The Scottish Connections - Orkney, Hebrides, Aberdeenshire and Stonehenge

The Ness of Brodgar is an astonishing complex of buildings and structures that seems to have begun some time around 3500 BCE (dating from charcoal recovered from a sondage under Structure 14's northwest wall), reached a peak of monumental activity between 3125-2850 BCE and declined over the succeeding centuries until its eventual abandonment around 2400 BCE.

What was so special about this narrow spit of land, at this high latitude, that was the driver for such an effort?

There's an obvious focus on the sky - the Ness itself runs roughly northwest-southeast making it an excellent spot from which to watch the Winter Solstice Sunrise and Summer Solstice Sunset - and other monuments on Orkney (eg Maes Howe) support the idea that these turning points were marked.

On an impulse, I fired up Stellarium and loaded a horizon profile created for the site by HeyWhatsThat to take a look at the sky around 3000 BCE.

The first thing I noticed was the one of the tracks from the Archaeolines plug-in wasn't shown - that for the Major Lunar Standstill at the negative declination for the Moon, for a very good reason.

The high latitude combined with the elevation of the horizon towards the south means that at its southernmost possible extreme, the Moon never rises as seen from the Ness. Even at its culmination due south, it remains below the horizon.

Major Lunar Standstill 3001 BCE, no moonrise at the southern extreme
(horizon landform, shown by the brown line, made transparent to show the track)

At the Ness we are, effectively, beyond the "arctic circle" for the Moon at the limit of its 18.61 year regression of the lunar nodes cycle.

I wonder what the Orcadians would have made of this? That's an investigation for another day.

Gneiss to see you...

Recent excavations in the summer of 2026 at the Ness have turned up another piece of polished Lewisian banded gneiss to go with the fragments found in previous digs (pestle macehead and an axe).

Lewisian gneiss from the Ness of Brodgar 2026 dig (photo: Sigurd Towrie)

These artefacts confirm connections between Orkney and the Western Isles/NW coast of Scotland as the latter areas are the source of this highly distinctive rock. As the dig diary puts it:

This distinctive rock, sourced from the north‑west coast of Scotland and the Western Isles, has long testified to Neolithic links between those regions and Orkney. Several of our polished stone artefacts – especially maceheads – were crafted from it.

Hmm - there's another gneiss macehead to think about, and that one comes from an entirely different site: Stonehenge.

The Stonehenge gneiss macehead

If the Lewisian gneiss finds at the Ness "testified to Neolithic links between those regions and Orkney" then surely the same case can be made for the one found at Stonehenge.

Col. William Hawley discovered this object in a shallow scrape near to the South Barrow in 1923.

Location of the gneiss macehead found by Hawley in 1923

He wrote, in his 5th Report on the 1923 excavation season given to the Society of Antiquaries in June 1924:

Only on one occasion has anything been found with them (ie cremations on the inner edge of the bank - SB), but this was one which went far to make up for the poverty of the others. It occurred this season and should rightly come into next season's report, but finds have been so infrequent that perhaps I may be excused for producing it this evening. It is a beautiful little polished mace-head of the 'cushion' type found amongst the bones of a cremation like the others, but with a shallow cist scraped 2 in. deep in the chalk rubble. It was 7 in . below the surface and 5 in. wide, but not deep enough in the more solid ground to cover all the bones and some protruded into the soil above the cist.

Recumbent echoes

Various authors (Burl, Bradley and others) have suggested that the recumbent stone circles of Aberdeenshire indicate a focus on the southernmost Moon at its Major Standstill extreme, and the prone nature of the Altar Stone in its present position could be regarded as an echo of those monuments. Certainly the perpendicular to its long axis points towards the northernmost major moonrise/southernmost major moonset.

There's more to unpack in the story of the Scottish origin for the Altar Stone - I look forward to a more secure provenance than the broad "Orcadian Basin" region when the sampling and analysis of the candidate sites has been completed.

Using the Moon as a proxy for the ancient Sun

There's a problem all archaeoastronomers face when they're dealing with properly ancient sites and their possible alignments to the sky, and it's called the change in the Obliquity of the Ecliptic.

The Earth's rotational axis is currently tilted at an angle of roughly 23.4° to the plane of our orbit around the Sun - it's why we have seasons. This angle (the Obliquity of the Ecliptic) isn't fixed, it varies over long periods of time (roughly 41000 years) between about 22.1° and 24.5°.

This angle is critical in determining exactly where on the horizon the Sun rises and sets at the solstices - the greater the angle, the closer to the due north direction the summer solstice sunrise and set appear; and the closer to the due south direction the winter solstice sunrise and set are.

The large sarsens of Stonehenge were erected about 4,500 years ago when Earth's tilt was 24° (in round numbers), and at summer solstice the Sun rose and set about 1° further north than it does today. Similarly, the winter solstice Sun rose and set about 1° further south than today.

All this means is that we can't, today, experience the alignments at solstice exactly the same way as the people who built Stonehenge. Sure, we can do calculations to correct for the offset but we can't ever see what they saw. Frustrating.

The Moon's orbit is tilted to the plane of the Earth's by about 5.1° and the Moon's orbital path itself rotates around the Earth, taking 18.61 years to go around once. This is what gives rise to the so-called Major and Minor Lunar Standstills.

In the couple of years around the Major Lunar Standstills the Moon can rise and set much further around to the north and south than the Sun can ever reach - something like 10° or roughly 20 lunar diameters further at the utmost extremes. It's these extremes that the long sides of the Station Stone rectangle are aligned on, as first reported by Peter Newham (and, independently, Gerald Hawkins) in the 1960s.

We can take advantage of the phenomenon, because while the Moon is in the "Major" half of its cycle there are times when it can rise (and set) at the azimuths that the ancient Sun once did and no longer does.

So we can effectively use the Moon as a proxy for the ancient Sun.

As I've written about before, there is a secondary solstice axis that runs through Stonehenge which points towards the winter solstice sunrise in the SE and the summer solstice sunset in the NW.

There is a sightline, tightly constrained, through Stonehenge that frames the precise spot on the SE horizon where the ancient winter solstice Sun appeared. It makes use of a notch in Stone 58 and the edge of Stone 53 to create a "hole" where you can view this small patch of horizon.

Once upon a time, 4,500 years ago, someone standing here at winter solstice would see the Sun rise just to the left of the electricity pylon you can see in the image above. Due to the change in the Earth's tilt, as explained above, that doesn't happen for us today.

Happily, though, on 11th July 2025 - one day after it was full - the Moon rose at almost precisely the same azimuth that the ancient winter solstice Sun once did (exceeding it by ~9' of arc in declination, so rising fractionally south of perfection) and I was afforded the opportunity by Historic England and English Heritage to be on site to watch it happen.

I set up my camera to point along the sightline through the notch in Stone 58 and told it to take a photo every few seconds from 22:20 UTC+1 to catch the rising Moon.

Remarkably for England in the summer time the sky was clear to the horizon, and at 22:22:27 UTC+1 the first gleam of the Moon appeared.

Over the course of the next several minutes, the Moon gave me the chance to watch with my own eyes something very close to what the builders of Stonehenge would have seen at their winter solstice Sunrises.

Half orb occurred at 22:24:52 UTC+1.

Full orb followed at 22:27:01 UTC+1.

Overlaying several shots together, and with some calculation to produce the true position of the ancient winter solstice Sun, I'm able to show how close this Moonrise was to being spot on.

Ever since Prof. Gordon Freeman first suggested the existence of a secondary solstice axis I've been intrigued by his idea. Back in 2012, I helped confirm the calculations he made based on his 1990s observations near the winter solstice at Stonehenge because we had a perfectly clear sunrise that year but he and I could never actually observe it "truly" due to that pesky change in the Earth's tilt.

Thanks to the Moon's periodic excesses in rising and setting azimuths, I've now been able to see it with my own eyes.

It's hard to convey the sense of excitement I felt in the few minutes before first gleam appeared, and the enormous sense of satisfaction in watching the Moon behave exactly as anticipated.

There's something wondrous about peering through a narrow gap created by two stones erected 4,500 years ago and being perhaps the first person in several millennia to experience a ghostly echo of the spectacle the Stonehengineers intended.

The observations and technical details have been written up and accepted as a research article for the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology so if you fancy you can find that here: https://doi.org/10.1558/jsa.33686

All the photographs taken and a short report (similar to what's written above, but with extra detail) is available via Archaeology Data Services here: https://doi.org/10.5284/1139139

Stonehenge - Access All Areas

Just a short post about the upcoming release of "Stonehenge - Access All Areas", a documentary - perhaps the documentary - about that famous pile of rocks in a field.

Julian Richards has been involved in the Stonehenge story for over 40 years as an archaeologist, writer, broadcaster and educator and has always wanted to make a film that properly explores everything we know (and think we know) about Stonehenge.

During the pandemic lockdown he got the unique opportunity to spend several days filming inside the monument when it was closed to the public and what started out as a plan to put out three 1-hour films has expanded into a massive project that (currently) runs to 11 episodes.

Julian, Luke Winter, Tim Daw and I have spent the last several years collaborating to distill our geeky obsession with Stonehenge into a coherent narrative, all filmed and edited by Steve Shearn.

Episode 1 drops on Julian's YouTube channel on May 3rd 2026.

Expect interviews, road trips, discussions, arguments, experiments, fun, frolics, Druids, festivals and (maybe) aliens.