18. The setting sun at the equinox, as seen from Avebury’s Cove on the 20th of September 2021. This is what the stone egg once surrounded Avebury’s Cove pointed at. Stone 2, "The Backstone" of Avebury's Cove, built in the middle of the egg, can be seen in the picture.
Had I known, when this picture was taken, that this was the evening of the Harvest Moon, I would have stayed awhile. The moon rose about three-quarters of an hour after this picture was taken, but I was returning home by then. Furthermore, had I waited until around 11 o’clock, and if the miserable person who wanted me out of the way had not deceived me, I would have been able to photograph the moon as she set in the same place as the setting sun.
From Neolithic man's perspective, equinoctial alignments are special occasions where the moon follows the same path as the sun, but frustratingly, she never quite gets to join him.
19. A disguised vista. We must move north of the cove to see the horizon that Avebury’s northern egg (Stukeley's Lunar Temple) aimed at and the view that Stone Age folks enjoyed – namely - the north downslope of Cherhill Hill.
So, to give an idea of what it looked like in the Stone Age, the following picture will clear some stuff away, such as the barn, the trees, and Avebury Manor.
20.
Except for the missing Covestone 3 and several stones of Stukeley’s Lunar Temple, this is what a view from Avebury's Cove looked like during the equinox 4,500 years ago.
The row of three seen against the hedge are all part of the outer circuit. These three were rescued from deep pits that Avebury's villagers had thrown them into. All three were stood upright and secured in concrete by Professor Piggott and Avebury's pre-war owner, the Scottish marmalade millionaire Alexander Keiller.
21. Before we move out of Avebury to study its Sanctuary, stone avenues, and a second cove at Beckhampton…
Ground penetrating surveys made by P. J. Ucko and others showed that an egg-shaped array of post holes holding sixty-seven upright timbers once existed in the northeast sector of the Avebury Henge. These posts pinned down the cardinal points north, east, south, and west with great precision and divided the horizon into thirty-six lots of 10 degrees.
We could continue to inundate the Array with even more 10-degree lines to the point where it becomes unintelligible, but there is no need. Several monuments had to obey the "The Stone Age 10-degree rule" propounded by the 5,200-year-old Arminghall Henge of Norfolk, where perhaps the idea originated.
With axes pointing precisely 50 degrees from north, Stonehenge obeys the 10-degree rule, too. So does Woodhenge, near Stonehenge. So does Mount Pleasant in Dorset, where the Beaker People, travelling south from Stonehenge post 2,500 BC, took the idea to new heights.
22. The interesting thing about the Array is that the azimuths of the sun and moon make tangents with its rings when seen from the Cove.
So, what was the Array for?
We know that Stone Age folk used the 10-degree rule to force some monuments into a semblance of order. However, the altitude of the Marlborough Downs modifies the azimuths of the sun and moon to 53 and 44 degrees, respectively, a nine-degree difference.
Perhaps the array tried to force the sun and moon further apart by one degree and make them obey the rule.
23. "A scenographic view of the Druid temple of Abvry in north Wiltshire, as in its original." By William Stukeley.
It is hard to imagine that when Stukeley made this drawing, he had become a druid who believed Avebury to be a serpent. Perhaps he hoped to get into the spirit of things by understanding more about the prehistoric mind. No matter, I cannot produce anything better to show that Avebury had two avenues of paired stones - one that entered the henge and another that left it.
The West Kennet Avenue, to the right of the picture, exits the henge and can be seen to end at the Sanctuary. Stukeley believed the Sanctuary to be the head of the serpent.
The Beckhampton Avenue, to the left of the picture, was disputed for many years until archaeologists dug around ‘Adam’ in 2003. Megalith Adam is all that remains of Avebury's second cove. ‘Eve,’ a short distance from ‘Adam,’ is now known to be the only stone of the Beckhampton Avenue still standing.
24. First, though, the West Kennet Avenue. Or simply - The Kennet Avenue.
This avenue of paired stones once connected the Avebury Henge to the Sanctuary on Overton Hill - one and a half miles away. This section of the avenue is almost all that is left of it, and we wouldn't have this were it not for Alexander Keiller, who spent his vast fortune restoring much of Avebury. The stones you see here were buried out of sight when Keiller arrived, but with the help of his friend Professor Piggott and a team of workers, the stones were excavated and reset in their original positions.
Interestingly, both Keiller and Piggott believed that Avebury's stones were sexed. Bulbous stones were considered female, and pillar-like stones were male. According to that, the stone on the right of the picture is female, and the stone on the left is male.
So, the Stone Age hypothesis was known by Piggott and Keiller pre-World War Two.
Enter now the astronomer, Professor John North.
Professor North visited Avebury looking for star alignments but found precious few of them.
Furthermore, he disregarded those he encountered along West Kennet Avenue in favour of alignments on the minor moon.
Treating the Avenue as a series of rectangular cells of four stones, North noticed that he could find alignments on the minor moon no matter which direction he looked - across the cells or diagonally - and even from the opposite direction.
*******
Male and female stones - astronomical alignments on the moon - Niedermendig Lava from Germany -- boys buried with beaker pottery and other dedications beneath the megaliths of the WKA.
The all-female West Kennet Avenue was an umbilical that connected Avebury to its sanctuary, a baby sun. And it's the moon egg of Woodhenge near Stonehenge which proves it.
25. The accuracy of our West Kennet Avenue survey can be attributed to a combination of Bing Maps, Ordinance Survey, and aerial photography from Google Earth.
Never mind what Professor North said about it, the West Kennet Avenue is primarily aligned on where the southernmost rising moon exits Lurkeley Hill every nineteen years at an azimuth of 140 degrees.
So, the Avenue respects the Stone Age 10-degree rule established by the Arminghall Henge of Norfolk in 3,200 BC. Some pairs of stones also respect the cardinal points of the compass.
Tellingly, the strange twist in the avenue where it exits the henge causes stone pair six of this umbilical to pass through some water-logged ground. Indeed, so does Stonehenge's Avenue.
It was realised that if we could prove the Neolithic moon to be female, we would have the hypothesis for our Stone Age monuments, which, in turn, could further confirm the West Kennet Avenue to be an umbilical cord and the Avebury Henge as a womb.
The first proof came with the realisation that Woodhenge, near Stonehenge, was a moon-egg. "Stonehenge Secrets 2007," by yours truly (in the major libraries but out of print.)
But the definitive proof came with the 2008 GPS survey of Woodhenge... "The Real Woodhenge, The Key to Stonehenge 2011." ISBN 978-0-9553012-8-5 (also out of print)
26. The Avenue that says Moon, Moon, ad infinitum. This is just one of the 140-degree alignments of West Kennet Avenue that points to where the southernmost moon will rise out of Lurkeley Hill during the moon’s standstill.
The West Kennet Avenue respects the Stone Age 10-degree rule many times over, with its megaliths producing a plethora of 140-degree azimuths aligned upon the moon like this one.
The inner face of Stone 33 West, seen in the foreground, to the inner face of Stone 37 East, demonstrates just one example of many instances.
Originally, this avenue continued past Stone 37 to end at the Sanctuary, a mile from here.
27. December 2018 survey of Avebury's Sanctuary while waiting for the winter solstice sunset. With circles marked out with blue-coloured concrete blocks to represent sarsen stones and red cylinders of concrete to represent timber posts, this is what the Sanctuary looks like today.
28. A model of the Sanctuary: Can you see the little man? Note how the internal posts are jockeying for position. Living accommodation? I do not think so.
A skeleton of an adolescent boy of about 14 years of age, with knees drawn up to his chin in the foetal position, was found buried on the inside of Stone 12 of the alternating stone and timber ring seen above. I have marked his grave with a red square. At his knees was found a complete but broken Beaker of likely German origin.
Archaeologists say the boy was long-headed - what they call Dolichocephalic. This would make him a member of the indigenous population. This is hard to believe since the boys buried alongside the WKA were round-headed beaker children.
The head of the boy buried at the Sanctuary was placed against Stone 12, facing east to the equinoctial rising sun, moon, and the Pleiades, as if able to look through Stone 12.
We have seen how high-intensity sunlight illuminates the Backstone of Avebury's Cove with Chaff-free Barley seeds buried against its rear face that might activate Avebury's northern ring - an egg. It is, therefore, not difficult to believe that this boy, or his spirit, might also bring the Sanctuary to life as the builders hoped for.
The earliest known Beakers came from the Michaelsburg hillfort near Untergrombach, but the Michaelsburgers abandoned their fort and became lost to history when the Rhine changed its course. Nevertheless, Beaker pots are good evidence of the two countries' friendship - though perhaps it was more like an uneasy peace!
Maud Cunnington and her team stripped the Sanctuary bare in 1930. And her husband, Col. Cunnington, measured the diameters of its six circles. The colonel considered the outermost circle 130 feet in diameter and the fence ring, half size at 65 feet.
The 65-foot circle was built from frail wooden posts that Maud believed to be a wattle fence. She also wrongly thought that the two large pillars, seen to be part of it, carried a gate. These posts are a physical link with the West Kennet Avenue of stones that join the Sanctuary to the Avebury Henge, almost 2.5 km away. But Maud called it a fence incorrectly because it formed part of the monument’s geometry. Furthermore, Col. Cunnington probably measured the outer circle through the centre of the stones.
Thanks to William Stukeley, Stonehenge and Avebury are already known to be internal devices. So, if the Col had measured the outer circle internally, he would have arrived at forty-seven megalithic yards -- eleven megalithic yards bigger than Stonehenge’s Sarsen Circle.
Maud’s team found a total of seven circles at the Sanctuary. However, only the outer two are sufficiently accurate for us to bother with without completely stripping the monument and surveying it with GPS.
Twenty pieces of Niedermendig lava were found buried five feet deep (1.5 metres) around the base of one of the Sanctuary’s wooden posts, and I have placed a toy man against the post where those fragments were found.
Quote. ‘The use of this rock was known to the Beaker People in the Rhine area, where it was also used by their predecessors - the Neolithic people of the ‘Michelberger’ culture.’ I am indebted to Herr George Kraft of the Museum fur Urgeschichte, Freiburg. Maud Cunnington1929.
Niedermendig lava was found at Stonehenge and at a settlement site alongside West Kennet Avenue. This raises the question of whether or not German tribes were the brains behind our monuments.
Nevertheless, finding Niedermendig lava at these critical locations eighteen miles apart demands the acceptance of a single, solitary hypothesis for the whole Stone Age period.
29. Survey plan of the Sanctuary. This plan view was made with the help of several sources.
1. Maud Cunnington's original plan, with a 140-foot scale, was so accurate as to put today's archaeologists to shame.
2. On-site measurements
3. Online Bing satellite photography.
The stone-and-post-ring is likely based on a 12:16:24 megalithic-inch Pythagorean triangle – even though, uniquely, the geometry is internal to the timber posts.
Also, we cannot escape the likelihood that people linked the Sanctuary and Avebury's outer ring with the function Pi. For example, Maud's husband measured the Fence ring at 65 feet in diameter. Converting this figure to Megalithic Yards, we get 23.88, which, when multiplied by Pi, produces a circumference of 75 Megalithic Yards. This figure relates to Avebury and Windmill Hill's largest radius of 750MY.
Similarly, while the outer circle was likely placed on a 47 Megalithic Yard circle, a measurement taken through stone centres, say 47.75, gives a circumference of 150MY.
Perhaps that is why some of the stones of the outer ring, i.e., stones 21 to 26, are placed inward, and some are skewed sideways as if the builders could not make up their minds.
30. Longstone’s Cove and the double stone row of the Beckhampton Avenue that led to Avebury. A drawing by William Stukeley 21 May 1724. Interpretation of Stukeley’s handwriting by the author.
Longstone's Cove aspect as lately. This is Stukeley’s heading statement, as seen beneath Stone C.
A. The stone still standing. This is Adam. B. Fallen. This is the now extant backstone. C & D. Stones destroyed by Richard Fowler among others. E. The only stone of the whole avenue standing. This is Eve. F F F F. Several left lone but thrown down & half buried. Extant avenue stones.
Two 'F' stones on the far left of Stukeley's drawing suggest that Beckhampton Avenue went further, as shown in his previous drawing, picture 23. Still, archaeologists dispute this extension to the Avenue.
31. Adam, the one remaining Covestone, is seen with Eve in the background. Here, it is evident that they are named the wrong way around.
Of equal importance is that Adam has now received the Tee-square treatment to discover that its inner face points 198 degrees from the north. This concurs within one degree of P. J. Ucko's plan.
32. Set on the same acute angle as a solitary 3:4:5 Pythagorean triangle, Longstone's Cove spoke of singularity!
Three Longstone field excavation plans are available in the public domain, and these were compared one against the other by layer superimposition in CAD. One reasonably good image is on page 105 of Andrew Lawson’s book "Chalkland: An Archaeology of Stonehenge and its Region." Another is based on preliminary results of the dig by Pollard and Gilling. Their plan was most helpful in placing Eve’s opposite number, which we shall call Eve B, even though, judging by what we know of the WKA, Eve B was male gender.
An excellent plan by P. J. Ucko was discovered in one of my scanned files, but I do not know where I got it.
Longstone’s field, near Beckhampton, with its Neolithic ditched-enclosure and stone cove, was excavated by Pollard and Gilling in 2003. So, it follows that Ucko produced his plan the following year before succumbing to diabetes. Ucko’s plan is the most accurate, even though no scale is given. Not that that is a significant loss because Pollard’s and Lawson's scales do not match. Pollard and Gilling’s being the least accurate. Fortunately, Lawson's book contains some helpful text: “The Longstone’s Enclosure measures some 140 by 110 metres.”
Well, 140 by 110 metres converts to 168.67 by 132.53 Megalithic Yards, so an oval of this size has been superimposed on Ucko's plan to scale it.
Further: “The length of a line transverse to the Avenue - made between three stones, is equal to the diameter of the Sanctuary at the end of the West Kennet Avenue.”
And, since we know that the diameter of the Sanctuary's outer circle of stones -- measured internally, is forty-seven Megalithic Yards, this internal measurement is shown between Covestones F and G.
Lawson's text does not mention the distance between Covestones C and G at 23.5 MY, which matches the Sanctuary's Fence Ring.
We also find the internal measurement between Backstone B and Stone C to be 16 Megalithic Yards.
So, the Beckhampton Cove is closely related to the Sanctuary!
We should also mention that while restoring Adam to the vertical, Maud Cunnington discovered a beaker boy's burial alongside it. And despite its name, Adam was female to the early residents of Avebury!
HEY SANCTUARY: YOU GOT MALE!
33. This is another view of Longstone’s Enclosure to demonstrate how this massive oval ring ditch was composed of radii that increased exponentially. I.e. 60 plus 10 = 70, 70 plus 20 = 90, and so on. So, early folks regarded this oval as a "live ovary" connected to the Avebury henge via Beckhampton Avenue.
However, we cannot produce a plan to show the exact sizes of those radii because we would need several hundred coordinates and a Cartesian plot. But, as far as I know, those coordinates have never been garnered.
34. A view southeast from Adam.
The 125-degree azimuth of Longstone's Cove aims at the nearby peak of a hill. However, the southernmost moon rises from the gap between the trees where the altitude is lower.
The comparison between the greater altitude of the solstice and the lesser altitude of the southernmost moonrise makes for a lesser difference between the sun and moon in terms of azimuth. This difference is around eight degrees.
Therefore, Longstone's Cove brought the sun and moon closer together. The purpose in the minds of early Avebury folks was copulation.
This image gives the azimuths of the southernmost sun and moon as they enter Longstone's Cove.
I would like to know what Pollard and Gilling found at the base of the extant Backstone.
35. In some ways, Andrew Lawson's book, Chalkland, seems superior because it shows Beckhampton Avenue obeying the 10-degree rule more accurately. However, the scale would be better if made three times larger and produced in proven megalithic yards. Fortunately, the north arrow is accurate.
Never forgetting that we are discussing the Stone Age mind here; what was it, apart from the beaker boy, that was meant to be fertilised in Longstone's field before being transmitted along the moon-aligned fallopian - AKA the Beckhampton Avenue - to the mother henge at Avebury, and then via the WKA umbilical to the Sanctuary. Was it an ovum, a zygote, an embryo or an egg? Or was it simply the life-spirit of the beaker boy buried beneath Adam?
Abstract modes of transport...
Whatever people hoped would be produced by the Ovary, which was fertilised by the sun and moon acting on the cove and its beaker boy, did not roll along Beckhampton Avenue to the Avebury henge - a womb. So, what was going on?
Avebury folks were in the habit of dismembering their dead and taking some body parts away, notably lower mandibles (jawbones), while leaving the skulls behind.
The Sanctuary is an excellent example because the lower mandible found beneath Stone 16 of the Stone and Post ring might have been taken from the boy's corpse at Beckhampton's cove - at the start of a route that suggests skull and jawbone ought to be reunited. Since the jaw is auditory, it may have represented life; after all, the dead cannot speak.
Pottery sherds were likely treated the same way, with sherds of the same pot being separated long distance and just as remotely.
36. Coming next: The answer to Avebury's oldest monument...The Causewayed Enclosure on top of Windmill Hill.