Tag: Clava

The Avebury Square within it’s Southern Circle

Soil resistance work (“geophys”), by archaeologists from the University of Leicester, of the land inside the southern stone circle of Avebury Henge, has revealed more about the Obelisk and lines of standing stones, which appear to have formed a near-square rectangle. Information can be hard to obtain when work is yet to be published but a press release to the Guardian and others many months ago (December 27th 2019) enabled figures from a media set to be viewed with public access. This has enabled me to so some site interpretation, using the (as-yet damned) numerical technique called ancient metrology. My results are fascinating and build upon the megalithic use of counting time as length to track important time-cycles such as the Nodal Period of 6800 days, between lunar maxima and minima, and the Metonic period of both 19 years and 235 lunar months, within which all of the varied orientations of Sun Moon and Sky are recycled.

Figure 1 Avebury Henge from the North with major features labelled
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Astronomical Time within Clava Cairns

In North East Scotland, near Inverness, lies Balnuaran of Clava, a group of three cairns with a unique and distinctive style, called Clava cairns; of which evidence of 80 examples have been found in that region. They are round, having an inner and outer kerb of upright stones between which are an infill of stones. They may or may not have a passageway from the outer to the inner kerb, into the round chamber within. At Balnuaran, two have passages on a shared alignment to the midwinter solstice. In contrast, the central ring cairn has no passage and it is staggered west of that shared axis.

This off-axis ring cairn could have been located to be illuminated by the midsummer sunrise from the NE Cairn, complementing the midwinter sunset to the south of the two passageways of the other cairns. Yet the primary and obvious focus for the Balnuaran complex is the midwinter sunset down the aligned passages. In fact, the ring cairn is more credibly aligned to the lunar minimum standstill of the moon to the south – an alignment which dominates the complex since, in that direction the horizon is nearly flat whilst the topography of the site otherwise suffers from raised horizons.

Cairns at Balnuaran of Clava. plan by A. Thom and pictures by Ian B. Wright
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