Okay, so i've been doing some research into stone circles up in Cumbria (a region in the NW of England known as the Lack District, due to the fact there are many large lakes there). This all started when i was an archaeology under-grad doing an essay on archaeoastronomy (how ancient sites align with heavenly bodies). I stumbled accross some stuff done by this guy called Alxeander Thom. Basically he was a professor in engineering and was the first person to systematically document man made stone features in Scotland and England.
So, being of engineering stock, he did all this very well, using all the correct surveying techniques available at the time. Now, when he came to do the circles in the Lakes he found that they weren't exactly circular, and wondered why. It's not that a circle is hard to plan (stick in the ground, long length of string, etc), and if your gonna go to all the trouble of dragging them heavy ol' stones all the way to a site through mountains and whatnot, why be lazy about how you set them out?
Well, to cut the story short, he did a big ol' study into this phenomena, and came up with the idea that these circles were actually set out with precise geometrical paterns based on a measurement he called 'the mesolithic yard'.
i managed to dig up some of these plans, and the geometrical figures he drew inside these circles looked enticingly similar to your friend and mine, the pentacle.
since then other archaeologists have largely dismissed his findings, running all sorts of computer simulations on circle formation and interal geometries. Fair enough i thought, ther argument against him seems pretty tight, and i largely forgot about it all.
however (insert dramatic music here), during my dissertation (on the oldest of these circles and how they related to the stone axe trade) i found that there are two circles which seem to defy all laws of probability, and could well point to the fact that Thom may have been correct after all.
These circles are Castlerigg, which is just slightly NW of Keswick, and Burnmoor, just a little west of a small village called Boot. Now these two circles are quite significantly far from each other, and yet you can perfectly super-impose the ground plans of these circles ontop of one another with only a small variation on a few of the stones.
i say to you that this is unlikely to have happens coincidently, and as such must have been planned using the internal geometric patterns which look suspiciously like the pentacle.
i was wondering if any of you know any histories of how the pentacle came about, because i'm thinking that its pre-cursor could well have appeared during the Neolithic.
so, thanks for reading this far, and let me know what you think! |
