar alignments were set up out-
side the ring a thousand years later [ 9 ]. The great building projects
were now the rings, not the tombs, as if attention had shifted from
the dead in the earth to the open sky - but see Chap. 8 .