The Ring of Brodgar. The name sounds operatic. It's a henge, like Stonehenge, and if it isn't as well-known, it's still something to make you sit up and take notice when you do find out about it.
The Ring of Brodgar stands in Orkney. Orkney is a chain of islands that sort of bridge the British Isles and Scandinavia. They were administered by Norway for a time and are now considered part of Scotland. But the Ring dates far earlier than that, during the time of the Picts. The time it dates from was about the boundary of the Neolithic Era and the Bronze Age. Not, of course, that there was a single instant where one became the other.
Construction must have taken years of effort. So why did they do it? Likely it had something to do with their conception of the heavens. The ancients were more complex than we generally assume.
2 comments:
I've read more than nine hundred stone rings have been found in the British Isles and there may originally have been more. Time went by which eventually lead to later generations forgetting why the rings were built in the first place - as you say, it's likely they were holy places linked to the sun's appearance in the sky at the solstices and equinoxes.
But people need houses and animals need paddocks so eventually many of the stones were carried off as needed. Even the marble casings of the pyramids in Egypt were scavenged with just a few left for us to be able to imagine how they must once have looked.
It's hard for us to envision just how important was the sky to our ancestors. Now most people don't bother looking at all and lights in the most populous cities make it impossible to see the night sky as it once was viewed.
The Ring of Brodgar is very beautiful. It would be nice to see it in person - and some of the others too.
The truth is that the vast majority of things that people have built for any reason have been forgotten, fallen into disuse, and in many cases fallen apart to the extent that they no longer exist. Most of this just takes a sufficient amount of time, and it's a natural process. The henges, or at least a good number of them, have survived to present day. While we no longer use them for the purposes their builders did, we can still appreciate their beauty and grandeur.
When you consider how the pyramids must have looked with the marble casings and gold peaks you can see why they were a natural for The Seven Wonders of the World. Even without all that they're still an eye-opener.
One thing that all ancient cultures have in common is that they had stories and myths connected with the sky. Not the same ones, obviously, but they all had a clear interest in it. In our distracted world we do forget that.
You're right. Seeing something like the Ring of Brodgar up close, being there, would be a thrill.
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