Intro:

Our knowledge of the ancient world is one of life’s great mysteries. We have at our disposal countless books, television documentaries, newspaper and magazine articles, but we never seem to get any nearer to the truth. Can it be so hard to fathom out? Evolution, progress, or whatever other term is used, is one slow and gradual process. Civilisation did not arrive at the present by enormous leaps, so the means by which we moved from the way of life some five to ten thousand years ago to the present day was one of gradual change.

Yet we retain remarkably little knowledge of the ancient way of life. It is accepted that there was no simple way of recording information some 5,000 years ago, but what were the stone circles all about: Avebury, Stonehenge, Callanish, Castlerigg? What was the Great Pyramid built to achieve? That several of these structures contain measurements which agree exactly with the dimensions of the Earth must surely be more than coincidence. But where is the information that the ancient people had; where is the knowledge: where has it gone?

When people look at Stonehenge (right) for the first time, they see a remarkably small site containing many huge stones in a baffling but symmetrical arrangement. Much study of this ancient site has taken place over the years but there is apparently no clear picture of the nature of the knowledge built into the site, nor of the purpose behind it. That it was related to the cycles of the Sun and the Moon is known, but why; and why was it constructed in that particular position?

Stonehenge is located quite close to two other ancient sites, those of Avebury (left) and Glastonbury. The site of Avebury is simply enormous and the effort put into its construction should not be underestimated, for the site not only includes two stone circles and an outer circle, but two stone avenues (of which only one survives to today), The Sanctuary, and Silbury Hill. Glastonbury, on the other hand, is rather different, and is still a focus of pilgrimage in the more modern sense. Points of real interest are the Abbey, the Chalice Well and the Tor.

The purpose of the three ancient sites is not at all clear, but since the reasons for being sited in those precise locations is also not understood, this is no surprise. So where has this knowledge gone?

The best way to approach this conundrum is to appraise the knowledge currently in the public domain and see where this leads. Where better to start than at Stonehenge, a very visible example of an ancient construction using representations of the earth’s dimensions?