England Ancient Astronomical Land Survey - LexiLine Journal 385

I recently received a letter which stated as follows: "Cheers. I like the site. Was it you put a dodecagon round Wynd's Point tied to Newgrange and Long Man of Wlimington?"

Here was my answer (slightly amended from the original):

The answer to your question is yes.

As you know, the pioneer in this field was ley line hunter Alfred Watkins, who wrote the book, The Old StraightTrack.

In my work, I first showed how a pentagon (five-sided polygon) and a decagon (ten-sided polygon) may have been used in ancient days for surveying.

I followed this with analysis by dodecagonal divisions (twelve-sided) as well.

AT http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi205.htm I wrote under the title The Pentagon, Pythagoras, Scotland & Triangulations:

"Angus and Patricia MacDonald, write in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,Great Britian, Rizzoli International, New York, 1991 (p. 48 of the international edition):

"[Groups of stones in Scotland] point to the existence of a Neolithic people who had developed a sophisticated mathematics which was in advance of those of contemporary Mediterranean cultures. They may also have been aware of the properties of the right-angled triangle many hundreds of years before Pythagoras propounded his famous theorem."

Triangulations and the Pentagon

This Pentagon shows how the ancients produced Golden Sections (ratio of 1.618) for surveying - by geometric means.

An Extended Surveyor´s Triangulation

This triangulation was used for Ancient Geodetic Survey.



The Triangulation at Salisbury Plain

Figure turned to show Salisbury Plain triangulation.


and at http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi233.htm I wrote:

"The Legend of King Arthur: The Prehistoric Survey

KING ARTHUR and the relation to GEODETIC SURVEY

The Name King ARTHUR is probably rooted in an Indo-European term found in Hindi ARTI and Sanskrit ARATRIKA, signifying rites of honor for men or gods; celebrated by circling a lighted lamp (fire) three times in a clockwise direction with protection given "by the deities of the directions of the compass". See the Encylcopaedia Britannica under "arti".

This ancient feast is similar to the "3-times around" feast of the early Pharaohs of Egypt and the thrice-around "threshing feast" of the Indo-European Latvians in the Dainas:

In the Latvian "rotala games" [ROT-ala = ARIT] (Dainas, Vol. 11, p. 546) "rot-ational games" relating to the Sun, Moon [and Pleiades] the participants stand in a line and chase each other thrice around in a circle [just as in the feast of Narmer, first king of Egypt, see p. 19, Clayton's Chronicle of the Pharaohs, German version] the leader carrying a stick with a braided cloth end [torch?] or live blossoms on it trying to catch up to the last person in the round."

If ARTHUR relates to a feast of the deities of the directions of the compass, then King Arthur´s Twelve Knights were 12 divisions of the heavens, perhaps also marked hermetically on a map of the Earth. Can we find the MID-POINT of such a circle on Great Britain, as would it correspond to the Heavens?

Let us take the official British Ordnance Survey historical map and guide of Ancient Britain, on which we find "Peddars Way", lines possibly of an outer circumference of a circle. Where would the "mid-point" of that circle be??

The possible importance of "Wynd's Point" to the UK was shown by me at http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi234.htm

The Geodetic Center of England and Wales at Wynd's Point

The Mid-Point Center (for Britain) of the Round Table of King Arthur was at Midsummer Hill and WYND'S POINT near Great Malvern and the Herefordshire Beacon.

This gives results shown below as "Knights of the Round Table although "nights ?" (sectioning the night-sky ecliptic of the Zodiac) or "knots" (surveyors crossings) probably is closer to the original term than "knights", which gave rise to the legends of King Arthur, who probably existed, albeit far, far further back in time than currently assumed.

However, that diagram is more of a possible hypothesis than anything that I had measured directly, nor do I have the requisite maps or resources to do such measurements exactly. I merely point to these things as measurements that professional surveyors should check to see if the ancients might in fact have done such triangulations.

A more widespread triangulation with a dodecagonal trianguation involving the mr triangulation, the Long Man and New Grange is takn from http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi228.htm.

The extension of this measurement line to Teotihuacan may be pushing the hypothesis a bit far, but I thought the ancients might have done this, so I think it is OK to refer to this possibility. Robin Heath in his book Sun, Moon and Stonehenge has an independenty derived but similar line which he has running through Preseli, the quarry for the Stonehenge bluestones, but I think that line is not quite correct, although his book is good. Beyond being a quarry, Preseli was surely not a geodetic marker. David Furlong in The Keys to the Temple also struggles with ancient triangulations in the UK. There is also a book by Danny Sullivan called Ley Lines. All of these books proceed from the basic hypothesis that the ancients were measuring the landscape in some manner, probably by astronomy, which I am sure is true.