Henge corrals?

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I agree. The lightbox proves that very specific solar alignment was very important. Ditto for other cleverly contrived placings. Modern analogies don't always work but try this on for size.

Take Anytown with an ancient church. It will be aligned with the altar to the east and with a west tower. There will be other churches and chapels not aligned as such, but with their entrances on the high street. They have been built by the Victorians on available land. Take all of the domestic front doors in all of the houses. Excepting those facing in a northerly direction, probably two-thirds will exactly face sunrises and sunsets on various days throughout the year. Many will face moon risesand moon sets. Yet none have been designed to do so. The alignments are real, but unintentional and certainly not ritual. The local cinema might align with a distant hill, but purely by coincidence.

What evidence do we have that makes the case that the majority of henges, tombs, long barrows, cursus, causewayed enclosure etc are deliberately aligned to sun, moon or landscape features? Again - I am not trying to prove a point. I'm just testing the accepted view.

Every site has to be taken on its own merits. Take the early churches. As I mentioned before, many of these do align to the sunrise on the local saint's day, not due east. Surely that isn't a coincidence?

I do agree that not every alignment is going to be valid, but when a great many tombs face cardinal or quarter compass points they surely must be. If they can be taken as significant then I would think that the rest must be for some reason or other. When you get a great many tombs that face a V-shape in the surrounding mountains then those views must be important.

My view is that the Victorian church analogy can be dismissed because tombs were not built where there was a bit of space. Many lowland tombs/circles seem to have been built on good farming land. This is something that seems to have been overlooked. The ancients actually set aside a good piece of land to build somewhere for their ancestors to go to. Maybe this was to assure them of some good land in the afterlife?

The different tomb type in Ireland demonstrate very different ideas of what was important. Passage tombs seem to face key sunrises/sunsets (in general), court tombs tend towards north & south, portal tombs face east & wedge tombs tend towards the west. All these are from different eras and potentially different cultures with different ideas.

Cork stone circles and stone rows nearly all align SW/NE. Other Irish circles face different directions. This does not make the Cork alignment standard invalid, but isolates it as a local design feature.