[Stones] Callanish moon skim - June and July

[Gerald Ponting]

I know that there is an overlap between the members of this list and those who contribute to the forums of themodernantiquarian.com. (I've only recently started posting to the latter - many of you know that I have concerns about some of Cope's original writings.) With all the interest recently in the Callanish moon skim, I've made various posts both there and here - and I have now updated my website, both with a revised table of times and dates for those visiting Callanish for the moon in July or later, and with a detailed illustrated 'blog' of the events of 11th-12th June.

See http://home.clara.net/gponting/page44.html for my blog
and http://home.clara.net/gponting/page45.html for the table of dates and times. 

The rest of this message is a background note to the info on the web-site,which I've also posted on a TMA forum.

Best wishes
Gerald

This all started from Professor Thom's original 1967 book, Megalithic Sites in Britain, in which he showed the extreme southern moon, as seen from the Callanish Stones, setting behind Clisham and the other hills of Harris. He'd made his horizon profile from maps and not returned to the site. Gerald Hawkins, in a very obscure 1971 paper, proved by photogrammetry that the small rocky hillock just to the south of the site (Cnoc an Tursa) blocks the view of Clisham when standing among the stones - something that is perfectly obvious just standing at the site and using one's eyes! (Hawkins, as far as I know, never visited Callanish.)

Margaret (now Curtis) and I did an enormous amount of work in the late 70s and early 80s surveying horizons and calculating sun and moon positions. Obviously, with the work that had been done before, one of the directions that most interested us was looking towards the extreme southern moonset. In our paper presented to a 1980 conference, we first linked the moonset with the alignment of the Callanish avenue towards the circle and the same moonrise with the hilly profile of a 'female figure' on the southern horizon, known as the 'Sleeping Beauty'; and that this may have been an intention of the original builders. See brief quotations from this paper at http://home.clara.net/gponting/page47.html

This was put forward as a THEORY. I'm not sure what Margaret and Ron have claimed since I ceased to be involved in the project in 1984, but I have never claimed that the prehistoric builders of Callanish *definitely* built the Callanish avenue in order to have a ceremony watching the moon set through the stones, on the few rare occasions that it happens, with an 18-year gap betwen such ceremonies. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But it is still a wonderful experience to be there and see the moon slide along the body of the hill figure. To see the setting moon among the stones must be even more amazing, but I've not been lucky enough to see this yet. Good luck with the weather, those of you who are planning to go in July. (See timing on my web-site; please let me know if you find it helpful.)

Others have taken the theory much further since 1980, including identifying the Sleeping Beauty with an/the earth goddess, etc. The idea has taken on a life of it's own, and it was amazing to me (and, incidentally, to Margaret) to realise that the crowds there on the night of June 11th-12th had all travelled to Callanish as a direct consequence of what we had published 26 years ago!

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Gerald Ponting
Writer, Publisher, Photographer, Lecturer
Hampshire, England
gponting at clara.net
http://home.clara.net/gponting/
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