Wirral Standing Stones

Author : David P Gregg
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (16 download)

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Download or read book Wirral Standing Stones written by David P Gregg and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wirral peninsula of Cheshire has been settled since Mesolithic times. The area was 'Celtic' during the Iron Age until the Roman legions built their fortress at Chester. When the Romans departed the Anglo-Saxons slowly moved in to farm the good land until the 10th when century when Norse-Irish were allowed to settle from Dublin. Just thirty years later a Norse-Irish-Scottish army invaded England and a great battle was fought to decide who ruled in Britain: the Vikings or the united English. That battle took place here on the Wirral in 937 AD. A century and a half later the Norman French arrived and replaced some of the English - Norse landowners. Of all this history little remains. Yet amazingly the author believes remains from the Neolithic and early Bronze Age are still here in plain sight and this book tells their story. The author has walked the Wirral landscape for several decades now, occasionally coming across battered standing stones easily dismissed as old gate posts. Yet checking the early OS maps he found over 160 standing stones mainly in clusters and often, as seen from above, in patterns. Checking tithe field and place names along with aerial photos and Lidar images adds further information. This books analyses 17 standing stone sites involving long multi-stone rows and circular arcs. Why were these rows built? In other places in Britain and Europe such rows often had a calendrical purpose, marking the solstices and equinoxes and perhaps festival dates by noting the sunrise positions. Such horizon calendars have been widely used by ancient (and recent) farmers. However on some famous sites the complex movements of the moon are also marked and this is the case on Wirral. Of course it is often said by the non-numerate that we have simple cases of coincidence. To counter this the author has carried out extensive statistical analyses of each site. On the Wirral sites the probability of the stone row orientations happening by chance are very low. There are only two explanations. Firstly that these sites were built in the Neolithic or Bronze Age as in other parts of Britain. Secondly that in the 19th century landowners conspired to build 'ancient' stone follies based on considerable 'masonic' knowledge of geometry and astronomy. The author toyed with the latter explanation more than once, faced with the remarkable results of his analyses. It is strange that in looking for memories of the standing stones in early Welsh and local literature some very weird links between the stone geometries and, for example, the poem ' Sir Gawain & the Green Knight', written locally and partly set in Wirral, were discovered. These findings are described in an appendix. The reader will find it interesting. The reader may also find the first 'technical' explanation for the stone sites difficult to accept given that the stones may have been raised over 4,000 years ago. For this reason the author supplies several other appendices which look at unexplained 'anomalies' and evidence of remarkable early mathematical achievements and technology.To put the Wirral situation in context we also examine in some detail the surrounding areas of Liverpool, North Wales and East Cheshire and look at their undoubted ancient stone sites. Wirral fits the same pattern. The remarkable artifacts of North Wales, the stones and tombs, and the early Welsh myths can all shed light on the Wirral situation.