Archaeoastronomy in the British Isles - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 67

of Jura, with its upper rim remaining just visible over the profile of
the hill as it continued to descend. Looking in the southwesterly
direction of the line of stones, the upper limb of the midwinter
Sun was similarly fitted to the profile of Cara Island. From the
observing platform at Kintraw the midwinter Sun would have set
completely behind Beinn Shiantaidh on Jura before its upper limb
showed again briefly in the gap between that peak and Beinn an
Oir (Figs. 1.3 and 5.4 ). When upright, the great stone in the middle
distance pointed like a finger towards the spot to watch on the
skyline above it. Lunar alignments are more complex, but exam-
ples will be given below.
The critics' case is that the society of the time was not able
to interest itself in such matters, so that if the alignments do
exist they are insignificant - almost certainly coincidental - or
else Thom has imposed his interpretation on the landscape, con-
sciously or unconsciously selecting horizon features that suit his
case and then arguing that the stones were deliberately positioned
in relation to them. However, Thom worked out how the ancient
observers could have plotted their observations on the ground, and
at Stonehenge there are postholes, near the Heelstone, in a very
similar pattern. Similar grids are found marked out in stone in
Caithness, for instance at the Hill o' Many Stanes, above.
However, the most spectacular examples are in Brittany. Even
today, thousands of stones are still standing in the great arrays
around Carnac on which the Thoms spent so much time. It has
been said that, in terms of man-hours, the Thoms' surveys of the
Carnac alignments may be the greatest archaeological project of
the century; the ground plan is a huge scroll that can be repro-
duced only in part or by reducing it so much that it becomes virtu-
ally incomprehensible.
Precisely how the Carnac alignments were used has still to
be established. It's been suggested that they were built by the pre-
vious Neolithic hunter-gatherers, representing their defiance as
Neolithic farmers took over the territory [ 8 ] . But their similarity
in type to the Heelstone postholes and the Caithness stone rows
is so striking that it can hardly be a coincidence that the greatest
of all sites claimed as observatories is in the immediate vicinity.
Le Grand Menhir Brisé, the Great Broken Stone of Carnac, was
originally 70 ft in length and weighed more than 300 t; it takes us