37 replies to this topic

[IrishStones]

Do tell, please, please! I would love a detailed account of every visit you have made to Irish mounds, but I will be joyful at any anecdotes you can provide. Do you recall the direction you faced looking out from the entrance or passage of any site? Especially the ones snuggled into a hillside?

Details on your feelings. I truly believe they are the most reliable "empirical evidence" we have. Our culture demeans the spiritual identification with supranatural sensations. But then we are stupid, I truly believe. No scientist worth their microsope has ever relied on "just the facts". We would still be in the stone age if that were the case. Every great scientist put a theory "out there" and aspired to it.

No as to these tales of  "wind". Every bloody detail, please! Your reports are golden to the quest. How many can actually visit these sites, and how many of them can be open enough to feel what is there, and how many of them are confident enough to report it? For the love of God, pretty literally, spill the goods!

Okay, so I get excited.... now... stories. Wind, facing direction. The names of the sites. The time of year you were there.

I once stood on the top of the cairn at Knocknarea in February, and my instinct was to look north towards Ben Bulben and all the sacred landscape before me, before I knew it was sacred, and It was a cold and dismal day, after walking up crawling through the wet underbrush, smelling foul smells coming from fox holes in the hillside, i swore was the bad breath of hell. I had strong feelings of discomfort, but when I got to the cairn, I had this incredible sense that I was airborne. Or could be. It was my first encounter with a megalith, at a very young age i can barely recall, but I do believe the encounter had a major impact on the rest of my life. Wish I could say more.

The most recent encounter I had was on Dingle near the Ferriter's Cove site. I was well inland, to the east, at the foot of Brandon Mt. and I could feel the pull of all thousand years of history. In this valley Mesolithic man survived the harsh winds. Many invasions from 1700 BCE right through the quite recent pilgrimages of European monks took place here. Pirates had hidden caves here. It is one of those Places. I was unable to walk the area, and got a keen sense of place just from riding around in my car. I don't know what signalled me that this was a special place. I knew nothing of its history or even of the archeology there at the time of my visit. I sure was interested in going in to town the next day to find out why the hair at the back of my neck stood up while I was t in that particular area!

[fireflite]

Well, I answered a couple of your questions on the weird feelings thread already, but you've asked some more "scientific" question that I'll answer here. I've had feelings at these places but not "strong" enough to be positive they were due to the place, which is why I speak of belief. I'm a technician by trade and upbringing, so I tend to look at most things from a technical point of view. I like to try to figure how something works and why it was put together the way it was. we visited most sites in spring I beleive. Here's a few details.

Sunday walk to the top of Slieve Gullion (Co. Down), in the rain, from the bottom to the top across and down the other side all the way back around to our car (I guess about 30 miles total, or at least it felt like). you mentioned felt like you airborne and possibly could have realized that goal! My wife had one of those disposable rain ponchos on and it sound like a B52 at take off the whole time we were on the top. There are 2 mounds on top separated by a suposedly bottomless lake(another story). I believe the face opposite directions (East-West?), but its been a long time.

Lough Crew which I spoke of earlier is mainly East although I believe some of the smaller mounds have other alignments.

Newgrange - winter solstice (South East)

Knowth - Equinox (East)

Fourknocks - East(?)

The whole island is a special place with to many "sacred" sites to count, if you ask me. I love it and will be back there soon.

[IrishStones]

An interesting point not wasted on me... the whole island... I agree. I've not been everywhere, but have criss-crossed north, south, east and west at least looking at the landscape from a vehicle. I have to do some research because my memory has faded, but it seems Knocknarea cairn was lengthwise northeast/southeast. More than alignments though I am interested in reports like you gave of water nearby, of the slope of hills nearby, and the effort to put certain burial sites in exposed places. Some of this makes sense to me (my hypothesis) and some things seem so different from the ways of other cultures.

[Tom]

An other suggestion was, they build the monuments as a navigation system?
specially in valleys they have pass through, they build the monuments close by the rim like the ones in Walsertal. in those valleys there is always fog and no sun so a orientation is impossible. maybe they use the dowsing primarily in this early years after the ice age to find out the right way through the swampy valley. archeologists explore several circles standing on small "wirestones" close to the main points of the rims. those "wirestones" enforce the power of dowsing so it is possible to use it over the whole dimension of the valley.
archeologists found those "wirestones" in stonehenge as well in carnac and other mainsites...
this is a new discovery!
they are in front of the megalith, arranged like beams:
http://www.buerserbe...05_074347_1.jpg

maybe an interesting point of view...

[BuckyE]

How's the book coming?

We'll never know why the stones were placed as they were. Too many of them are gone: under the risen sea, knocked down and hauled away, plowed under; perhaps just unrecognised as such. Any scientific investigation of stones and mounds must be based on a reasonably accurate statistical analysis--a certain percent of a type of monument in a given era points in a certain direction or is by water--and we just don't any longer know what the "universe" of placements was. (We can get a pretty good concept of what the CURRENT universe is, but does that tell us what it was when the stones were being pushed around? No.)

Which stones are we discussing? The little French statue menhirs? Dolmens? Rings? Alignments? In what era? The Neolithic lasted thousands of years, and people erected stones in the Mesolithic, too. That, I think, is going to be the only truly telling point. Sedentary--that is, village--culture and stone pushing came along at about the same time, and they happened before farming. The interesting thing is not why the individual stones were placed or mounds built in a particular place. Those decisions were manifold, varying with the type of monument and time and area (local culture) in which it was created.

There will have been as many beliefs about the stones back then as there are beliefs about churches or pubs or stores today. God houses, power centers, political statements, advertisements, amusing ways to keep the kids busy in the off season, places to meet people, do business. Where they were, or the direction they pointed, would have been important to some, meaningless to others.

The truly interesting thing is that people did it at all: that they began to create UNnatural environments--rings, cairns, alignments--or to mark the landscape in UNnatural ways: erecting stones, engraving them, etc. That's the cool thing about them.

[Fred]

The truth is they built these Megalithic Features everywhere and a bloody long time ago
Amazingly without iron but with obviously greater minds than we’d previously given these people credit for, but the more we open our minds to what they may have been up to the more we learn.  So here’s my contribution..
Following on from the deductions of Lomas & Knight in Uriels Machine and Knight & Butler in Civilization One, I’ve been wondering about a couple of things that they never discussed in their books. Maybe someone else is interested enough to offer some input here.
As a bowl has been found in a passage mound, (notice I don’t use tomb!) it suggests that water was used for some activity within the central chamber, (other than for birthing uses), and the phrase ‘an ear of corn beside a fall of water’ has me wondering if this may be a reference to an alternative method of calibrating a standard length.

We know from d= half a t squared that it takes 1 second for a drip of water to fall 16ft.
Because acceleration = 32ft/sec.2
There are 192 inches in 16ft (16 by 12).
There are 32 inches in one megalithic yard (MY).
Therefore there are 6MY in 16ft and so it takes one second of time for a drip to fall 6MY.

Without even knowing that a fall rate of 32ft  per second, per second exists, adjusting the fall distance so that 366 drips occurred whilst Venus moved across one degree would give a repeatable length of 6 Megalithic yards or 16ft. This length can easily be divided into lesser lengths as required.
Could this be why the inner chamber of Newgrange needed to be so high?

Other things that these Megalithic Scientists could have used the chamber for come to mind.
 Observing the future Foucaults Pendulum and deducing the reason for the twist and determining their latitude from the result.
 By blocking out the main doorway into the passage observatory and watching the sky some objects would have/ are visible during the day.
 Sky watching on clear nights over a 366 day period period through the light box would scan a large belt of the night sky. Counting the days before or after a solstices and checking the new location of meteorites/comets would allow calculation of impending collision courses. They aren’t referred to ‘the watchers” for nothing.
 Setting up a siesmic detector to record events in fine sand. “Yep that one hit the earth”.
 If ley lines exist, and they enter the earth at some points and exit at anothers. Could noise be transmitted from one point of entry to a point of exit?
 Could acoustic resonance occur within and be detected at another similar shaped Domed chamber?
 Why the need for a dome to cover the passage? When all they needed to do was block out light (to see light to enter?) they only needed to cover the passage and chamber itself with dirt etc. Any Ideas?

[FourWinds]

fireflite, on 17 July 2002, 22:20, said:

At dawn on the winter solstice, every year for the past 5000 (?) years, the sun enters the roof box above the entrance at Newgrange. A square beam of light travels down the passage and lights up a carving of the Sun on the back wall of the end chamber. Only on this day does this happen.

<snip>

There are 400+ known Passage Mounds in Ireland

<snip>

I'd just like to address these two points. Firstly the beam of light enters the chamber at Newgrange for 2 or 3 days either side of the Winter Solstice.

Secondly, there are not 400 passage tombs in Ireland. The figure is closer to 300.

[FourWinds]

The passage in Fourknocks faces north. Knocknarea is a round cairn so has no axis and it's never been opened, so we don't know which direction the passage (if there is one) faces.