Standing stones and straight lines

At Carnac, in Brittany, you can walk for over a kilometer before you can reach the end of the eleven rows of great stones. They have stood there for around 6,000 years. Like the Egyptian

pyramids, these stones were put in place by people who understood astronomy. Scientists believe that they were used in watching the moon. The largest number of standing stones is at Carnac, but they can be seen in many other places in Europe: Scotland, Ireland, Corsica, Malta, Spain and Portugal, as well as Germany and Scandinavia. Sometimes they stand alone, sometimes they make circles, and sometimes they were used to build stone rooms where dead bodies were put.

The most famous of these circles is mysterious Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. The stones stand four times as tall as a man, and the biggest are probably as heavy as fifty tons.

People think that Stonehenge was built between 2800 BC and 1400 BC, and that some of the stones were brought from Wales, more than 300 kilometres away. Again, we ask why.

Most people agree that Stonehenge, like other stone circles, is a religious place. The big stone outside the circle was probably put there to show where the sun first appears on Midsummer’s Day (June 21). But there are different ideas about its meaning. Perhaps the shape of the circle together with the shadow of the stone shows the marriage of two gods, of the sky and the earth.

Standing stones and pyramids use line that cannot see, but which are related to the earth and the stars. In the 1920s, a man called Alfred Watkins photographed and wrote about straight lines all over the earth, which he called ‘leys’. He thought that they followed old roads that people no longer used, and that they had a religious meaning.

Most of these lines are found in North and South America: in Bolivia, Ohio, California and New Mexico, for example. The most famous are the Nazca lines, in the desert of Peru. Because they are so complex and we can only see them from the air, some people believe that they were made by visitors from other planets. Others believe that they follow the lines of magnetic energy. No one knows.

(from Strange but True by Alison Baxter, Oxford Bookworms Factfiles, Oxford University Press 2000)

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