21.    The setting sun at the equinox, as seen from Avebury’s Cove on the 20th of September 2021. This is what the stone egg that 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 a while.  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. 

23.  Except for the missing Covestone 3, 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 is not part of the egg, which is now extant in this view but of the outer circuit. These three, and others, were rescued from deep pits that Avebury's villagers had thrown them into and securely stood upright in concrete by Professor Piggott and Avebury's pre-war owner, the Scottish marmalade millionaire Alexander Keiller. 

25. The exciting 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 produces azimuths of the sun and moon as 53 and 44 degrees, respectively, which is only nine degrees.   

Perhaps the array tried to push the sun and moon further apart by one degree and force them to obey the rule.

27.  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 moon.  

Treating the Avenue as a series of rectangular cells of four stones, North noticed that he could find alignments on the moon no matter which direction he looked - across the cells or diagonally - or even from the opposite direction.

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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.  

Archaeologists often wrongly classify dedications as domesticated refuse, calling them Middens.

The West Kennet Avenue was an umbilical that connected Avebury to its sanctuary, a baby sun.   

29.  Just one of the 140-degree alignments of West Kennet Avenue that point to where the southernmost moon will rise out of Lurkeley Hill at 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. 

Once upon a time, this avenue continued past Stone 37 to end at the Sanctuary, a mile from here.

 31.  My 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 typical 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.  Like Avebury's northern ring, an egg, Stone 12 and the boy are aligned with the equinoctial sun and moon.

 
The boy was long-headed - what archaeologists call Dolichocephalic- proving him a member of the indigenous population. His skull was placed against Stone 12, and although dead and unable to see through the stone, he faced east to the equinoctial rising sun, moon, and the Pleiades. 

 
We have seen how high-intensity sunlight illuminates the Backstone of Avebury's Cove with Barley seeds placed at its base that might activate Avebury's northern ring - an egg. 

 
It is, therefore, not difficult to believe that this boy's spirit, protected by the nearest tree trunk that leant over him, might also bring the Sanctuary to life as was hoped for, like the barley seeds buried beneath Avebury's Cove. 

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The earliest known Beakers came from the Michaelsburg hillfort near Untergrombach, but the Michaelsburgs 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! 

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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 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 aligned with the West Kennet Avenue of stones that link the Sanctuary to the Avebury Henge, almost 2.5 km away. But Maud was wrong to call it a Fence because it formed part of the monument’s geometry.

 
Furthermore, Col. Cunnington should have measured the outer circle internally and not through the centre of its stones. Thanks to William Stukeley, Stonehenge and Avebury were already known to be internal devices. If the Col had measured the outer circle internally, he would have arrived at a figure of 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 again 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, too, and at a settlement site alongside Avebury's 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 twenty miles apart demands the acceptance of a single, solitary hypothesis for the whole Stone Age period. 

33. Longstone’s Cove and the double-stone row of the Beckhampton Avenue that led to Avebury.  A drawing by William Stukeley 21 May 1724.

Stukeley's text interpretation.

Longstone's Cove aspect as lately.

A. The stone still standing. (Covestone Adam)

B. Fallen. (Backstone)

C & D. Stones destroyed by Richard Fowler among others. 

E. The only stone of the whole avenue standing. (Eve)

F F F F. Several left lone but thrown down & half buried. 

A pair of stones marked F, F, seen on the far left of Stukeley's drawing, suggests that Beckhampton Avenue went further, as shown in Stukeley's previous drawing, Picture 21.

35.  Set on the same acute angle as a 3:4:5 Pythagorean triangle, Longstone's Cove spoke of singularity! 

Three plans of Longstone’s field excavations 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.

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 shown.  Not that that is a great loss, because Pollard’s and Lawson's scales do not match, either, Pollard's being the least accurate.  Fortunately, there is some helpful text in Lawson's book.  “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 above 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 can, and is, produced above.

Lawson's text does not mention the distance between Stones 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.   

         HEY  SANCTUARY:  YOU  GOT  MALE!

37.   A view southeast from Adam. 

 
The 125-degree azimuth of Longstone's Cove aims at the nearby peak of the hill.  However, the southernmost moon rises from the gap between the trees, and this horizon is far more distant. 

 
The comparison between the greater altitude of the solstice and the lesser altitude of the southernmost moon makes for a lesser difference between the sun and moon in terms of azimuth. This difference is only eight degrees.

 
Therefore, Longstone's Cove, unlike Avebury's Cove, brought the sun and moon closer together for copulation. 

39.   Andrew Lawson's book, Chalkland, seems superior because it shows Beckhampton Avenue obeying the 10-degree rule more accurately.  But the scale would be better if made three times larger and produced in proven megalithic yards. The north arrow seems accurate. 

So, what was it that was meant to be fertilised in Longstone's field before being transmitted via the moon-aligned fallopian known as the Beckhampton Avenue to the mother henge at Avebury and then via the umbilical known as the Kennet Avenue to the Sanctuary?  Why, an egg, of course!

Modes of transport...

The egg, fertilised by the Cove, that people hoped would grow inside the Ovary, obviously did not roll to the Avebury Henge by following Beckhampton Avenue.  So, what was going on?

Avebury folks were in the habit of dismembering their dead and taking parts of their bodies, particularly their lower mandibles (jawbones) while leaving their skulls behind. 

The Sanctuary is an excellent example because the lower mandible found buried beneath Stone 16 of the Stone and Post ring might well have been taken from the beaker corpse, actually, a male child, found by Cunnington to be buried beneath Adam at the start of a route that one day might reunite skull and jawbone together. 

 
Pottery sherds were likely treated in the same way, sherds of the same pot being separated long distant and just as remote.