18. The setting sun at 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. The "Backstone" 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 by then I was well on my way back home. Further, if 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, seen above. The whole point being - from the perspective of Neolithic man - is that the moon always follows the sun around, but she never quite gets to join him.
19. Unfortunately, we must move over a bit these days if we want to see the far horizon and what the northern egg aimed at. Namely, the northern downslope of Cherhill Hill.
To give you an idea of what it looked like in Stone Age times, the next picture will clear some stuff away, such as the barn, the trees, and Avebury Manor.
20. This is what a view from Avebury's Cove looked like five thousand years ago.
Every megalith of Avebury’s northern egg, what Stukeley called a Lunar Temple - is of course missing, having been destroyed years ago. So the row of three seen against the hedge, are not part of Avebury’s northern egg but part of the outer circuit. These three, and others, were dug up and restored to the vertical by Avebury's pre-war owner, the Scottish marmalade millionaire, Alexander Keiller.
21. One more thing before we move out of Avebury to study its Sanctuary, its avenues of stone, 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 or stones 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, as well as dividing the whole 360-degrees of sky into thirty-six lots of 10-degrees.
We could continue to inundate this 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 five-thousand-two-hundred-year-old, Arminghall Henge of Norfolk, where the idea probably originated.
With a pair of axes, pointing precisely 50-degrees from north, Stonehenge obeys the 10-degree rule too. So does Woodhenge, near Stonehenge. So also does Mount Pleasant in Dorset, where the Beaker People, traveling 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 these rings when seen from the Cove.
So what was the array for?
We know that Stone Age folk used the 10-degree rule to try to force some monuments into a semblance of order. And since the 1.7- degree altitude of the Marlborough Downs gives an azimuth of the moon, relative to the Cove of 44-degrees, and the solstice to be 53, the difference between the sun and the moon is only nine-degrees.
So, the array wanted to push the sun and moon further apart by as little as one-degree to force them to obey the 10-degree rule.
Difficult to believe? Then wait until we come to analyse Avebury's other cove at Beckhampton. For there, Avebury folks reduced the difference between the sun and moon to eight-degrees. Thus bringing them closer together!
23. A scenographic view of the Druid temple of Abvry (Stukeley's spelling of Avebury) in north Wiltshire, as in its original. By William Stukeley.
It is hard to image that when Stukeley made this drawing, he had become a druid and believed Avebury to be a serpent. Perhaps he hoped to understand more about the prehistoric mind by getting into the spirit of things?
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. 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 in place.
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 upright in concrete.
Interestingly, both Keiller and Piggott believed that Avebury's stones were sexed. Bulbous stones were considered female, and pillar-like stones, male. According to that, the stone seen on the right of the picture is female and that on the left is male.
Clearly, the Stone Age hypothesis was known pre WW2.
Enter now the astronomer, Professor John North.
Professor North visited Avebury looking for star alignments but found precious few of them. Also, he disregarded those he found along the West Kennet Avenue in favour of alignments on the moon. Treating the Avenue as a series of rectangular cells of four, North noticed that no matter which way he looked - be it across the cells or diagonally - or even from the opposite direction, he could find an alignment on the moon.
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Male and female stones -- astronomical alignments on the moon -- Niedermendig Lava from Germany -- boy burials with beaker pottery and other dedications, (often wrongly classed by archaeologists as domesticated refuse, which they called Middens.)
The West Kennet Avenue was an umbilical which connected Avebury to its Sanctuary -- A baby sun. What else are we supposed to think?
25. The accuracy of this survey of the West Kennet Avenue can be put down to a combination of Bing Maps, the Ordinance Survey, and aerial photography from Google Earth.
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.
The Avenue therefore respects the Stone Age 10-degree rule set up by the Arminghall Henge of Norfolk in 3,150 BC. Some pairs also respect the cardinal points of the compass.
Oh, and the strange twist in the avenue where it exits the henge (a womb) at stone pair six, causes it to pass through moist ground -- hence water.
I realised in 2007 that if I could prove the Neolithic moon to be female, I would have the hypothesis for our Stone Age monuments, and that, in turn, could further prove the West Kennet Avenue to be an umbilical cord.
The first proof came with the realisation that Woodhenge, near Stonehenge, was a moon-egg, in 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 in... The Real Woodhenge - the key to Stonehenge - 2011, ISBN 978-0-9553012-8-5 (also out of print)
26. Just one of the many 140-degree alignments of the West Kennet Avenue that point at where the southernmost moon will rise out of Lurkeley Hill in late 2024.
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 over this Hill.
One such alignment is shown above.
From 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 similar instances.
Originally, of course, this avenue of stones once continued past Stone 37 to end at the Sanctuary, a mile away.
27. My December 2018 survey of Avebury's Sanctuary while waiting for the winter solstice sunset, which lacked sufficient clarity to be of much use.
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. The peak of Silbury Hill can also be seen in this picture.
28. 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 knee's drawn up to his chin in typical foetal position, was found buried on the inside of Stone 12 of the alternating stone and timber circle 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.
The boy’s skull was of the long-headed type - what archaeologists call Dolichocephalic, which proves him to have been a member of the indigenous population. His skull was placed up-against Stone 12, and although he would not have been able to see through it, he was facing east to the equinoctial rising sun, moon, and stars. We have seen how high-intensity sunlight illuminates the Backstone of Avebury's Cove, and how its early inhabitants hoped that Barley seeds placed at its base might activate Avebury's Northern Circle -- an egg. It is, therefore, not difficult to believe that the spirit of this boy, his remains protected by the nearest tree trunk placed leaning over him, might also bring the Sanctuary to life as was hoped for the barley seeds buried beneath the Cove.
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The earliest known Beakers came from the Michaelsburg hillfort near Untergrombach, but Beaker folk abandoned their fort and became lost to history when the Rhine changed its course. Nevertheless, Beaker pots are good evidence of friendship between the two countries -- though perhaps it was more like an uneasy peace!
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Maud Cunnington and her team stripped the Sanctuary bare in 1930. Her husband, Col. Cunnington, measured the diameters of its six circles. The colonel considered the outermost circle to be 130 feet in diameter and the next one in to be half that size at 65 feet. The 65-foot circle was built from frail wooden posts that led Maud to wrongly believe its use as a wattle fence. She also wrongly believed that the two large posts, seen to be part of it, once 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’s away. But Maud was wrong to call it a Fence Ring 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. This was because, 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.
Maud’s team found a total of seven circles at the Sanctuary, but only the outer two are sufficiently accurate for us to bother with, without completely stripping the centre of the monument again and surveying it with GPS.
Twenty pieces of Niedermendig lava was found buried five feet (1.5 metres) deep 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 also found at Stonehenge and at a settlement site alongside Avebury's West Kennet Avenue. This raises the question of whether or not German tribes where the brains behind our monuments.
The finding of Niedermendig lava at such important locations and twenty miles apart, demands the acceptance of a single, solitary hypothesis for all timber and stone monuments of the period.
29. My surveyed plan of the Sanctuary. This plan-view was made with the help of several sources. 1. Maud Cunnington's original 140-foot scale, which proved so accurate as to put today's archaeologists to shame. 2. On-site measurements and, 3. Online Bing satellite photography.
I find the stone and post ring to be likely based on a single 12:16:24 megalithic-inch Pythagorean 3:4:5 triangle - see inset. The reader will also note that this geometry is internal to the timber posts. Generally speaking, working internally to timbers was out of character. There is only one other place where I know of this, and that is Ring C, Woodhenge, near Stonehenge. All sixteen posts of Woodhenge Ring C are massive affairs at one-megalithic-yard diameter -- as are the 16 timber posts of the Sanctuary's stone and post ring.
Also, we cannot escape the possibility that people may have tried to link the Sanctuary and Avebury's outer circuit through the function Pi. For example, according to Maud's husband, the fence ring measures 65 feet diameter. Converting this figure to Megalithic Yards we get 23.88, which, times Pi, produces a circumference of 75 megalithic Yards. This figure relates to Avebury and Windmill Hill's largest radius of 750.
Similarly, whilst the Stone Age mandate was for the outer circle to be set around a 47 Megalithic Yard circle, internally; a measurement through the centre of the stone's, i.e., 47.75 diameter, would have a circumference of 150My. Perhaps this is why some of the stones of the outer ring, i.e., stones 21 to 26, are placed slightly inward, and some are skewed sideways as if the builders could not make their minds up?
30. Longstone’s Cove and the double-stone-row of the Beckhampton Avenue that led to Avebury. Drawn by William Stukeley 21 May 1724.
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, and seen on far left of Stukeley's drawing, suggest that the Beckhampton Avenue went further as is shown in Stukeley's previous drawing, Picture 21.
31. Adam with Eve seen in the background. Here it's obvious that they are named the wrong way round.
Of more importance is that Adam has now received the Tee-square treatment to discover that its inner face points 198-degrees from north. This concurs within one-degree of P. J. Ucko's plan.
32. Set on the same acute angle of a single 3:4:5 Pythagorean triangle, the Longstone's Cove spoke of singularity!
Three plans of the Longstone’s field excavations are available in the public domain that I know off, and these were compared one against the other by layer superimposition in CAD. One reasonably good image is to be found on page 105 of Andrew Lawson’s book ‘Chalkland - an archaeology of Stonehenge and its region.’ Another is based on preliminary results by Pollard and Gillings. Their plan was most useful for placing Eve’s opposite number, 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 from.
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Longstone’s field, near Beckhampton, with its Neolithic ditched-enclosure and stone cove, was excavated by Pollard et al in 2003, so it follows that Ucko produced his plan the following year, before succumbing to diabetes. Even so, we believe that Ucko’s is the most accurate, even though it is the only plan not scaled. Not that that is a great loss, because Pollard’s and Lawson's scales do not match, anyway, Pollards being the less accurate. Fortunately, though, thanks to some text in Lawson's book, this is no great loss.
Lawson... “The Longstone’s Enclosure measures some 140 by 110 metres.”
Well, 140 by 110 metres converts to 168.67 by 132.53 Megalithic Yards, and so an oval of this size has been superimposed on Ucko's plan, above, to scale it.
Again from Lawson's Chalkland text: “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, drawn above.
The text does not mention that the distance between Stones C and G is just as important. Being exactly half of 47 and allowing for some error, this matches the Sanctuary's Fence Ring at 23.5 (23.88) Megalithic Yards.
I also find the internal measurement between Backstone B and Stone C to be 16 Megalithic Yards.
HEY SANCTUARY: YOU GOT MALE!
33. To Avebury Man, the massive oval ring ditch was meant to be an ovary composed of radii that increase exponentially -- 60 plus 10 = 70, 70 plus 20 = 90, and so on. So this ovary is an obvious expression of growth. However, we cannot produce a plan to show the exact sizes of those radii, because we would need several hundred accurate coordinates, and a Cartesian plot of them, to do so. But, as far as I know, those coordinates have never been garnered.
34. Unlike the regular cove in the middle of the Avebury Henge, the Longstone's Cove is splayed 37-degrees, as too is the acute angle of a 3:4:5 triangle.
The inner face of Adam can be considered to be placed on the hypotenuse of this triangle to demonstrate that the Cove was aligned to the whole of this not-so-distant rise. It is rare for a monument to be placed so close to its horizon. But there is a reason for it.
A tale of two horizons, one high and close, with a second somewhat lower and at some distance, to form a notch for the moon.
If both sun and moon had been presented with a flat horizon, the difference between them -- in terms of azimuth -- would be about nine-degrees.
But, the two-degree altitude of the near rise delays the appearance of the sun and therefore reduces the difference between their respective azimuths by about one degree. This brought the sun and moon closer together, and for the obvious purpose of copulation.
35. This image gives the azimuths of the southernmost sun and moon as they enter Longstone's Cove.
We can see that the southernmost sun surpassed the 125-degree azimuth of Adam by several degrees. So the Cove was not directly aligned on the sun.
We can also see that the southernmost moon surpassed the Cove by an even greater amount. So the Cove was not aligned on the moon either.
36. This image, found in Andrew Lawson's book, Chalkland, seems superior by the way it shows the Beckhampton Avenue to obey the 10-degree rule more accurately.
The scale would be even better if it was made three-times larger and produced in proven megalithic yards. North arrow seems accurate.
So, what was it that was meant to grow in Longstone's field, before being transmitted to the mother henge at Avebury, and then on to the Sanctuary, via the moon-aligned fallopian, known as the Beckhampton Avenue? 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 all the way to the Avebury Henge by following the 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 just as remotely.
Cremation released the spirits of the dead. This was practiced for a while at Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge. The bones of their cremated elite were separated out and taken to Stonehenge, while the ashes, to which many sherds of Beaker pottery were added, were stacked twenty inches deep in a teardrop-shaped Midden, alongside the timber egg known as the Southern Circle, just inside the Durrington Walls Henge.
What further proof do we need that the River Avon was used as an Umbilical Cord?
37. Coming next: The answer to Avebury's oldest monument....The Causewayed Enclosure on top of Windmill Hill.