Sir,—Logical readers of Mr. Crawford’s article may well stand amazed at the gap between his premises and his deduction that his discovery “puts out of court once and for all the fanciful astronomical theories of the late Sir Norman Lockyer and others.”
All will agree that the new knowledge of air photography created by war efficiency is an invaluable weapon for observation in field archæology, but facts so observed must be soberly examined in relation to those known previously.
How can Mr. Crawford’s discovery of a “dog’s leg” piece of road of unverified date (coming at an angle into the avenue where another road from another direction has always been known to come into it) possibly upset the fact of the main axis of Stonehenge being accurately (or roughly) oriented to the rising sun for purposes of ritiual, sacrifice, or worship? The people of Wiltshire were, I think, coming to Stonehenge to see the sun rise on midsummer day over the sighting stones long before Sir Norman Lockyer looked into the matter.
I have before me the largest scale ordnance map of Stonehenge, which shows the position of each stone before late restorations. Two stones, the “Friar’s Heel” and the “Sacrificial Stone,” are marked. A straight line over the centres of these goes on the south-west exactly through the centre of a large barrow about 1,000 feet away. To the north-east the line lies parallel within the avenue, but on one side of it, and then (on a smaller scale map), exactly hits the important hill-top camp of Sidbury, about 7½ miles away. The fact that the avenue is for 726 yards on this line is good corroboration to the deduction that Stonehenge was built on this axis, but the avenue is not essential to the sun-rise sighting theory, which is based on sighting over two or more fixed stones or other marks, and need not be along a road at all.
What Mr. Crawford’s other, supposed uses of the avenue have to do with his conclusion is difficult to
imagine.—Yours truly,
Alfred Watkins.
Hereford, July 28, 1923.