Arcadia Discussion Zone

Great pictures anyway Richard. Thank you so much for going down there. Maybe next year I'll make the effort to meet up. It was a warm night so I hope you felt it was worth the effort of going down there.

I will try to dig out Pete Glastonbury's synopsis for you. He was going to write a book but it's gone by the wayside now. I posted the relevant pics from it in this thread anyway.

Oh yes, it was definitely worth the effort (anyway, I saw four mysterious burning orbs in the sky on the way home - see Crop Circles - it was a great night!). But no, seriously, thank you for telling us about it. And it can't be that well known about, because I half-wondered if there might have been a few other people around watching it, but there was nobody, although there were a few folk wandering about the base of the hill itself, or going up to West Kennet Long Barrow. So I definitely plan to do it again next year, in fact I think I'll make it an annual thing.

I certainly did, and was just about to post a short report on it.

The sun did indeed roll down the hill, but I didn't do a very good job of capturing it, I'm sorry to say. In fact, I'm rather shame faced about it, having slightly botched both the photography and my choice of viewing location. In fact, I wish you'd been there, as I probably needed supervision!

I did nevertheless see the sun roll down the hill, so here's my account of the evening. All times given are British Summer Time (GMT+1).

I arrived there in good time, at about 7.45pm, with the sun still quite high in the sky over the hill. Yesterday was a very hot day in the south of England, with temperatures going above 30 degrees here in Winchester, and even at Avebury at that time the temps were still in the high 20s. It was a beautiful evening, warm and still, the crop fields burnished deep gold by the sun. I parked in the lay-by opposite Silbury Hill on the Marlborough road, crossed Pan Bridge and made my over to the foot of the rise that leads up to West Kennet Long Barrow. I continued on east along the Kennet a little way into the general viewing vicinity that you had indicated on one of your plans.

And I should have stayed there. Just as I should have taken a copy of your plan, instead of relying on my increasingly collander-like memory. But I still had a lot of time to wait at that stage, and decided to continue wandering east for a while, and then realised that I was getting too far away, and was losing the hill periodically behind trees and hedgerows. Anyway, after a fair bit of general dilly-dallying about, taking photographs of things and trying out different vantage points, and concerned that the now setting sun was way too far away from the hill, I walked back towards Silbury.

This is the view from near to West Kennet at 8.45pm. As you can see, from this position the setting sun is far from the hill.



Now seeing my error in having ventured too far to the east, I realised that the nearer I got to the hill, the more I was able to close the angle, as it were, thus "bringing" the sun closer to the side of the hill. But time was now ticking away. Sadly, therefore, thanks to all my faffing about, by the time I got to the viewing area, the sun had already started its roll. It proved very hard to photograph, despite much frantic fiddling with camera settings, and so the first usable picture I have of the roll is this one, taken at 8.48pm, although I observed the phenomenon from about a minute earlier, when it was quite high up the hill, if not at the top of it.



As you can see from the above picture, there's a notch in the hill towards the top, presumably caused by erosion around the summit, and it was from this position up the hill's flank that I first witnessed the roll.

Not much of a picture below, but this is the sun reaching the foot of the hill, at 8.50pm, seemingly caught in the V formed by the side of the hill and the farmhouse in the foreground.



And here's Silbury Hill at 9.06pm, the sun having now dropped beneath the horizon.



So I'm really sorry, I didn't do half as good a job on that as I wanted to. I really should have gone over the night before, even though it is the best part of a three-hour round trip, and confirmed a little more precisely the correct viewing location (and angle of view towards the hill), and got the camera better set up. Never mind. I got to see most of the roll. And it was a beautiful evening to be at Avebury, and I enjoyed the experience. If you know when it's going to happen again, please do let me know, and I'll try and do better next time. But there was still much to enjoy about it all.

I also got the chance to see the Silababy companion hill you have referred to elsewhere. Here it is, viewed from one field away, from the south.



And finally, to conclude the excitement for the evening, on the way home I witnessed a bizarre and unexplainable aerial phenomenon over some crop fields, but I'll write about that another time on a different thread.

Richard, I think if your sun went down where the house was you were too far south. Which means that Pete G mislead me and I misled you. Hopefully there is a narrow gap nearer the road where the phenomenon is visible. Vegetation may now be in the way. Maybe Pete's photo was not taken on the ideal line either.

The sunroll notion at Avebury is not common knowledge. A small team were going to publish but didn't. Pete G has been supplying me with information about Avebury, stuff he was saving for his book, but he says that will now not happen, he is ill. So he's shared it with me.

There is another view given in the synopsis, which shows Silbury and Silbaby nearer to us at the right. We can see the farmhouse is now to the left at the foot of Silbury. So it's as much my fault for not being clearer about the viewpoint. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I am still unclear whether moving that far over would be correct for the sunroll on this date, so I admit to some confusion.



Will private you the link to the complete document Richard.

One thing I did notice is how dramtically and swiftly the distance between the sun and the hill changed every few steps I walked towards it. So approaching the little farm road to West Kennet from the east, for example, I looked at the sun way away from the hill, and thought, "This can't be right, it's about two counties away", and then just one field further on it completely closes up the angle, and I have my sun roll.

http://www.landscape-perception.com/visual_investigations/

here's a plan for the viewing position according to these chaps...the viewing point, the backsight, for the Silbury sunroll phenomenon is marked on the plan here as ‘camera position’.

ALL SAINTS' church, so called in 1763, (fn. 72) is built of chalk blocks and freestone and has achancel with north vestry, a nave with north aisle and south porch, and a west tower. The animal-head label stops of a reset doorway are 12th-century and the oldest masonry in the church. The present nave was built in the 13th century with north and south aisles, each with a three-bayed arcade, the north aisle being narrow. The chancel was probably rebuilt or lengthened in the 14th century. In the 15th century the south aisle and all but the centralbay of its arcade were demolished, the doorway bearing the 12th-century stops was set in th esurviving bay, and the porch was built; the whole doorway is in 12th-century style but apart from the stops is 19th-century. Also in the 15th century the tower was built, new windows were inserted in the chancel and the north aisle, and the nave roof was renewed and given a celure above a rood loft which was approached by a stair turret in the new south wall. (fn. 73) In 1854 the church was restored under the direction o fC. H. Gabriel. The chancel, which by then had been ceiled, was rebuilt with the vestry and in a14th-century style, the chancel arch was enlarged, a west gallery was removed, and the whole church was repaired and refitted. (fn. 74)

From: 'Yatesbury', A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 17: Calne (2002), pp. 172-181. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report ... mpid=18052 Date accessed: 29 October 2012.

Continuing my ramblings to the immediate south-west of Windmill Hill, yesterday I went up and over the Oldbury Hillfort escarpment at Cherhill, and down onto the old Roman Road, which is now a long and very straight bridle track, that runs more or less parallel to the modern Devizes-Avebury-Marlborough Road.



Another view east along the road, towards Avebury, just after a hail storm:



This is a William Stukeley engraving of the Roman Road from 1724, a different stretch of it, but the same general area.



Back on the Windmill Hill side of the escarpment one has a long view across the plain to the Ridgeway on the horizon. The bridle track running left to right in the foreground is the Old Bath Road.



It also affords a different perspective on Silbury Hill, from the south-west.

Did you hear the Yatesbury Bells Richard
http://youtu.be/Wpcac3xMJUM
the bells date back 1600's

the Mass Dial of Yatebury
a circle in stone



the stainglass window has the Myrrbearers Mary Magdalene included
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~engcots/YatesburyPhotos.html

...and astronomer/musician, Brian May of Queen.

As opposed to Brian, Queen of May?



Sorry, I needed the cheap larfs today - I'm home with a bad headcold.

BTW, Happy Eponalia, everyone...

TCP

Pete Glastonbury wrote to me today and says that if we want to try again for the Avebury sun roll in 2013 to let him know and he will show us the exact viewing spot.

Pete Glastonbury has an exhibition on at the Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes until Feb 3rd.

Ancient Wiltshire
The exhibition features Pete's knowledge of the monuments of the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, combined with his deep interest in astronomy and space science.
The exhibition also commemorates the 200th anniversary of the publication of Ancient Wiltshire - the first true archaeological publication.

here is quartz a trigonal crystal
experiments have been conducted to use calcite for a cloak of invisibility.

Had this not happened I would have disappeared into the sand and become totally invisible, with no clue as to where I had gone.

Alum bay is famous for all the different hues of sands that can be found in the cliffs. As kids we would buy small bottles and make patterns inside with the sands.