Re: Vised | Forum — The Modern Antiquarian

Slaggyford Stones 1

Image by StoneGloves

Slaggyford Stones .

tiompan Sep 15, 2011 22:05:38

Replying to StoneGloves

StoneGloves wrote:

"The OS have a cairn not a currick marked at the top of Kip law .From the site of the stone (which is not 100 % accurate as I ‘m not sure which one it is as seen on GE but this will have little impact on the result as both extremes of the “wall “ occupy less than degree at the distance to Kip law plus I believe it is fairly central ) to the summit is 105 degrees which provides a declination of minus 3.9 ."

GoogleEarth does have the stone marked in the wrong place. The cairn on Kip Law is quite high - shows in profile for quite a long distance. Working things out roughly generates errors. - 3.9 is close to 0, which is the declination of the sunrise at the equinoxes, all things being equal. Roughly it will be possible to see the sun rise from behind the Kip Law Cairn from the proximity of the main stone row at Thornhope. It's certainly strong enough to test on site.

Your original suggestion was for a minor standstill therefore the minus 3.9 declination a lunar dec i.e. including parallax .If you are talking about solar alignments as in the case of equinoxes then the declination from the stone to the top of Kip Law is minus 4.7 . Even at minus 3.9 it is still 11 days off and 4.7 nearly 2 weeks .
Regardless of all that even if the dec was spot on and the stone was a genuine rock art were you really suggesting that there was a case for an intentional alignment ?

StoneGloves Sep 16, 2011 07:43:03

Replying to tiompan

"Your original suggestion was for a minor standstill therefore the minus 3.9 declination a lunar dec i.e. including parallax .If you are talking about solar alignments as in the case of equinoxes then the declination from the stone to the top of Kip Law is minus 4.7 . Even at minus 3.9 it is still 11 days off and 4.7 nearly 2 weeks . Regardless of all that even if the dec was spot on and the stone was a genuine rock art were you really suggesting that there was a case for an intentional alignment ?"

Of course.

But I suggested an alignment to the major standstill of the moon, not minor. I just threw out the name of Kip Law too quickly and without considering that you'd put it into your way back machine straight away. How do you calculate the elevation, incidentally. Trigonometry or a computer programme?

The stone is rock art - very cheesy - but is poorly located. GoogleEarth draws it between twenty and thirty metres away from its actual position, but that's using the TMA data and not ERA's. (Which should be the same as the stone's only been visited once with a GPS). I watched the man scribble the numbers down and it would have been so easy to get one or more of them wrong, in the bright sunshine. Rock Art does have a known association with stone rows but none, I suspect, with Iron Age walling.

I've found with these alignments that it is better to get a rough idea by calculation and then to confirm or refute them by observation. There was a scheme to watch the moon at various extreme settings a few years ago but, except for Callanish, I think I was the only person that took part, here. I got some good photographs - at the cost of many nights disturbed sleep - and still remember the events vividly.

Something else has occurred to me though - how much does Cope pay for patrolling this site?