Astronomical Rock Art at Stoupe Brow, Fylingdales

first published 28 October 2016

I recently came across Rock Art and Ritual by Brian Smith and Alan Walker, (subtitled Interpreting the Prehistoric landscapes of the North York Moors. Stroud: History Press 2008. 38.). It tells the story: Following a wildfire of many square miles of the North Yorkshire Moors, thought ecologically devastating, those interested in its few decorated stones headed out to see how these antiquities had fared.

Background

Fire had revealed many more stones carrying rock art or in organised groups. An urgent archaeological effort would be required before the inevitable regrowth of vegetation.


Figure 1 Neolithic stone from Fylingdales Moor | Credit: Graham Lee, North York Moors National Park Authority.

A photo of one stone in particular attracted my attention, at a site called Stoupe Brow (a.k.a. Brow Moor) near Fylingdales, North Yorkshire.

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What stone L9 might teach us

image of stone L9, left of corridor of Gavrinis Cairn,
4Km east of Carnac complex. [image: neolithiqueblog]

This article was first published in 2012.

One test of validity for any interpretation of a megalithic monument, as an astronomically inspired work, is whether the act of interpretation has revealed something true but unknown about astronomical time periods. The Gavrinis stone L9, now digitally scanned, indicates a way of counting the 18 year Saros period using triangular counters  founded on the three solar year relationship of just over 37 lunar months, a major subject (around 4000 BC) of the Le Manio Quadrilateral, 4 Km west of Gavrinis. The Saros period is a whole number, 223, of lunar months because the moon must be in the same phase (full or new) as the earlier eclipse for an eclipse to be possible. 

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Megalithic application of numeric time differences

Natural time periods between celestial phenomena hold powerful insights into the numerical structure of time, insights which enabled the megalith builders to access an explanation of the world unlike our own. When looking at two similarly-long time-periods, the megalithic focussed on the difference between them, these causing the two periods to slide in and out of phase, generating a longer period in which the two celestial bodies exhibit a complete ensemble of variation, in their relationship to each other. This slippage of phase between celestial periods holds a pattern purely based upon number, hidden from the casual observer who does not study them in this way. Such numerical patterns are only fully revealed through counting time and analysing the difference between periods numerically.

For example, the solar year is longer than the lunar year by 10 and 7/8 days (10.875 days) and three solar years are longer than three lunar years by three times 10.875 days, that is by 32 and 5/8th days (32.625 days), which is 32/29 of a single lunar month of 29.53 days.

The earliest and only explicit evidence for such a three year count has been found at Le Manio’s Quadrilateral near Carnac (circa 4,000 BCE in Brittany, France) used the inches we still use to count days, a “day-inch” unit then widespread throughout later megalithic monuments and still our inch, 1/12 of the foot [Heath & Heath. 2011]. The solar-lunar difference found there over three years was 32.625 day-inches, is probably the origin of the unit we call the megalithic yard and the megalith builders appear to have adopted this differential length, between a day-inch count over three lunar and solar years, in building many later monuments.


Figure 1 (in plan above) The monumentalising of a three-year day inch count at Le Manio as a right triangle based upon its southern kerb (in profile below), automatically generating the megalithic yard.
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