About four-posters​….

close
more_vert
tiompan T
tiompan Jan 23, 2007 19:46:36
Replying to Hob

Hob wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Three Kings Northumberland certain and a host of dubious ones
Three Kings deffo, it's got a burial and everything.
There's dubious one at Fontburn. If Fontburn is a four-poster, then so is one of the cairns at Lordenshaw, but neither of them are really. It's just that prehistoric Northumbrians weren't very good at sticking to the plan when it came to circles.

But there's a sort of blurry line, is a four poster a 'circle' per se (oviously the shape ain't circular, but you know what I mean..) or a glorified cairn? Has anyone ever shown that the burials are contemporary with the stones?

According to Burl a circle was the basis of the design with the stones taking up points on it to create a rectangle except some of the Irish four posters didn't have stones on the perimeter and were more asymmetric .
.

S StoneLifter
StoneLifter Jan 23, 2007 19:55:08
Replying to tiompan

It's adventures in squaring the circle - with a view to understanding orbits, perhaps. Nobody has inspected the stones beside the road, near Alston, for cupmarks.

H Hob
Hob Jan 23, 2007 20:04:26
Replying to tiompan

tiompan wrote:
some of the Irish four posters didn't have stones on the perimeter and were more asymmetric .
That's partly feeding the thing that perplexes me. It's a bit like the thing about how many points you need to describe a linear alignment, in that any two points can form either a straight line or a curve. If you've got four points in any kind of square/parallelogram/trapezium, they're going to be points on some theoretical circle or other, just as any two points are on some theoretical line or other. But it doesn't really imply that the things were actually set out as four points on a circle. Maybe they cardinal points were important as part of a cross?

The fact that some of the Irish ones are asymmetric implies some are not, now those I'd accept as being part of a circle, as five points would describe a circular perimeter. But that there are five posters that aren't symmetrical just confuses me even more.

Which is of course why the ancients did all this stuff. Just to confuse those of us who live in their future.