In the previous post (Is the Altar Stone the founding stone of Stonehenge?) I wrote that perhaps Atkinson was correct when he suggested the Altar Stone might have once stood upright in the stonehole he found immediately southwest of Stone 56, the one with the Group I Cornish polished stone axe deliberately placed in its primary fill.
I went on to suggest that perhaps the Altar Stone and the Station Stones comprised the first stones on the site, as they would be the minimum that would be necessary to fix the Sky to the Earth and encode all the solar and lunar alignments.
The stonehole that Atkinson suggested is at the base of a feature catalogued as "WA 3639".
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| Position of WA 3639 and the suggested stonehole, from Cleal et al 1995 |
It's in an interesting place, being on the primary solar axis (Summer Solstice Sunrise to Winter Solstice Sunset), bang up against (and partly under) the large lumpy fragment of Stone 15, midway between Stone 56 (the tallest stone on the site, one upright of the now-fallen tallest trilithon of 55-56-156) and the massive block that is Stone 16.
I wondered if the position was at all significant in terms of the minimal arrangement of stones, so I reached for the 2012 paper "Stonehenge Remodelled" (Darvill et al) because I knew it had a selection of plans of the various "Stages" of the monument through its life. These were originally in Cleal et al, but were amended to illustrate the consensus view that Darvill, Marshall, Parker-Pearson and Wainwright arrived at.
Overlaying the plans to show just the Station Stones and an upright Altar Stone in the position of WA 3639 was simple enough. I also retained the Heelstone, Stonehole 97, the Aubrey Holes, the banks and ditches and the causeway postholes (since they're all potentially early features).
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| Altar Stone (green) positioned upright in WA 3639, Station Stone rectangle in red |
I then added the interior postholes that Hawley discovered in his 1919-26 excavations, since they're possibly early features too, together with Stoneholes B and C outside the causeway entrance in the NE.
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| As above, but with Hawley's interior postholes and Stoneholes B and C included |
Next step was to draw in the primary solstice alignment line, through the Altar Stone (since WA 3639's stonehole is on this axis) and to the left of the tip of the Heelstone which is where the Sun rose 5000 years ago when the Earth's tilt was 24° rather than the 23.5° it is today.
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| Primary solstice axis is in orange Summer Solstice Sunrise (top right) to Winter Solstice Sunset (bottom left) |
Last step was to take that primary axis line and rotate it 81°, which was the angle between Summer Solstice Sunrise and Winter Solstice Sunrise 5000 years ago, and drop that over the Altar Stone position.
I was not expecting what happened when I did that.
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| Secondary solstice axis added in orange Winter Solstice Sunrise (bottom right) to Summer Solstice Sunset (top left) |
I did that last operation when zoomed in close, so I could get the intersection point of the axes exactly over the Altar Stone's position.
When I zoomed out, I was astonished to see that this secondary axis also intersects Station Stone 93.
Not only that, but it also follows the line of postholes that define the unexplained "arrowhead"-shaped arrangement at the end of the Southern Causeway corridor.
I need to do this again, with the high resolution images from Cleal et al to be certain it's what it looks like, but what it looks like is that there's a sightline that runs from Station Stone 93 via the postulated upright Altar Stone in WA 3639 to the Winter Solstice Sunrise position over Coneybury Hill.
It may not hold up to detailed scrutiny when I do that reworking, but for now this is potentially very exciting - at least for me.
Update: 29th Aug 2024
Doing this again using the vector illustrations of Plan 1 and Plan 2 from Cleal et al, the alignment is not quite as precise as with the ones from "Stonehenge Remodelled" in that the alignment just misses Station Stone 93's SW face.
This in itself is interesting, because it means there'd be a very tightly constrained sightline between that face of the Station Stone and the NE face of the proposed upright Altar Stone which frames the appropriate place on the horizon - Winter Solstice Sunrise to the SE and Summer Solstice Sunset to the NW.
Arguably, given another tightly constrained sightline that makes use of pair of stones to create a viewing portal, this is actually more convincing.
Here's the result:
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| Same construction but using the plans from "Stonehenge in its Landscape" Cleal et al, 1995 |
You might notice that there's now a second red "blob" in the interior of the monument. The one to the SW is the proposed upright Altar Stone in WA 3639, and the other in the NE is... well.
While trawling through Cleal looking for anything relevant to this endeavour, I came across the following comment relating to the NE end of the Bluestone oval setting:
This is somewhat difficult to parse but it drew my attention to WA 2730, positioned as shown below, just to the bottom right of the middle of the image:
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| Feature WA 2730, just inboard of the Bluestone circle in the NE quadrant of the monument |
This is an odd feature, it appears completely unrelated to the other settings but is about 1.5m NE of the only grave ever discovered in the interior of the stone circle. What happens if you put a stone here?
Such a stone, together with the proposed upright Altar Stone in WA 3639, lies on the primary solstice alignment. Curious and, although Atkinson's comment about a possible pair to the Altar Stone is probably referring to a stonehole near Stone 55 in the SW rather than at the NE end of the interior, it intrigues me.
Could there have been a second Altar Stone in the interior?
This is a rabbit hole that many people have gone down - starting with Inigo Jones' and John Aubrey's comments about a "supposed Altar Stone" in the middle of the "cell" (the innermost part of Stonehenge) "towards the east" that Philip, Earl of Pembroke, reported had been "carried away to St. James' (Westminster)".
I'm going to leave it to others to deal with that conundrum!
