The enclosure from the southern bank.
Image credit: A. Brookes (20.6.2019)
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Another great site to visit, a brooding Cornish sky to boot. Reading the various field reports I see it is compared to a site in Carnac, I assume referring to Le Quadrilatère de Manio. Other than both rectangle I'm not sure I get the connection, regardless its on my list.
It is, first time I've been here as I've gradually been making incursions from the edges of Bodmin Moor. It's quite a long walk from the bus route. The sites round here are first rate, I've never been the anything like this before though. The brooding sky brought several lots of rain during the day.
I've regarded it as a kind of rectangular circle henge (with the stones emphasising the - for want of a better word - insularity of the site). Guess we'll never know.
That's consistent with the bank (although no ditch). I'd have to dig Burl out, but I think there was some kind of rectangular site in the SE of England that's not there any more (Godmanchester rings a bell?), don't know if that's in any way comparable though.
The lack of ditch is, perhaps, debatable... when I saw the site a banding of reeds within the stones was strongly suggestive of a former ditch:
"The interior fills with water and a contemporary ground level has not been established."......
Yes, that's a fair point. That's still the case.
Mmm. Would be interesting to know 1) how much the water table has fluctuated over the millennia. 2) how much 'digging' has occurred over time - you're right in that there certainly isn't evidence of a uniform inner ditch... checked my notes and time has blurred the memory. Guess core samples etc would determine the water table issue. If it was always boggy it wouldn't make sense for it to have been a meeting place. Whatever, what a class site! Would love to go back.
There’s Crucuno rectangle too themodernantiquarian.com/site/10042/crucuno_rectangle.html to add to the understanding/confusion.
The water table point is interesting. Also makes me wonder whether the area was actually covered in trees. If we speculate a Neolithic or even early BA date, I assume (?) that Bodmin Moor was like Dartmoor at that time, i.e not peaty moorland at all but forested. Which would make for a possibly much drier interior of the site.
Andy, the Crucurno site looks great. Wonder if there was ever an earthwork?
I also remembered this: themodernantiquarian.com/site/3783/caer_leb.html, which is Iron Age.
I don’t know about an earthwork at Crucuno tsc; I was right beside that monument but didn’t visit it after a full day around Carnac. I have Burl’s Brittany guidebook and I’ll see if he mentions anything. I have the bigger tomes too and I’ll see what they say.
Burl doesn't mention an earthwork, but does say "Monuments with a closer resemblance to Crucuno exist in England at both the little-known King Arthur's Hall on Bodmin Moor – a rectangle of standing stones, 48 x 21m, inside an earthen bank: its long sides lie N–S – and at Stonehenge, where the Four Stations stones stand in a rectangle whose sides point to midsummer sunrise and the major northern setting of the moon." He had already mentioned the significance of the longer sides at Crucuno being aligned "to E and W, so that looking to the W one would have equinoctical sunsets of March and September nicely defined along the longer sides of the oblong."
Interesting stuff re the alignment. It's really difficult to draw any conclusions re the connections or similarities when there are so few sites of this type to start with. After all, a rectangle is a pretty standard geometric shape, so the fact we have a handful of sites across several widely spread areas doesn't really give enough evidence to say that they're anything more than coincidental. Infinite Neolithic/BA/IA people with infinite stones would sooner or later make them into a rectangle :)