Long Meg

We had a fairly quiet day. We wandered to Long Meg to take pictures of the stones. I love archaeology, so I fully intend to bore everyone now...

Long Meg is a Bronze Age stone circle that has 51 stones, 27 of which are still upright and is an oval shaped henge, measuring about 100 metres on its widest axis. There is evidence that there was a ditch henge in the adjacent field, which has a side running parallel to Long Meg, which addresses why there is an almost straight edge along one side of the henge.

There are many legends associated with Long Meg; that the stones were a coven of witches and they were turned to stone by Scottish wizard Michael Scott and that the stones cannot be counted twice (one after another) and reach the same total. If this happens, according to local legend, the witches will be de-petrified and they will be reanimated. More modern legend holds that there will be severe storms if anyone attempts to destroy the stone circle, and this is borne by the story that Colonel Lacy, a local landowner (who also had Lacy's Cave built was planning to have the stones blown up; a storm blew up from nowhere, meaning that the gunpowder could not be lit and the attempt was abandoned.

The stone of Long Meg itself is made of Sandstone, quarried from about 3 miles away, rather than granite (which is what the rest are) and is over 3.5 metres high and stands off by herself at the Southeast of the circle. One side of this megalith is covered with prehistoric rock art, some of which can be seen on my highly processed blip. According to Aubrey Burl, an eminent (but sometimes wrong) archaeologist, this stone might be a remnant of another, earlier henge, and so unrelated to the rest. There are an equal number of legends associated with this stone - that she was a witch, Meg of Meldon who lived in the early 17th Century amongst others.

Personally, I like the idea that 4000 years ago, people used her as an astronomical device. She lines up with the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset and might have been used to mark these high points in the calender. But that is another blip....

More experiments in my Flickr.