[quote="thesweetcheat"]
"I would also chuck in that contemporaneity isn't always essential for monuments to be "related" either. "

I agree but at Maen Llia the argument was that the possible equidistance suggested contemporaneity ,i.e. " “its geometric relationship with nearby Bronze Age monuments points to its prehistoric origins .” it may well be prehistoric and associated but you don't date mouments from their distance to another monument , which is as bad as dating a monument from a possible astro event .

"In any case, a surveyor won't lay a tape between two points on a slope and then use that measurement alone as the basis of the length of line he draws on his 2D map. A line measured from his 2D map will be shorter than the length measured on the ground, as he would need to correct for the slope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_correction_(surveying)#Correction_due_to_slope "

At ML it's over 300 m ,you can bet the bloke who first recognised the distances never traipsed a tape over the 300+m . The equidiatance was recognised on a map .

"I would tend to agree (based on nothing more scientific than visiting sites without measuring anything at all) that topography plays a bigger part than equidistance in placement of monuments in proximity."

People who are interested in monuments often notice similar features about the siting of moorland/upland monuments , not in the obvious spot but at a point where it might be visible from certain points lower down , relationships to water , direction of valleys etc , they crop up time and again and appear intentional as opposed to the pot luck of a siting imposed on it by the fiat of equidistance .