Fascinating. Stonehenge’s location may be related to a certain natural landscape feature that quite by chance coincided with the sun’s coordinates for the midsummer solstice.
So I learned last night from a doco that featured the theory of Mike Parker Pearson. Gullies running from the stonehenge in a line pointing to the position of the midsummer solstice sun on the horizon were long assumed to be manmade simply because of that alignment. Elementary, My Dear Watson.
Archaeological excavations on those pathways, however, apparently led to the realization that they were not manmade at all but were a geological structure, presumably gouged out by a retreating glacier long before Stonehenge itself.
(Okay, don’t tell me everyone else knew that and I am the last to catch up!)
If so, then we evidently have an explanation for the location of Stonehenge, way out there in the otherwise middle of nowhere.
Neil Godfrey
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It’s fascinating. Stonehenge was a/the focus of a sacred landscape, the land of the ancestors. So it was a very intentional “middle of nowhere” situated on a chosen alignment with these natural features.
OK, I won’t say I already “knew” about this hypothesis :-], but I saw a different doco about Stonehenge a few years ago where Pearson mentioned the idea. So I’ve heard of it but not in depth. Wish I could access this documentary, these are among my favorite types of shows to watch. Thanks for the info, I’ll check to see if someone has posted it to YouTube, Daily Motion, etc.
There’s always MPP’s book, of course, which you may have read. I debated long and hard about getting a copy of that and in the end painfully decided, “No, I simply have too long a back-log of reading already, dammit.”
The backlog of books that I want to read will outlive me. That’s part of the appeal of a 1 hour documentary, it takes so much less time. You don’t learn as much as you can from a good book, but you can at least get a Reader’s Digest level overview. :-}