Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos. John North
as pottery that included early Windmill Hill ware, Peterborough ware, grooved ware (Rinyo–Clacton), and Beaker types. This pottery shows that the tomb was in use for perhaps more than a thousand years, and deposits of Romano-British ware show that some sort of interest in it continued for well over three millennia. (Much material from the tomb is displayed in the Devizes Museum.) Long after the tomb ceased to be used for burial, it must have continued to function as a focal point for religious practice—much as do the cathedrals of the Christian era quite regardless of the fact that they too are the sites of burials. If it is hard to envisage such loyal devotion to a low ridge of earth and stone, that is only because we are ignorant of the systems of belief preserved by those who revered it. At what stage the enormous blocking stone 3.7 m high was placed across the façade it is impossible to say, but this must have come last, if the lines of sight of which we have spoken were precisely that, and not theoretically drawn rays, falling on the sightless dead. The massive stone sealed off the tomb’s contents, but even then did not mark an end to its ritual function.
FIG. 30. Suggested profile of the original West Kennet long barrow, looking across it from the south. The barrow might have been of constant height over even more of its length. The ground rises very slowly to the west and falls to the east. The two lowest lines are conjectural levels of the observer’s eye and the ditch floor.
The barrow tapers off towards its western end and loses height in relation to ground level, but the ground rises gradually to the west. The profile of the barrow is now degraded, but in its prime was probably not very different from that shown in Fig. 30. Its present contours suggest that there was originally a well-defined ridge. This is borne out by Thurnam’s statement: ‘Dr Took, as they call him, has miserably defaced South Long Barrow by digging half the length of it. It was most neatly smoothed up to a sharp ridge.’ One assumes that there is intended irony in the substitution of ‘Took’ for ‘Toope’.
The rays capable of entering the five chambers do so in much the same way as the pair of rays (from the stars in the Southern Cross) at Wayland’s Smithy, being limited to a greater or lesser degree by the uprights. Those passing to the southern and northern parts of the central chamber (W and X, Fig. 28) have slightly more latitude than the others, but if it is assumed that at least two stones must always be involved in fixing the direction, even they are tightly governed. Most of the key uprights are carefully worked, and in this respect alone can be distinguished from the rest. In all cases a normal adult male could just have stood upright to see the rising star appropriate to the chamber, and there is no question of this being an imagined possibility only for the deceased lying on the ground. The horizon over which all these stars rose is therefore here assumed to be the natural horizon, so that extinction angles hold good.
It seems that the axis was not directed to any star, but that at least three and possibly four of the chambers were, and no doubt consciously. There is some uncertainty in the precise original positions of the stones, which are critical, and the following brief statement is made solely with a view to a date found in the following section. The alignments proposed are all valid for dates in the neighbourhood of 3625 BC, for rising stars (with azimuth, assumed extinction altitude, declination and year in parentheses): Spica, in chambers U and V (63.7°, 2.1°, 17.53°, 3630); the Pleiades in chamber Y (101.8°, 4.4°, –3.99°, 3640); and Betelgeuse in chamber Z (109.9°, 2.0°, –10.85°, 3610). It is conceivable that beta Tauri12 was to be seen at W and Antares13 at X in the western chamber.
FIG. 31. Section of the northern ditch of the West Kennet Long Barrow near the end of the section marked B in Fig. 26. An adult male (eye at M) of average stature would have stood in the ditch bottom to see the brief appearance of Sirius over the tomb. A woman or shorter person (eye at W) or even a child (eye at C) could in principle have seen the same phenomenon. Of the two rays marked, the upper is at 13.5° to the horizontal, and the lower at 12.5°.
FIG. 32. Years at which the two stars Sirius and Arcturus could have been seen at right angles to the various sections (A to F) of the West Kennet barrow, plotted against altitude. The years corresponding to equal altitude viewing in opposite directions are marked with circles. Azimuths from north are marked on the graphs. The broken lines in the neighbourhood of points 1 and 3 represent shifts in azimuth of half a degree.
It is assumed here that the star Spica entered chambers U and V, although once the chambers were surrounded by the rubble of the mound, the ray could not pass into V at all. At the time of foundation it might have been allowed free passage, and in entertaining this possibility one is reminded of Wayland’s Smithy, where there was a strong presumption that the vertical stones of the chamber were set up astronomically before the building of the mound was begun around it, and without any hope of astronomical use thereafter. (The capping stones were presumably—but not necessarily—dragged up some sort of inclined plane, but even this need not have been the mound itself.) Surely the same is true at West Kennet. Several of the stones there are notable for their relatively flat faces, and the very fact that there are so many good parallel lines in the plan of the chamber might be thought to hint at alignment on common stars. In fact three stones (chambers U and V) seem to align on the setting alpha Centauri, three stones (chamber W and the western chamber) on the setting Procyon, and three (chambers Z and Y) on the setting Deneb. All this holds good for dates within two centuries of 3600 BC; and there are potential alignments too on Spica, Bellatrix, and Antares. The greatest problem here is that it is impossible to quote azimuths without an inordinate number of qualifications: the stones are at most a couple of metres across, they have been moved slightly in their long history, and in some cases their hidden sides were possibly those used in aligning them. Uncertainties of two or three degrees (even of one degree, taking averages) leave too much room for doubt over specifics. That the plan of the chamber has a definite geometrical rationale can hardly be denied, however; and we are certainly not short of independent evidence that Neolithic geometry and stellar astronomy were closely allied.
There is good reason for assuming that viewing would have taken place across the West Kennet barrow, in accordance with the double principle of viewing at right angles to the barrow—here closely parallel to the line of the nearby ditch—at equal altitudes from opposite sides. Any lingering doubts as to the broad correctness of these ideas should fade as the pairing of the ditch-sections stipulated earlier is investigated. As before, in all cases an initial search is made for possible stars, within the limits set by the barrow’s form and age. There can be little doubt that the star observed across sections A and D looking north was Arcturus, while looking south across any of the four northern sections, Sirius was most probably the main object of attention. (Rigel is a candidate that initially falls by the wayside, since it seems to provide dates between 3222 and 3057 BC. These dates are much too late, if the radiocarbon dates available are to be believed.) Here are the two brightest stars in the sky.
In discussing similar cases at an earlier stage, little was said about the errors involved in the method. At West Kennet the situation is precarious, for the only part of the ditch so far excavated is close to being in the worst of all possible places, that is, near the change of direction from B to C (Fig. 26). Putting everything aside for the time being except the directions of the ditch (and matching barrow edge), all of them involving averaging over sizeable lengths, our principles lead to the following results—quoted with pseudo-precision, without any regard for their