Long Meg and her Daughters is a Neolithic stone circle in
the Northern Lake District; we went there on Sunday.
There are reckoned to be around sixty stone circles in
Cumbria, the most in any one county not of course that counties had any meaning
in 2000BC. Why so many? Actually the relevant question is why so many still
extant? Might be something to do with the relatively stable agricultural
landscape: no mining, just one railway line, few roads little industry away
from the coast in other words, no good reasons over the centuries to dig up or
push over the stones. Long Meg is the third or fourth largest [by diameter]
circle in the UK. Only Stanton Drew
and the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney are
larger. It is located in a slightly bowl-shaped depression on top of a high
hill that you can take the car to and park. It has views to both the east and
the west and careful measurements indicate that it is aligned to the rise of
the Winter Solstice [21st December]. There is evidence that Long Meg
itself, a 3-meter high megalith of sandstone as opposed to the slate of all the
other stones, was a later addition. Long Meg has a number of cut circles and
carved cup & ring marks on one
face suggesting [in my opinion] that that was why it was chosen. They weren’t carved
in-situ . . . they dragged the extant stone
up the mountain because of its previous [2500-years?] of religious
significance.
It is like most of these circles in that it was built as a
predictive calendar; when was the best time to sow; what is the right time to
harvest? Plus probably, various rites took place. Something I read, sorry forgotten
where said only that it was a meeting place; they have found thousands of
flints and axe heads there from as far away as Langdale, the only local source.
Perhaps that’s true but later. No society would construct something like this
to trade in flints.
There are two double entrances at north and south which add
weight to the theory of a large crowd congregating in an enclosed space. I was
interested in the acoustics. There was a guy there with a small camera team
presumably making some kind of video and you could hear him speaking right
across from him on the other side. In a normal voice.
Not the best or most interesting circle I have ever been to
that award will always go to Callanish, but it and Castlerigg across the valley
make up an almost unique pairing of Neolithic monuments that we are fortunate
to have.
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