Solstice

Ancient Calendars

One of West Cork's ancient calendars

One of West Cork’s ancient calendars

We’ve been catching up on our rock art project this week and it’s brought us out into the field. On Saturday the weather was spectacular – crisp, but with a totally blue sky and vibrant colours. See Amanda’s photo of the day here. We spent most of the day just east of Rosscarbery, a picturesque settlement above the water at Rosscarbery Bay, where the birdlife viewing is always a delight.

One of the sites we visited was Bohonagh. Not only does it boast cupmarked stones, but a very fine boulder burial and a stone circle.

Bohonagh Stone Circle

Bohonagh Stone Circle

West Cork is particularly rich in 3000 year old Bronze Age stone circles and most of them are of the ‘axial’ or ‘recumbent’ type. This means that the circle is laid out on an axis that is oriented in a particular direction. On one side of the circle is a stone laid longways – the recumbent stone. Across from the recumbent are the portals: two tall stones that appear to create a doorway into the circle. Sometimes the stones rise in height from the recumbent to the portals, and the portal stones may be set ‘end-on’ to the circle. There are always, therefore, an uneven number of stones – up to 17 have been recorded, although many circles are incomplete, with fallen or missing stones. The purpose of the axis was to provide a line of sight on a sunrise or sunset (and perhaps even moonrise and moonset) at important calendrical points such as solstices and equinoxes.

The portal stones at Bohonagh

The portal stones at Bohonagh

Bohonagh quartz

Quartz at Bohonagh

A feature of these circles is that many of them include quartz rocks: sometimes as one of the circle stones, sometimes as an additional rock in the interior or exterior of the circle, and sometimes on a nearby monument such as a boulder burial. At Bohonagh there were several quartz rocks, including one lying outside the circle and two supporting the boulder burial. In one case, at Ballycommane, we have seen an enormous quartz rock function as the capstone of a boulder burial – quite awe-inspiring in its visual impact. Interestingly, this same phenomenon occurs in a stone circle in Cornwall – Boscawen-Un in the West Penwith Peninsula, not that far from West Cork! As we watched the quartz under the boulder burial glisten in the sun (impossible to capture on a photograph) we knew it had to be seen as a very special stone to the builders of these circles.

Brooding stones at Dunbeacon

Brooding stones at Dunbeacon

Stone circles often command sweeping views of the surrounding countryside. This makes them well worth visiting, even if a goodly hike is involved. Because they are invariably located on private land, it is good practice to try to track down the landowner and request permission, and of course to always close gates and observe good field etiquette on a visit. Don’t be surprised to find that many are no longer intact: the centuries have taken their toll and many of the stones have fallen or disappeared over time. On the upside, this adds to the romantic wildness of the scene.

Gorteanish Stone Circle, re-discovered in the laying out of the Sheep's Head Way

Gorteanish Stone Circle, re-discovered in the laying out of the Sheep’s Head Way

One of the most famous of the West Cork stone circles is Drombeg, near Glandore. Here, people gather on the winter and summer solstices to witness sunrise and sunset.

Drombeg on a wet day

Drombeg on a wet day

At Bohonagh, the alignment is to the spring equinox sunrise and sunset, due east and west. We plan to be there!

Ghosts of the Past

An abandoned village slowly returns to the bog

An abandoned village slowly returns to the bog

Amanda, Bardic School

Amanda, Bardic School

Amanda and Peter Clarke were our hosts yesterday for a Sheep’s Head Day. They know the peninsula intimately and were able to take us to places we would never have found on our own. They also love it: they have made their lives in Ahakista in a beautiful old farmhouse with a productive garden, and between them manage several projects that are great local resources.

We have written about the Sheep’s Head Peninsula in previous posts. It’s a wild and beautiful place, criss-crossed by a network of world-class marked trails, and full of prehistoric and historic sites. Part of our tour took in the Bardic School, about which Robert wrote in his Kings and Poets piece. But mostly what we saw was new to us: an impressive stone circle and a stone alignment, a lonely and moving famine graveyard, the remains of a pre-famine village, and finally a holy well and mass rock site.

The stone circle is probably the recumbent type, in which two tall portal stone stand opposite a stone with its longest axis parallel to the earth. The sightline from the portals over the recumbent stone is often focused on a solstice sunrise. Stone alignments in this area tend to be three to five stones in a row and may also be part of the solar and lunar observatory system that is characteristic of many Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments.

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Ireland before 1845 had a population of 8 million people. Over a million died of starvation and disease and another million emigrated in the period of the Great Famine, from 1845 to 1852. West Cork was one of the epicentres of the disaster. It is still alive in the folk memory of the people and we saw two graphic reminders of it on our tour. The first was the Roskerig burial ground. Although stones were scattered around the graveyard, not a single inscription was visible, as if it had been hastily used in a chaotic time and then forgotten. The second reminder was the remains of a long-abandoned village, now slowly returning to the bog.

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The holy well and mass rock are dedicated to Mary and are adorned with multiple images of her. The well is still in use and credited with miracle cures. The mass rock, where a crowd would gather outdoors in the days of the Penal Laws that outlawed Catholicism, to hear mass, is well preserved. When the Redcoats got wind that a mass was in progress and came to arrest the priest, Mary threw up a thick mist around the area to confuse the soldiers and allow the priest to escape. In acknowledgement, we deposited our coins in the well and said a prayer for something close to our hearts.

well

Here Comes the Sun

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The sun rises across the valley from Ballybane West on Feb 2nd, 2013

Joint Post by Finola and Robert

In Finola’s solstice post, she wrote that archaeologists are aware of the astronomical siting of some Irish megalithic sites, such as at Newgrange, and Loughcrew.

Michael Wilson and his Whole Horizon Analytical Technique (WHAT)

Michael Wilson carries out his Whole Horizon Analytical Technique (WHAT)

We have become intrigued by the work of Michael Wilson, a talented amateur astronomer who is singlehandedly documenting the astronomical siting of many monuments in this area. Recently he has turned his attention to rock art. His website contains an astonishing body of work, meticulously researched and rigorously recorded, along with explanatory notes. His thesis, in a nutshell, is that the builders and carvers of Neolithic and Bronze Age times were keen observers of the day and night skies and were intimately familiar with their surroundings. They situated their megaliths and rock art in places where the contours of the horizon allowed them to mark significant solar and lunar events, such as solstices, equinoxes, lunar settings and risings, and intermediate points. Thus, the sun at the winter solstice might rise at the highest point on a nearby mountain, or set in a deep notch in the hills at the spring equinox. The solar calendar has four quarter days (the solstices and the equinoxes), four cross-quarter days (the half way points between the solstices and the equinoxes) and a further finer division into points half-way between the quarters and cross-quarters: an ancient 16 month calendar.

A few days ago, Michael posted this:

Imbolc, the spring cross-quarter, is almost upon us. It will be on Feb 1st by the Gregorian calendar, where it is commonly known as St Bridget’s Day or Candlemas, but this is not the correct day. By day-count, the times to celebrate will be sunset on the 3rd and sunrise on the 4th. Astronomically, the sun will be exactly half-way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox at about 16:13 GMT on Feb 3rd, while Feb 2nd is the day to see the sun rise and set at the prehistoric positions for marking this festival.

We set out for our favourite rock art site, Ballybane West, before dawn on Feb 2nd, feeling incredibly lucky to have a clear sky. As the sky brightened, and the nearby hills started to receive the sun’s rays, the carvings on the rock surface became clearly visible. Then, the sun rose, exactly where Michael’s predictions said it would, at the highest point of a rounded hill on the horizon. As people had been doing 4000 years ago in this exact spot, we marked the cross-quarter day of Imbolc – a time when the land starts to warm up, the first spring flowers appear, and the ewes are visibly pregnant.

The carvings light up in the dawn rays

The Ballybane West carvings light up in the dawn rays

If Michael is correct, we have to think in a whole new way about the rock art. Although there have been indications before that the location of the carved rocks was of some significance (for example: there is often a view of water; some theorists have posited that they are ancient boundary markers), this way of looking at rock art elevates the actual siting of the rock as most important, and allows us to view the carvings themselves as a way to indicate the purpose of the site – a means to an end rather than an end in itself. The motifs, though, will probably remain as enigmatic as ever.

The Sun Stands Still

The Entrance Stone at Newgrange.

The Entrance Stone at Newgrange.

That’s what solstice means – the sun’s apparent ability to stand still at the mid-winter point. It rises no further south, hangs around that area for a few days, and then starts on its trek back to the eastern sky. For early farmers, like the ones who built Newgrange in the Boyne Valley in Ireland (and Stonehenge and the Pyramids) and like the ones who carved our rock art, such seasonal markings were critical. At Newgrange, an enormous passage tomb built 5000 years ago, the rising sun illuminates the passage and chamber only during the winter solstice. In West Cork, near here, the Drombeg Stone Circle is designed so that the winter solstice sun sets over the recumbent stone, through the two tall portal stones. Drombeg probably dates to the Bronze Age.

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Ballybane West at sunset

There is a good argument that open air rock art may also relate in some way to equinoxes and solstices and days of seasonal change, such as those that were celebrated in the ancient Celtic festivals. So far, the only rock art that has been putatively identified as having a significant solar orientation is the Boheh Stone in Mayo. We decided to visit our favourite rock art site, Ballybane West, on the evening of the 20th December and again on the morning of December 21, to see if anything interesting showed up at sunset or sunrise. We were rewarded in the evening by the rock art glowing beautifully in the slanting sunlight, although we could observe no particular significance about where the sun was setting.

Enigmatic carvings at Ballybane West

Enigmatic carvings at Ballybane West

The next morning, although the dawn colours were spectacular when we left the house, the clouds rolled in and obscured the sunrise. Still, it was wonderful to be out on the rock at dawn, listening to the birdsong and feeling in communion with the ancient spirits of this special place.

Happy Solstice to all our Family and Friends!

Ard Glas Dawn, Winter Solstice 2012

Ard Glas Dawn, Winter Solstice 2012