Archaeoastronomy on Hoy

25^th July 2014

5:50pm

The Island of Hoy, Scotland, UK

I’m back tracking now. I’ve dropped off most of my things at the hostel, which turns out to be nothing more than a small one level house: two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a small central area for dining. I only have my small UK bag and my archaeoastronomy things with me. It’s so much easier to bike without all of my luggage, although I think I’ve more or less learned the art of it. That said, at one point my shoulder bag, the one holding my tablet, almost fell off the bike. The bungee cords held it awkwardly along the side of my bike tire. I nearly had a heart attack.

Anyway, I’m biking back to the Dwarfie Stane, which is my first research subject of my time in Orkney. I’m not going to go into great detail on all of the tombs I visit, because I plan to visit about 60 and I imagine that would get boring after a while. However, I will tell you about this one so you all can get a taste of what I’m doing.

I leave my bike at the parking place off the side of the road, and walk down the well walked path. Trudging through Scottish heather might just be the most efficient way to twist an ankle. By some stroke of luck or genetics my ankles don’t really twist in situations where they would for a normal person. All the same, the walk would have been awfully unpleasant if it weren’t for the path.

The Dwarfie Stane might actually be a bad “example cairn” because although it is a Neolithic tomb… it’s not actually a cairn. Technically a cairn is a mound of rocks and a burial cairn is a mound of rocks with an open centre which was used as a communal tomb. The Dwarfie Stane is unique in Orkney and the UK as a whole in that it’s a tomb made by hollowing out one very large rock. This quality of the tomb doesn’t cause me to change my research procedure, so you’ll still be able to get a feel for what I’m doing at all of the sites I visit.

The Dwarfie Stane as seen from the outside.

So the goal is to record the position of the opening, as well as the direction of the entrance passageway. Therefore I need a GPS & a compass (I have both so we’re good). The GPS has a 3 metre resolution right now, which is pretty brilliant even if it doesn’t sound like it. And it seems as though my iPhone’s compass still works even though there is “no signal” which means I get to take a secondary measurement on the passageway’s direction. Scientists love additional data points whenever you can get them.

I start by taking a few photos, and then I crawl down into the tomb. Sticking my arm out of the cairn, I record the GPS position. Then I begin to fiddle with both my Orienteering compass and my iPhone compass to take measurements.

The entrance points to the west, and seems to line up with the point on the horizon where these two hills meet. I haven’t calculated if there are any alignments with this tomb yet. However, it seems wholly possible that this tomb aligns with the setting sun or moon on a specific day. The celestial body would set in the crevice right between those two hills.

View from the mouth of the tomb

This is a spectacular first result, way more than I had hoped for. The inside of the tomb is covered with carvings, but all of them are comparatively modern. As I sit here jotting down the last of my notes, Ain’t no Grave by Crooked Sill plays on my iPhone. The irony isn’t lost on me.