Silbury? Is that that southern show-off copy of a Great Wolds Barrow?
"What woud happen to the rock art? "
If the rock art was contemporary, then I would imagain that it would have looked pretty awesome beneath a thin whitewash.
But how's about this..and I'm rambling here so bear with me.
Long Meg is not a monument in isolation, it is part of a local chain of monuments stretching along a river terrace. On a larger scale the circle is also part of a huge chain of monuments running in a roughly north south direction along the eastern edge of Cumbria. Perhaps all of these monument s were painted too?
The main elements at Long Meg are the ditched enclosure, the stone circle, Stukeleys circle , Long Meg herself and then we have the natural elements of the site - the spring, the river, the pennines and possibly the Skiddaw massif.....
Ok I could ramble on here about the Cross Fell possibly being a major focus for the circle but I'll save that one for another day.
What I can see is, the ditched enclose and stone circle covered in whitewash, standing out bold and bright in the landscape with the standing stone of Long Meg left unpainted, her bold red sandstone a symbol of the dead, her colour and carvings.
We know from the archaeological and ethnological record that red was a colour that was associated with the dead. The classic example of this being the use of ochrein the preparation of the dead from the Palaeolithic onwards.
I guess what I'm clumsily trying to get at is that there could have been a sort of thing happening with Meg where you have the white circle of hard igneous rocks symbolising 'the now' set against the soft red carved outlier of Meg symbolising the ancestors and the multiverse.
The spring is at the north end of the monument so to get to Meg you would have to walk through the ditched enclosure and stone circle - a sort of procession from the living to the dead...jezus I'm inventing a cosmology for Long Meg, I think I better go and think about this one or perhaps just sit in a darkened room for a while.
cheers
fitz
