Julian Cope presents Head Heritage | The Modern Antiquarian Forum

FourWinds

10943 posts

Re: Henge corrals?

Dec 19, 2005, 08:54

Every site has to be taken on its own merits. Take the early churches. As I mentioned before, many of these do align to the sunrise on the local saint's day, not due east. Surely that isn't a coincidence?

I do agree that not every alignment is going to be valid, but when a great many tombs face cardinal or quarter compass points they surely must be. If they can be taken as significant then I would think that the rest must be for some reason or other. When you get a great many tombs that face a V-shape in the surrounding mountains then those views must be important.

My view is that the Victorian church analogy can be dismissed because tombs were not built where there was a bit of space. Many lowland tombs/circles seem to have been built on good farming land. This is something that seems to have been overlooked. The ancients actually set aside a good piece of land to build somewhere for their ancestors to go to. Maybe this was to assure them of some good land in the afterlife?

The different tomb type in Ireland demonstrate very different ideas of what was important. Passage tombs seem to face key sunrises/sunsets (in general), court tombs tend towards north & south, portal tombs face east & wedge tombs tend towards the west. All these are from different eras and potentially different cultures with different ideas.

Cork stone circles and stone rows nearly all align SW/NE. Other Irish circles face different directions. This does not make the Cork alignment standard invalid, but isolates it as a local design feature.

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Re: Henge corrals? (PeterH)

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Re: Henge corrals? (PeterH)

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