Long Meg & Her Daughters forum 20 room
Image by Chris Collyer
Long Meg & Her Daughters

Hey hey, another wet day

close
more_vert
fitzcoraldo F
fitzcoraldo Sep 4, 2008 19:50:42
Replying to tiompan

tiompan wrote:
he was a brilliant engineer , the problem is his interpretation.
Thom classified Long Meg as a type B flattened circle and went to great pains to describe it's geometry. Nothing wrong with that but I wonder what Thom would have made of the earlier ditched enclosure, the probable cause of the flattening of the circle. Perhaps he would have set aside his slide rule and taken up the spade.

S Stoneshifter
Stoneshifter Sep 4, 2008 20:50:08
Replying to fitzcoraldo

He can have my spade - but his principal tool was the theodolite. And Castle Rigg is a flattened circle too - but there's no sign of an earlier enclosure constraining it.

The Fog on the Tyne starts up the Derwent Valley, as it's cooler out there, and snakes slowly down, through Blaydon, meets a grubby cloud from Prudhoe, and spreads down to the coast. If you'd not seen it happen you probably wouldn't believe it.

Try this - http://www.elainemorgan.me.uk/ - and find her new book, available as a pdf. It's interesting, obvious, and a great example of establishment ignorance. (The fog's just reaching Winlaton as I type).

Nobody's interested in finding the main alignment from my new barrow on the outskirts of Alston. It's to the NW, broadly, perhaps to Grey Nag summit. Thom gives the centre line of Long Meg as the meridian, so the putative centre of the circle is constrained in one dimension, at least.

T tiompan
tiompan Sep 4, 2008 20:50:29
Replying to fitzcoraldo

fitzcoraldo wrote:
tiompan wrote:
he was a brilliant engineer , the problem is his interpretation.
Thom classified Long Meg as a type B flattened circle and went to great pains to describe it's geometry. Nothing wrong with that but I wonder what Thom would have made of the earlier ditched enclosure, the probable cause of the flattening of the circle. Perhaps he would have set aside his slide rule and taken up the spade.
There was also the stone at Castlerigg which was the last peice in the calendrical jigsaw ,only problem was , was that it had been moved there within living memory . Have you seen his stuff on cups and rings ? The megalithic yard goes micro , with just a handful of examples he fits them all into the scheme , looks like the engravers had micrometers . His plans are nearly the best though . He did a lot for astroarchaeology but because Ruggles and others pointed out the mistakes it has led to a backlash and the knee jerk reaction of "it's all bollocks , Ruggles has shown Thom to be wrong " when there is still a lot of perfectly sound sound stuff accepted by Ruggles etc . Thom overstretched and we threw the baby out with the bathwater .