Tag: squaring circle

Kerherzo Rectangle near Erdeven & Crucuno

first published in March 2018

In 1973, Alexander Thom found the Crucuno rectangle to have been “accurately placed east and west” by its megalithic builders, and “built round a rectangle 30 MY [megalithic yards] by 40 MY” and that “only at the latitude of Crucuno could the diagonals of a 3, 4, 5 rectangle indicate at both solstices the azimuth of the sun rising and setting when it appears to rest on the horizon.” In a recent article I found metrology was used between the Crucuno dolmen (within Crucuno) and the rectangle in the east to count 47 lunar months, since this closely approximates 4 eclipse years (of 346.62 days) which is the shortest eclipse prediction period available to early astronomers.


Figure 1 Two key features of Crucuno’s Rectangle

About 1.22 miles northwest lie the alignments sometimes called Erdeven, on the present D781 before the hamlet Kerzerho – after which hamlet they were named by Archaeology. These stone rows are a major complex monument but here we consider only the section beside the road to the east. Unlike the Le Manec Kermario and Kerlestan alignments which start north of Carnac, Erdevan’s alignments are, like the Crucuno rectangle accurately placed east and west. 


Figure 2 Two stones, angled to the diagonal of a 3-4-5 triangle 235 feet from north west stone and setting sun at summer solstice
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Educating Megalith Builders at Crucuno rectangle

Around Carnac in Brittany the land is peppered with uniquely-formed megalithic designs. In contrast, Great Britain’s surviving monuments are largely standing stones and stone circles. One might explain this as early experimentation at Carnac followed by a well-organised set of methods and means in Britain. What these experiments near Carnac were concerned with is contentious, there being no appetite, in many parts of society, for a prehistory of high-achieving geometers and exact scientists. Part of the problem is that pioneers interpreting monuments are themselves hampered by their own preferences. Once Alexander Thom had found the megalithic yard as a likely building unit, he tended to use that measure to the exclusion of other known metrological systems (see A.E. Berriman’s Historical Metrology. Similarly, John Neal’s breakthrough in All Done With Mirrors, having found the foot we still use to be the cornerstone of ancient metrology, led to his ambivalent relationship to the megalithic yard. Neal’s interpretation of the Crucuno rectangle employs a highly variable set of megalithic yards, perhaps missing the simpler point, that his foot-based metrology is supported as present within the dimensions of the Crucuno rectangle; said by Thom to be a “symbolic observatory” of the sun: this monument was an educational device, in which Neal finds the geometry of “squaring the circle” which, as we see later, was probably the Rectangle’s main metrological meaning.


Figure 1 Alexander Thom’s survey of Crucuno Rectangle by Alexander Thom, see MRBB, 1978,   19   & 175-176
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