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 Head To Head The Modern Antiquarian Callanish Forum | Start a topic | Search |
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| I hope that a fairly definitive answer to the original question can now be seen on my updated web-site http://home.clara.net/gponting/page42.html and the pages linked from it. This all started from Professor Thom's original 1967 book, Megalithic Sites in Britain, in which he showed the extreme southern moon, as seen from the Callanish Stones, setting behind Clisham and the other hills of Harris. He'd made his horizon profile from maps and not returned to the site. Gerald Hawkins, in a very obscure 1971 paper, proved by photogrammetry that the small rocky hillock just to the south of the site (Cnoc an Tursa) blocks the view of Clisham when standing among the stones - something that is perfectly obvious just standing at the site and using one's eyes! (Hawkins, as far as I know, never visited Callanish.) Margaret (now Curtis) and I did an enormous amount of work in the late 70s and early 80s surveying horizons and calculating sun and moon positions. Obviously, with the work that had been done before, one of the directions that most interested us was looking towards the extreme southern moonset. In our paper presented to a 1980 conference, we first linked the moonset with the alignment of the Callanish avenue towards the circle and the same moonrise with the hilly profile of a 'female figure' on the southern horizon, known as the 'Sleeping Beauty'; and that this may have been an intention of the original builders. See brief quotations from this paper at http://home.clara.net/gponting/page47.html This was put forward as a THEORY. I'm not sure what Margaret and Ron have claimed since I ceased to be involved in the project in 1984, but I have never claimed that the prehistoric builders of Callanish *definitely* built the Callanish avenue in order to have a ceremony watching the moon set through the stones, on the few rare occasions that it happens, with an 18-year gap betwen such ceremonies. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But it is still a wonderful experience to be there and see the moon slide along the body of the hill figure. To see the setting moon among the stones must be even more amazing, but I've not been lucky enough to see this yet. Good luck with the weather, those of you who are planning to go in July. (See timing on my web-site; please let me know if you find it helpful.) Others have taken the theory much further since 1980, including identifying the Sleeping Beauty with an/the earth goddess, etc. The idea has taken on a life of it's own, and it was amazing to me (and, incidentally, to Margaret) to realise that the crowds there on the night of June 11th-12th had all travelled to Callanish as a direct consequence of what we had published 26 years ago! Reply | with quote |  24th June 2006ce 12:45 In reply to: Callanish for the terminally stupid (Rhiannon)2 replies: Re: Callanish for the terminally stupid (Vicster) Re: Callanish for the terminally stupid (Pete G) |
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