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Winter solstice/Yule time Quiz: Trainspotter or Druid?


Winter solstice/Yule time Quiz : Trainspotter or Druid?

These are generally male-specific tendencies - females rarely finding the need spend their Saturdays on station platforms noting down train-types - although the appeal of the dressing-up box is frequently irresistible.
Here are a few test indicators -

This last year, have you
Dashed around the countryside taking hundreds of photos of megaliths?
Ticked off some of your List of Stones To Be Seen Before I Die?
Got distracted by a) heaps of rocks in fields b) humps in the landscape when you should be looking at the road ahead?

or
Started growing a beard?
Sewn bedsheets into a wearable tent?
Looked for woad in your local DIY store?

Do you always carry
Azimuth-tables and notebook?
A compass and measuring-tape?
or
A crystal on handspun wool thread?
A dowsing rod for ley-lines?

Have others caught you
Staring at the ground in search of flint arrow-heads?
or
Staring into the distance calculating sight-lines?

Have you caught yourself
Imagining finding a massive menhir, complete with cupulas and carvings - to the accolade of archaeologists?
or
Dreaming of leading the solstice-chant at your local henge, complete with adoring accolytes - to the admiration of your mates?

Answers on a postcard, please.

Back a few years, I saw the warning-light of Doubt in my Mary's eye. Where was this dolmen-thing leading to? Around this time she had just discovered The Oil Drum.com and was beginning to grasp the seriousness of the global situation. Our evening conversations - a thirty-year-long dialogue over the customary bottle of wine - soon developed into a curious mix of Peak Oil warnings and population/water/resources statistics on her side - and Peak Wood, Neolithic population explosion and Bronze age soil erosion on my side.

It's possible that she saved me from turning into either of the caricatures listed above, by urging upon me the need for peer-reviewed information, analysis and discussion, and the importance of relevance. Both trainspotter and druid are essentially taking 'time out' in a playworld created to allow the poor bloke to feel he has some little control over events, or some special status denied him in the mundane world. Both are imaginative constructs, arenas where the protagonists and adversaries are chosen by the lead actor - be they numbers and lists, or gods and incantations.

Latterly her panic and gloom have settled into resigned pragmatism: our leaders will continue to fail us, so we'd better double the kitchen-garden, halve our consumption and strengthen village links. She reads less 'doomer-web' stuff and comes out dolmen-hunting more. She has, however, spotted a new danger emerging: her husband may be turning into that third possible stereotype, the Prehistory Bore. But her accuracy with shoe on shin under the dining-table is as unerring as ever - I won't be allowed to become a caricature of myself.

Richard @ dolmen.wordpress.com

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soltices and dolmen orientations


Last year I was all set to witness the sun rise on the newly-turned year - but it was pouring down, untypically for our normally cold clear winters.

This year I can touch the cloud-base, the sky's so heavy with snow. But I've a Theory To Prove, and the forecast said it will clear a bit . . . so it's up in the dark for porridge, then coffee in the flask and tog up like an Inuit - or Idiot.

Now, it's regrettable, but in this dumbed-down day-and-age, going dolmen-hunting puts me way over at the Eccentric end of the spectrum. So it was with alarm that I heard that my wife and daughter wanted to come too. I know they're used to me being a bit barmy - but to want to join in - they must be mad!

The theory isn't that startling: a number of archaeologists have noted that the alignments of the dolmens in Languedoc-Roussillon are all over the compass (including one north-facing, at Lugne) and that this reflects waves of 'immigration' or cultural influence - and integration.

I simply wanted to establish that one of the nearest dolmens to our village, was one of the very few of the 150 tombs in our region that actually faced the winter solstice sun-rise. With the dolmen de la Porteille, twenty km. south in the Corbieres Hills, it's the only tomb that faces exactly 120 degrees, E S-E.

I confirmed my own measurements with those in the Corpus Mensurarum (the core data from 2,500 communal tombs from around the Mediterranean) that forms the basis of Michael Hoskin's tremendous study: Tombs, Temples and their Orientations. It's a summation of half a lifetime's work at Cambridge University, with the data set out in clear and accessible form.
Also, I have to admit that the U.S. Naval Observatory Astronomical Applications Dept. azimuth-calculating programme was most useful.

Naturally I was disappointed when the glow to the east failed to break into a dazzling sunbeam smiting the chevet stone at the back of the tomb. But it did give rise to further thoughts regarding the other dolmens of the region - those that are oriented to a sun already risen.

Back at the house now and I'm delighted to come upon the article in Modern Antiquarian about the bone-middens near Stonehenge, and the winter festivals that they might represent.

Then I'm out in the courtyard, gathering old logs for this year's midwinter solstice bonfire party, when it occured to me that by not orienting their tombs too strictly to the instant of sunrise, by relaxing the 'fundamentalist dogma' by a few degrees, the clan could avoid disappointments, dismay and despair. If they let the day develop and the sun establish itself, before opening the tomb for its annual rituals - then the ceremony could continue more effectively - and with less sniggering from the family . . .

Hoskin's conclusions follow similar paths - only more seriously. He proposes that the waves of influences - sunrising architects versus sunsetting - mingled in a beneficent manner here in our region, and that pacific concessions to each 'culture' were made.

Meanwhile I found myself unconsciously building a kind of bonfire I've never done, or seen done, before. Seven short upright logs surrounding one tall central log, with space between each for bundles of kindling. The henge or harrispil of burning wood-menhirs would be pushed gradually closer to the central Standing Log - but still apart to allow a venturi-effect of air to circulate.

It worked, and there was plenty of cheer from the pot of Vin Brûlé for the families and friends, both French and English, who came to celebrate - but no bone-midden.

There's more on le Dolmen de la Madeleine - both summer and midwinter photos - plus links to some of Hoskin's work, and the sun/moon azimuth calculator at www.dolmen.wordpress.com

Richard

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Dolmens and hillforts


Languedoc has been a crossroads of people and cultures and trade since prehistoric times - and our corner of South West France where the river Aude meets the Mediterranean, reveals these traces most particularly. It's an unassuming but benign river : bringing snowmelt from the Pyrenees, slowing in the fertile plain, before opening into accessible lagoons at its mouth near Narbonne.

From the south, over the Pyrenees, came the sunrise dolmen-builders, and from the sea in the east came the sunset builders. They came and stayed because the climate was good - and because there were metals in the hills, and a clear route through the Carcassonne Gap and down the Garonne to the Atlantic.

Metals and goods came down from Ireland and Cornwall, and were traded and exchanged for ceramics and jade and jet from Italy and Greece, and up from the Iberian peninsular. Poppy and sativa seed users met the beer-drinking Bell-beaker people - traces remain in the now-silted protohistoric lagoon ports.

For them here, the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic period was a golden age, with enough land and forest to go round, sufficient water and wildlife for the population, and an energizing interchange of ideas and goods. Families and clans lived in peaceful harmony with modest communal burial tombs spaced evenly through the hills of the Minervois and the Corbieres. There was no warrior-caste : there was no war.

It's with deep pleasure then, that I roam around these hills looking for the half-forgotten burial places of these happy few.

Of course they did not know that they were happy. They didn't know that the mines they dug would produce manganese-dust, leaving precious children and valued elders half-paralysed. And that the need for wood to fuel the forges would denude the hills of trees. Or that their ever-increasing flocks of sheep would strip the slopes of soil. Or that empires to the east would fall, and trade collapse, and that a dark age would engulf them. Or that new people would come, the Volcae Tectosages or Celts as we generally know them, with the new metal and the iron-working skills that produced lethal and durable weaponry. Then everything could start up all over again, but different.

I record and write about those Iron Age hillforts and oppida because my megalithic searches bring me into close contact with them - and because they too are fast being forgotten. But I do it with unease and a sense of foreboding - though their locations are often dramatic and the construction impressive. For by this time money has arrived, and these places represent concentrations of wealth and power and fear.

So I return with relief to the solitary dolmens, knowing they signify valleys of people unencumbered yet with the burden of overpopulation and the weight of complexity.

Richard
http://www.dolmen.wordpress.com
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