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Megalithic Terraforming (British History)
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Mick Harper
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The chapter on Folk Customs is still in the throes of organisation so meanwhile here's one we did earlier.

Megalithic Terraforming

We tend to keep geological and historical timescales separate in our minds because the one rarely impinges on the other. But in the case of the British landscape this is not actually so. The whole of Britain down to the line of the Thames was covered by thousands of feet of ice up until about twelve thousand years ago and such ice-sheets create a tabula rasa, whatever was there before in the form of surface features has been completely erased and, when the ice retreats, a wholly new landscape emerges.

So most of Britain, and since the area immediately to the south of the ice will also be radically effected, we can say the whole of Britain, consists of a landscape that is only twelve thousand years old. That hill, that valley, that lake, have all been created by natural forces of weathering over the last twelve thousand years.
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Mick Harper
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

Human beings have been present for the whole of that time and it is only now that ecologists are coming to terms with the effect of any human presence. The earliest inhabitants, though few in number, would still have imposed themselves not merely as the 'top predator' but as a thoroughly un-natural top predator.

However few, these unsophisticated people can wring changes on a surprising scale since by hunting large animals with un-natural efficiency, for instance by trying to exclude them completely as a thought-out objective, they can have all kinds of knock-on effects on the flora and fauna which in turn can have considerable consequences for forestation, erosion and eventually geomorphology. These chain reactions may be specially radical in post-glacial areas since the flora and fauna themselves are not yet securely established.

Nonetheless in the wider scheme of things Early Man's works are no doubt less than epochal, the environmental changes being after all accidental. But such a situation changes markedly with the coming of agriculture, and not only because the human population changes from thousands to millions. To become 'millions' these agriculturalists are obliged to set about the wholesale conversion of the harsh post-glacial landscape into something much gentler.
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Mick Harper
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

If we look at geologically 'new' areas elsewhere on earth, that is landscapes that have only recently emerged from being covered by the all-scouring sheets of ice thousands of feet thick, we expect rather forbidding terrain. Areas like the Laurentian Shield in Canada or the Scandinavian peninsula are desperately poor in terms of nutrients, littered with acidic lakes and generally not up to much in terms of human utility.

This is also true of areas immediately south of the ice, which are scarcely better in either North America or mainland Europe. None of this fits what we see in Britain, which has emerged from the ice just as recently but where conditions are best summed up as 'mostly benign'. Of course this may all be entirely because of climate, subsoil or other local factors but the same effect can be achieved by Man, intentionally or accidentally, by fortuitous land alteration or by deliberate actions.

Take, for instance, forest clearance. To read orthodox historical accounts, the impression is always given that forest is somehow ground that the locals haven't quite got round to clearing but this cannot possibly be true. It is accepted from various lines of evidence that Britain was 'cleared' with considerable speed as soon as agriculture was established but then, for some reason, it is supposed that these same determined clearers weren't up to the task of finishing the job.

Despite thousands of years of presumed land-hunger, despite thousands of years of possessing the technical means to do so, for thousands of years the Ancient Brits stubbornly refused to 'clear the forest'. We may not know exactly why these unfeasibly large tracts were left intact but at least we can be reasonably sure it must have been a deliberate choice on somebody's part to do so.
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Mick Harper
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

By contrast, areas of the countryside completely denuded of trees but not used for farmland, which include virtually all English moorland, are routinely declared to be that way for natural reasons--soil type, altitude etc--but human activity in the form of overgrazing, overfelling and industrial tailings are at least prima facie alternative explanations.

These areas may be mute testimony to what happens when Megalithic principles are ignored or, perhaps more likely, the Megalithics regarded certain areas as 'industrial' and had few qualms about letting them go so far as agricultural use was concerned.

The other treeless landscape, and the one most readily identified with Megalithia in the popular mind, is the chalk downland of southern England, but what exactly is a chalk downland? It cannot exist in nature since left to itself it reverts to scrub within a very few years so the mere fact of its existence today gives us two apparent 'facts' about the past: i) the southern English countryside has not been unsupervised even for 'a very few years' and ii) somebody or other was once quite anxious that a large swathe of the countryside should be treeless.

Again, why? At this remove all we can reasonably say for certain is that chalk downland was caused by and steadfastly maintained by Ancient Britons.
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Mick Harper
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

Presumably it is no accident that the greatest Megalithic structures are to be found on this chalkland. The only piece of Megalithic terraforming recognised as such by academic archaeologists is Silbury Hill, near Avebury. Though the mound is reckoned by archaeologists to require six million man-hours, orthodoxy is reluctant to grant the Megalithics the capacity for the routine application of such vast forces to produce even more imposing interventions in the landscape.

Since Silbury Hill has no obvious purpose, archaeologists are loath to give the Megalithics any motives as to their monumental constructions other than the usual 'ritual purposes'. When there is a historical record, terraforming is accepted as an entirely straightforward matter. For example even run-of-the-mill Georgian gentry families routinely went in for prodigies of earth-sculpting using methods--pick axes and shovels--scarcely more productive than the tools available to the Megalithics, and did it in a single generation.

Why then is it so difficult to contemplate an entire nation with a timescale of at least centuries managing to Capability-Brown much more extensive areas of the countryside? Once it is accepted that, unlike Georgian gentry, the Megalithics' terraforming was central to the British way-of-life, the mobilising of six million man-hours becomes somewhat par for the course.

But more than that, if indeed the Megalithics were focused on terraforming we might safely suppose that over several thousand years they might have improved their techniques. Nor is it hard to see the general area they might concentrate their improvements on since the control of running water is a Megalithic speciality. Just because the science of eroding (and re-depositing) chalk and limestone is something we have rarely needed to do does not mean that the Megalithics were not masters of how it was done.
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

It is only logical to start at the two places most important to Megalithics, Avebury and Stonehenge. The two sites are separated by but a few miles of Wiltshire countryside so given that Megalithia is country-wide, even Europe-wide, the sheer proximity of their two chief constructions is something requiring explanation.

In fact, the proximity is the explanation because they are essentially a single elongated complex even though, technically speaking, Avebury is a transport entrepôt and Stonehenge is a scientific establishment. But such twinning of the mundane and the sublime is a constant characteristic of Megalithia.

Any cursory examination of the Avebury environs will lead one to suppose that Avebury was selected because it had a remarkable number of prominent features in the chalk landscape surrounding it. But this is wrong, as we have seen Avebury was selected for its postion vis a vis the geography of southern England. If so, it follows that the prominent features were sculpted from the landscape now that this was the site of the 'capital of Megalithia'.

Stonehenge by contrast seems to have been deliberately positioned because of the lack of prominent features. This too is something of an illusion because the surrounding chalk landscape has been deliberately 'planed' to create lines-of-sight in every direction towards the visible horizon, for observational purposes. Of course this is somewhat difficult to prove, one is left merely with a statistical puzzle: how many 'plains' are there in Britain apart from Salisbury Plain and what is the probability that one of them would have the world's most famous pre-historic site on it?
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

A different but even more characteristic piece of Megalithic terraforming can be found on the route between Avebury and Stonehenge, which passes between Milk Hill and Tan Hill. There has long been a local controversy as to which of these next-door neighbour hills is higher, a matter of some significance because these are the highest hills anywhere in this part of England.

The BBC felt the dispute merited a half-hour of national prime time to decide which one was in fact the taller and set about measuring them by the latest scientific techniques. No doubt this was terribly important but what everybody on the programme missed was the rather more pertinent question: what are the chances in nature of having the two highest hills in a particular area being a) right next to one another and b) exactly the same height?

Statistically of course it is supremely unlikely but then again, statistically, somewhere in the world it probably has to happen, and when it does no doubt the startling congruency might excite the attentions of the local television station. But what are chances that that 'one place in the world' should happen to be on the route between the world's two most important Megalithic sites?
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Mick Harper
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

The obvious conclusion is that the Megalithics deliberately arranged for the two hills to be of equal height. This is not physically a difficult task, merely a matter of lopping off a bit from the higher one, but the challenging aspect is to be able to survey their respective heights to within inches (ten, according to the BBC) in an overall height of a thousand feet.

But then surveying, or some allied piece of scientific endeavour, was presumably the reason for doing it in the first place since striving for such pedantic accuracy seems a bit extravagant if done only for ritual or aesthetic purposes. The specific reason though is unknown.

The importance of latitude might mean that having equally tall 'sighting posts' would be a good way of calibrating cross-staffs but another possibility is the timing of the sun behind one and then the other, which would be useful data when measuring, for instance, the circumference of the earth. Alternatively, having two hills of equal height, close enough to be used as a giant spirit level, would make an excellent baseline for the triangular surveying of the British countryside.

If Milk and Tan Hills are measuring devices of some kind, then their being situated between Avebury and Stonehenge would seem to imply that Avebury and Stonehenge are themselves to some degree measuring establishments. However, since Avebury is the major centre for people in need of navigational data it is perhaps better to think of it as the end-user of the science that is being generated at Stonehenge, which gives the impression, even now, of ivory tower isolation from the hurly-burly of Megalithic commerce at Avebury.
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

Nevertheless Avebury is clearly more than just a transit clearing house. Not only does it have stones that even today, when most have been destroyed, are impressive in their profusion but the stone circles are themselves only the centre of a vast range of Megalithic 'things'.

One cannot say much more than that their purpose is enigmatic, though one can say that they are ambitious both in scale and number. Since Avebury would appear to be the 'capital' of Megalithia, it may be that this vast agglomeration of barrows, artificial hills and tumuli are, as orthodoxy mostly opines, burial places for very important people but the alternative view is that the entire complex is for much more useful purposes.

On this reading, Silbury Hill would cease to be a monumental tomb and could now be seen as a scientific viewing platform. This is unprovable considering Silbury Hill in isolation but what has to be done is to take Avebury as a loose collection (different sites were built in different eras, corresponding to the successive changes at Stonehenge) but all of which, considered together, have some unifying purpose. What that purpose is we cannot say save that it is likely connected with navigation.
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

Stonehenge's purpose is just as hard to identify as Avebury's. Certainly it is too complex and too sophisticated to fit easily into the rough-and-ready world of the ordinary stone circles but it clearly bears a direct relationship to them, the one must have a function related to the other. If Stonehenge is not directly concerned with transporting people and animals, is it reasonable to suppose that it is for controlling the system that transports the people and the animals?

What, after all, would we expect of a system that lasted for at least two and a half millennia (4,000 to 1,500 BC) and more especially what would we expect of a cast of characters who were operating a supranational organisation based on navigational instruments and measurements? Is it not reasonable to suppose that such people would become inquisitive about matters that are not strictly limited to the requirements of people getting about the countryside? The least we might anticipate would be the emergence of an intellectual élite and the development, however nugatory, of a megalithic science based around their existing areas of expertise--surveying and astronomy.

It might, for instance, have acted as a kind of university, both in the sense of training neophytes and in the sense of doing basic research. A third and perhaps linked role would be that of National Standards Institute. John Michell (of blesséd memory) pointed out that a national, nay international, surveying and astronomical measurement system would require a central standard and he made the case that the purpose of the cross-pieces of the trilithons, the lintels that stretch across from one sarsen to the next, safely out of reach and carefully cut to size (unlike the other megaliths at Stonehenge), were to act as the defining repository of the basic Megalithic measure.
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

The rest of the monument, a series of near-circles radiating out, though built at different times, would then presumably be for ensuring the accuracy of the calendrical and astronomical data required for navigation. But a valid objection to this theory is that cross-staffs, stone circles and leylines just do not require this order of exactness.

However, there is one circumstance that does require long-term monitoring of where precisely heavenly bodies are situated, when dealing with the very long haul. The night sky changes quite a lot over the centuries. For instance, our Pole Star was not the Megalithics' Pole Star. As the earth's axis wobbles via the so-called Precession of the Equinoxes so the star that is directly over our North Pole changes. Before Polaris, it was Drago, Draconis, the Dragon,* which may or may not be associated with all the dragons that are supposed to be flying up and down the Western (and Eastern) geomantic lines.

It is not just the Pole Star; when the earth shifts its orientation in space, everything heavenly is up for grabs so if you have a system that relies on where these objects are in the night sky at any one time and that system is designed to last for aeons, then somebody or other has to have something or other to keep track of the changes. This would at least account for the fact that Stonehenge was being used and altered over a period of thousands of years.

* That well-known Megalithic, Robert Hooke, used the carefully sited Monument, designed by that other well-known Megalithic, Christopher Wren, to measure the transit of Draconis and then abandoned the Monument forthwith as a viewing platform..
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But this is all so slow. Does it really take an entire Stonehenge to keep people abreast of such infinitesimal changes when the end-user is operating to stone-age margins? A lot of this speculation is dependent on one's view of how the Megalithics conducted their observations. If it is accepted that squinting at heavenly objects and marking their position via a back shadow off a standing stone with a stick is not the last word in scientific precision, then is it possible to improve matters by trading time for exactness?

If individual sightings will only be approximate can you arrange matters such that manifold sightings done over very many years will increase the precision? This would perhaps explain why Stonehenge was not only in use for such a long time but why, periodically, another circle-of-stones was built to replace the current one.

And then there is the other possibility--trade space, not time, in the search for accuracy. Instead of doing two observations a long time apart, do two observations a long distance apart. The Michael Line for example can equally be seen as a way of looking at the same sunrise several hundred miles apart and thereby producing a capacity for genuinely earth-wide, not to say solar system-wide, measurements
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

The Megalithics thought big. The Michael Line itself is evidence that the Megalithics were surveyors on the grand scale but the Line provides at least circumstantial evidence the Megalithics were landscape engineers of epic ambition too. We are so used to the map of Britain that we perhaps lose sight of the fact that it is suspiciously convenient in layout from a line-of-sight navigational poiint of view.

How fortunate, for instance, is it that the longest landline across Britain should link the two most important megalithic commercial sites, the tin mines of Cornwall and the flint mines of Norfolk? Unless of course Britain was designed that way. A preposterous thought? Actually, re-sculpting Britain is surprisingly do-able in Megalithic terms. Here is a map of pre-Megalithic south-western Britain:

Old coastline shown in bold

It will be noted that Cornwall is no longer 'plugged into' the rest of Britain, at least not as the Megalithics saw things, with their requirement to have overland leylines as their navigational system. So they drained the Somerset Levels and created a line-of-sight joining Britain's two most distant east-west points, the Cornish west coast and the Norfolk east coast.

The evidence that the Somerset Levels are the product of Megalithic intervention as opposed to natural forces is threefold:
1. It is agreed even by orthodoxy that the Levels date only from 4,500 BC, which is the same date Megalithia started.
2. The levels are formed by the Polden Hills -- a polder is an area of land claimed from the sea.
3. The Norfolk Broads.
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

This last point arises because, while the Levels are unique in Britain (if not the world), there is one place that comes close in physical terms and that is the Norfolk Broads. By an otherwise astounding coincidence, the Broads are more or less bisected by the Michael Line. And not just any old bit of the Michael Line but the only other part which is directly affected by proximity to the sea.

The North Sea erodes the east coast of Britain at a rate of approximately one mile per century, something we treat by shoring things up or alternatively letting things slide, depending on how we feel about any given part of the coastline, the level of our technology and the state of our finances.

The Megalithics took a similar view and they regarded the end of their main trunk route, the Michael Line, as sufficiently important to decide that safeguarding it for all time against erosion was the right policy. How do we know this?* It is a simple matter of comparative cartography. Here is a map of the British east coast of six thousand years ago, i.e. before sixty centuries of coastal erosion @ one mile per century:

North Sea coastline c. 4,500 BC (shown as bold line)

* One way we can know it is that the two villages on the present coast either side of the Michael Line are Ormesby St Michael and Ormesby St Margaret. The fact that two dragon-slaying saints (plus Orme = worm = dragon) are still here facing the sea is eloquent testimony that they must have been there a very long time and such a situation can only arise if, for some reason, coastal erosion has been stopped here in its tracks for very many centuries.
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Megalithic Terraforming (cont)

Now we draw in the longest landline across southern Britain, and protect it with 'the Norfolk Broads'

North Sea coastline c. 4,500 BC with Michael Line and Norfolk Broads protection

We apply sixty centuries of coastal erosion @ one mile per century except in the place where the Norfolk Broads have been constructed to prevent that erosion.

North Sea coastline after sixty centuries of erosion everywhere except the area protected by the Norfolk Broads.
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