Home Maintenance, Standing Stones and more Viewsheds

Friday: Noticeably cooler today. The home is like an open house - kitchen fitters, electrician, gas engineer and carpet assessor all booked in to make good things that aren't quite right! Aaahh! Home improvements!

So back to viewsheds.......and this time we will move to Pembrokeshire. I will use Google Earth again to explain things, so you will need to make sure you have this installed on your computer. It is a free download from:

http://earth.google.co.uk/intl/en-GB/

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, archaeologists often try to discover how inter-visible monuments are in the landscape as this helps in trying to understand any possible ritual role they may have had in the past. Standing Stones, those enigmatic totems from (mainly) the Bronze Age, have been subject to much spatial analysis in a bid to establish their possible ritual significance for those peoples that erected them.

Stonehenge is an example of an alignment that clearly attaches much importance to the mid-summer sunrise, and similar sight-lines exist at other prehistoric structures across the UK, and indeed across the world. Many of the stones of Stonehenge originated from Pembrokeshire, but how these "bluestones" travelled from the Preselis to Salisbury Plain still promotes heated discussion.. Man or nature? At the present the tide of opinion has flooded to the idea that prehistoric peoples transported them, (from now well identified outcrops),  for reasons best known to themselves.

To read alternative views  on the movement of the bluestones form Preseli to Stonehenge try:

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/stonehenge-how-did-stones-get-there.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/12/111222-stonehenge-bluestones-wales-match-glacier-ixer-ancient-science/

http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146413758

or countless other online discussions.

Anyway, I digress - back to viewsheds and standing stones.

In South Pembrokeshire there are three standing stones in fairly close proximity to each other. They are all on what was the Stackpole Estate, and as is common with such things, there are folk tales associated with them. Firstly, let me introduce you to the dramatis  personae.

A - Devils Quoit (St Twynnells parish)

http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/3923/devils_quoit.html

B - Harold Stone (Stackpole/St Petrox)

http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/3924/harold_stone.html

C - Devils Quoit (Stackpole)

http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/3927/devils_quoit.html

The most enduring folk memory connected to the three stones is that at sunset on the summer solstice, they come to life and dance together at Sais Ford (a derelict cottage near Sampson Farm, at the site of a fording of  Treforce Lake), returning to their stations by dawn.

Here is a Google Earth file to show their locations, along with that of St Twynnells church

http://sdrv.ms/XvgJtK

The viewshed of the Harold Stone is of particular interest. Today it has taken about 5 minutes to establish what the view from the Harold Stone is like. In the Bronze age, the ground might have been just as, if not more, open. The orientation of the Harold Stone is of interest too. It is a large slab of the local carboniferous limestone, like a large plate 30 cm thick. If you sit with your back against the plate, you are either facing north-west of south-east, depending upon which face you choose to rest against. facing south east, you are looking straight into the modern hedge. Without the hedge, the view is no more than 400 metres. You can check this on Google Earth using the ruler tool.

The view to the north-west is far more expansive.

In the mid-1980's my interest in megaliths had been ignited after a weekend's study school with Aubrey Burl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Burl) at Urchfont Manor near Devizes. I read widely about the archaeology of standing stones, henges and stone circles. I considered the ideas of Alfred Watkins, the great investigator of "ley lines" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line), and the intense archaeo-astronomical writings of the like of  Alexander Thom, who worked on the astronomical alignments of standing stones, believing that our ancient ancestors measured the motion of the sun, moon and stars with great precision. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Thom)

St Twynnells church from the west

I eventually did what you might call today a "desk based assessment" of the alignments of the two Devils Quoits and the Harold Stone. Drawing lines carefully over my well used Castlemartin OS Pathfinder map. the obvious thought was whether any alignments matched up with the sun rise or sun set at the solstices. In the lounge of the Suffolk cottage I was renting at the time, with its huge open log fire, the alignment of the Harold Stone with the Devils Quoit in St Twynnells looked promising. A site visit in the early spring, saw me sitting with my back against the Harold Stone, looking north-west directly at the Devils Quoit, and in the far distance the slender limestone grey tower of St. Twynnells Church on the crest of the old red sandstone ridge. It was uncanny, the way in which sitting relaxed against the slab, your sight line fell on the two distant monuments, their ages separated by a few thousand years. Had I found a Ley Line? Wouldn't it be "so cool" if the sun actually set at mid-summer over the Devils Quoit and St Twynnells Church?

Looking east from the top of St Twynnells church tower

Over the next few weeks my interests focused on different things - the wills and inventories of those who had died in St Twynnells and and the neighbouring parish of Warren in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I stopped thinking and reading about megaliths and the "Dancing Stones" of Stackpole - but not for long..........

By the way, the electrician didn't turn up, but the kitchen is now working properly, the damp problem was a false alarm and the damaged carpet will be replaced in time...

Next Time .... The things parents do for you, standing stones and the burial of William Poyer.