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Trethevy Quoit in danger
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tiompan
tiompan
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Re: Trethevy Quoit in danger
Mar 03, 2013, 11:23
Littlestone wrote:
tiompan wrote:
Sound construction techniques was not the point of my comment .
It was in reference to the earlier comment which I quoted ""If you had all those pieces laid out on the ground you'd never put them back together like that again would you dad!"


We may be talking at cross purposes. I read Sanctuary's comment that, "If you had all those pieces laid out on the ground you'd never put them back together like that again..." as meaning that given the option of putting the pieces on the ground back together again you’d put them back corrrectly – correctly here meaning as they originally were and, by implication, in the most stable way.

We might add that aesthetics does not preclude stability (or vice versa) in fact it might be argued that both, when correctly applied, go hand-in-hand to produce something which is both beautiful and stable.


Quite . Trethevy has stood for millenia whether or not it is presently on the point of collapse is has nothing to do with the fact that the most parsimonious description of it's original structure is what has been suggested for some time i.e. the backstone collapsed and the northern ante -chamber stone was removed . The only other likely structural change from the original build was removal of cairn material . Roy does not accept this view .
If your only concern is stability then you don't build fancy monuments like portal tombs with their extreme sloping capstones , or massive capstones perched on three points and also sloping . That the builders managed to do produce stability and an example of conspicuous architectural extravagance is to their credit but many, hardly surprisingly , eventually collapsed . We could use the materials at Trethevy to build more efficient stable structures similar to a portal tomb but the point is that is not what the builders did , they built Trethevy the way they wanted it , not from a sensible modern viewpoint and there is no evidence to suggest that their original build was modified to make the structure any more or less stable .
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