Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (7 page)

Edmund has an excellent mind and is quick on the uptake, but he is certainly not gullible in any way. During the time we have known him he has proved to be one of our best supporters, but also our sternest critic if he thinks that we are not being consistent about accuracy and significant figures.

It was high summer and Edmund was spending time with his family on the island of Anglesey, off the north coast of Wales, and we agreed to meet him there so that we could acquaint him better with some of our more recent and, at that time, unpublished findings. We met Edmund at one of Anglesey’s more famous burial mounds and were slightly amused when he turned up, pedalling furiously across the very uneven ground on a folding Brompton bicycle. We were less amused, and quite frankly astounded, to see the resemblance between Edmund and an historical character whom we had come to admire hugely during the writing of
Civilization One
. Edmund is the absolute image of Thomas Jefferson, signer of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States of America.

The meeting with Edmund was both useful and enjoyable. He has proved to be a staunch ally but a continued critic on occasions. However, it wasn’t so much this meeting that made that August break so significant but rather what happened after Alan left Anglesey.

Some days earlier Alan had seen a television documentary presented by British architectural historian, Dan Cruickshank. The programme in question was an episode of the series
Britain’s Best Buildings
. This fascinating series found Cruickshank visiting London’s Tower Bridge, Durham Cathedral and the Palace of Westminster, to mention but a few. However, the episode that was important to our researches had found Cruickshank in the city of Bath. Bath is not too far from Bristol in the southwest of England and is famous for being a Roman town, as well as its wonderful buildings, many of which were built in the Regency period (18th century). Because of its naturally hot mineral springs, the place first appealed to the aristocrats and the growing middle class of Regency England. Many people bought houses in the town and would come there for the ‘season’ when they were not at their country estates or in London.

In a sense most of Bath could be termed a ‘new town’ because the greater part was planned at more or less the same time in the 18th century and some of the most famous sites were designed and built by the same man, a remarkable architect by the name of John Wood. In the documentary, Cruickshank spent a great deal of time extolling the beauty and symmetry of a large circle of houses that John Wood had created. This is known as the King’s Circus and is as magnificent today as it was when it was first built.

What was immediately interesting were the dimensions Cruickshank identified in relation to the King’s Circus. He stated that John Wood had been obsessed with ancient standing-stone circles and that the Circus owed its dimensions to a megalithic stone circle close to Bath. The circle in question is called Stanton Drew. The diameter of the King’s Circus, from building front to building front across the circle, is 318 ft. This measurement was remarkable because it produced a circle with a circumference of 366 MY to an accuracy of 99.7per cent – a tiny variation that was probably not meaningful in the assessment of measurement of these buildings.

What this meant was, to a very high degree of accuracy, that John Wood had (knowingly or otherwise) designed the King’s Circus to have a circumference of 366 MY. Of course one might suggest that the whole thing was a coincidence were it not for the fact that John Wood was a professed Druid and was extremely familiar with a number of stone circles in his own part of England. Further investigation showed that John Wood had personally measured Stonehenge, and this turned out to be much more important than Stanton Drew.

Interest in the megalithic monuments was starting to take off in the 18th century. Archaeology was in its infancy and many people at the time thought that Stonehenge might have been built by the Romans. Wood thought it owed more to the Druids, a mystical religious component of Celtic British culture at the time of the Roman invasion in
AD
43. Despite the fact that Druidism was more or less wiped out in both France and Britain by the Roman legions, it still retained a mystical fascination for rich 18th-century antiquarians. An order of recreated Druids (The Ancient Order of Druids) was formed in London in 1781, just a few decades after the death of architect John Wood in 1754, but we know from Wood’s own writings that an Order of Druids already existed at the time he was building the King’s Circus in Bath. This 18th-century Druidism was closely linked to Freemasonry.

On Midsummer’s Day in 1717 the Freemasonic Grand Lodge of London had been formed by a group of lodges meeting in the city’s public houses – and the same week, in the same inns, they founded the Modern Order of Druids.

Of course any notion that the original Druids had anything to do with Stonehenge or indeed any of the megalithic sites, in any direct sense, is extremely unlikely. Over 1,000 years had passed between the building of the stone circles and the time of the Druids but the connection seemed tenable to the 18th-century historians and information about the Druids was available from Roman sources, such as the writings of Julius Caesar.

Alan and his wife Kate went to Stanton Drew and obtained some reasonably accurate measurements for the site, but nowhere could they find a circle at Stanton Drew with a circumference approaching 366 MY. The mission to this site had drawn a blank, but Stonehenge was a different matter – and now we were alerted to the possibility that our prediction of a 233/732 ratio might have indeed been employed as a near perfect pi calculator to deliver a circle of 366 equal parts.

In our attempts to find a stone circle conforming to the 366 pattern which we anticipated must surely have existed, we had looked at examples across the length and breadth of Britain. However, we had not looked at earlier Neolithic sites that did not contain any stones. Although Stone-henge would become the most famous stone circle in the world, it certainly did not start out that way, and within its earliest ground plan we hit upon everything we had been searching years to find – and, as it turned out, much more besides.

During the years of our common research it had not occurred to us to measure surviving sites that Thom had ignored. Thom had been initially looking for astronomical observatories. He assumed that the stones, sometimes moved many kilometres across the landscape, had been set into their eventual positions so that they performed some specific function. For example, when seen from the centre of a circle a particular stone might line up with a cleft in a distant hill where the Sun could be expected to break the horizon at the time of the summer solstice.

As a result, all of Thom’s measurements dealt with the positions of stones, together with the circles and alignments of which they were a part. But it had not been within Alexander Thom’s remit to measure any circle that had ‘no’ stones. Why should he have done so? Such a structure could not betray its astronomical significance and in the mind of Thom it probably didn’t even have one.

It is a fact that across Britain there as many circles without stones as there are circles with them – in fact there are almost certainly many more such examples. A particular group of these have come to be known as ‘henges’. This is actually a particularly inappropriate name because the word ‘henge’ comes from an Anglo-Saxon word that meant ‘hanging’ or which could alternatively describe a ‘gibbet’ where the hanging of miscreants took place. For example, the world’s most famous stone circle, that of Stonehenge, actually means ‘hanging stones’.

Good name or not, the word henge has come to be associated with usually circular mounds and ditches that are to be found almost everywhere in Great Britain. They range in size tremendously and doubtless the vast majority of them are lost beneath trees, farmland and buildings. Fortunately some do survive, and a few of these represent such magnificent examples of Stone Age engineering that it is a near miracle they are not much better known.

When we looked at recreations of Stonehenge during its various phases (between at least 3100
BC
and 1500
BC
) we could have kicked ourselves for not having noticed something that should have stood out like a sore thumb. As its name implies, Stonehenge was originally just a henge – a simple circular ditch and bank within which all the later stones were erected. When one isolates the henge from the later additions something becomes clear. It had a circumference of 366 MY! It had been right under our noses for years and we had failed to see it. This was one of those ‘Eureka’ moments that make our investigations so fascinating and occasionally exciting. In a moment it set us looking in a new and very productive direction.

It now became obvious that John Wood the architect had not based the dimensions of the King’s Circus in Bath on just any circle and certainly not that of Stanton Drew, but rather that of the henge at Stonehenge, a site that he not only knew well but which he had personally measured in some detail. Whether he had simply ‘copied’ the measurements of Stonehenge or if he actually knew something about the Megalithic Yard was a moot point at the time but it would become far more important later.

The information about Stonehenge was very welcome, but one henge that conformed to the expected patterns we had predicted years before was not enough. We had to make our argument so watertight that nobody could argue.

•

With the idea of henges firmly in his mind, Chris took a look at a major Neolithic site on Google Earth; the free-to-use internet program that provides seamless aerial photographs of the planet’s surface – and in considerable detail in well-inhabited areas. The site he had chosen to study was a group of three well-preserved henges on the outskirts of the hamlet of Thornborough, near to the North Yorkshire town of Masham. We had both visited the site previously but had made no attempt to measure its dimensions. These three giant circles were made around 5,500 years ago by mounding up earth to a height of 6 or 7 m with openings roughly northwest and southeast. The three circles are joined by a causeway some 65 m (214 ft wide) that are over 1 mile in length. Whilst the banks around the circles have obviously broken down somewhat over the passing millennia, they remain in remarkably good condition and are still distinctly circular in appearance, although the sheer scale of the site makes it hard to discern the curve at ground level.

Now, Chris zoomed into the central henge and opened up the Google Earth measuring tool in this fantastic internet facility; he carefully gauged the inner centre-mound and external diameter of each ring by taking averages across several directions. The northern henge is now covered in trees and is less easy to measure accurately, but previous surveying has established that all the henges are the same size. Knowing that these henges had been once covered in white gypsum to produce glowing, jewel-like rings, Chris was particularly interested in their outer dimension. He put the resulting distance of 193 m into his calculator and divided by 0.82966 to convert it into Megalithic Yards and stared at the outcome – 233 MY.

This seemed too good to be true and Chris checked all measurements again, and yet again, to ensure this was a correct result. The conclusion was clear – whether by coincidence or design, all three of these henges were examples of the 233/732 circle we had predicted some three years earlier. An external diameter of 233 MY meant that the outer extremity was precisely twice 366 MY in length!

In our opinion, henges were created to observe star movements by providing an artificial horizon – a horizon that was level and at a known distance. And here was a powerful indication that the builders had used Thom’s Megalithic Yard to construct henges that divided the horizon up into 366 equal parts – each 2 MY across.

This would have allowed an astronomer standing in the centre of one of any of these circles to view exactly one 366th section of the sky if they erected two posts 2 MY apart on the outer edge of the circle. Each gap then gives the viewer a guaranteed 1 Megalithic Degree horizontal section of the sky. Such posts would have needed to be tall to appear above the bank, but the builders could also segment the posts in an upward direction to provide perfect gaps of 1 Megalithic Degree.

These massive henges must have been the world’s first high-performance astronomical observatories.

Further investigations of the dimensions at that stage were equally breathtaking, to say the least. From centre to centre of the northern henge to the central henge is 366 Megalithic Rods and the distance from the centre of the middle henge to the centre of the southern henge is 360 Megalithic Rods. We already knew that 366 and 360 are two numbers that work together within the system of megalithic geometry that we had identified several years earlier. There was no longer any doubt that Alexander Thom’s Megalithic Yard and Rod are real. They are alive and well in North Yorkshire, ready to be inspected by any archaeologist whose head is not stuck in a bucket.

Chris noted one further dimension that stood out – but this had to be a coincidence … didn’t it? The three henges were offset slightly in a dogleg so the centre-to-centre distance between the centres of the northern and southern henges was just 1,500 m. Had the three henges been in a ‘perfect’ row this distance would have been 1,525 m.

The type of henges found close to the present village of Thornborough are known as class 11A henges. This means that they have two opposed entrances within a single bank inside of which is a ditch (
see
figure 5). Each henge is so large it would be possible to fit the much more famous Stonehenge circle into each of them 20 times over.