Final Rundown of the Top 15 Standing Stones in the UK - with competition winners
Submitted by Andy B on Monday, 26 February 2024 (1220 reads)
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Submitted by Andy B on Monday, 26 February 2024 (1220 reads)
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Submitted by Andy B on Monday, 11 December 2023 (3782 reads)
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Submitted by Andy B on Tuesday, 08 August 2023 (6537 reads)
PhotographyBruce Adams, one of our members since 2012, sadly died late last year - he had motor neurone disease. Over the years Bruce assembled albums documenting his visits to many stone circles and related sites, including rubbings of the stones, sketches and lots of photos. Bruce kindly donated the albums to us and we have been scanning them to share prior to finding a permanent home for them. We now have five of his wonderful albums to browse online.
Image submitted by Andy B
Read Article | 9 News and Comments | Category: Feature Articles
Submitted by traceyramsbottom on Thursday, 29 December 2022 (9241 reads)
Alternative ArchaeologyTracey Ramsbottom (nee Brown) writes: I produced and edited the Devon earth mysteries magazine Wisht Maen between 1993-1996. I have now scanned and made all the issues available to download via the Megalithic Portal. The issues feature some fantastic artwork by Anna Clarke and some very interesting articles by Paul Broadhurst, Cheryl Straffon, Andy Norfolk, Jeremy Harte, Pete Glastonbury and others.
Image submitted by traceyramsbottom
A reminder about this run of folklore small press magazines we first made available in 2013. I've improved the PDFs and added embedded text (which is mostly readable but a bit flaky in places)
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Submitted by Aska on Friday, 06 May 2022 (523 reads)
Medieval (High and Late) Chashi are earthen structures, i.e. area partitioned by deep ditch(es) constructed by Ainu people modifying the natural topographic features. More than 500 chashi are found in Hokkaidō and the total number of them might be 700 and more. The purpose and chronology of chashi are unclear, the purpose might be shifted over time: sacred area, place for ritual ceremonies, assembly plaza, warehouse of harvest and treasures, watchtower for school of fish or troops of enemies. The excavated artefacts prove that chashi are not older than 14th century, and many chashi were constructed between the 16th and 18th centuries (Ainu era) when conflicts or battles with immigrated Japanese occurred, they might have been constructed as military fortresses. Their types are classified as follows :
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Submitted by Andy B on Wednesday, 12 January 2022 (1443 reads)
ResourcesHere is our pick of some of the most interesting prehistoric sites to visit in the French Alps in the summertime. Click on the headings below to read more about each site and see their location. We will start at the welcoming resort village of Méribel, heading over to the border with Italy, and then south to find more intriguing sites.
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Submitted by M_M_Robinson on Saturday, 07 August 2021 (8867 reads)
Multi-periodAn exclusive series on the North Wales uplands by archaeologist M M Robinson all linked from this page. The tide of human settlement has largely receded from the hills and mountains of North Wales, leaving us with one of the richest historic landscapes in Europe. This journal describes a series of walks through the valley and moorland environments of these uplands. Recurring themes include the search for ancient route ways, the importance of seasonal movements of stock (transhumance), abandoned territories of the Bronze Age, and more recent features which often go unnoticed such as sheepfolds, intake walls and abandoned homesteads. There is plenty here for readers whose starting point is an interest in megaliths.
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This article series is well worth a re-run.
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Submitted by Andy B on Friday, 06 August 2021 (1781 reads)
MysteriesA fascinating article from Anthony Weir: Are Irish sweathouses a continuation of a prehistoric tradition of inhaling consciousness-altering smoke, recently overlaid with the prophylactic function of saunas ?
Cannabis is not likely to have been used in Ireland for a millennium at least, but a much more seriously-numinous means of widening the awareness is still to be found all over the island: Psilocybe lanceolata, or "magic mushrooms"....
Image submitted by Anthony_Weir
To celebrate 20 years of the Megalithic Portal, we'll be rerunning a selection of our news items from 20 years ago. Here's one from June 2001 highlighting an article by Anthony Weir which is still online
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Submitted by Thorgrim on Monday, 07 December 2020 (22696 reads)
Multi-periodThis article was originally published in 2005: Is there a lost Neolithic trade route that took high quality flint from the mines at Grimes Graves to Stonehenge? Dr Ernest Rudge certainly thought so and spent many years researching what he called a "Lost Highway". Rudge located many puddingstone boulders that he thought acted as marker stones along the way. After his death in 1984, his work was summarised by John Cooper of the Department of Palaeontology at London's Natural History Museum. His summary gives a detailed itinerary, much of which I have now plotted on the Megalithic Map. I have John's permission to use information from his publication and he is delighted that further research will continue.
Image submitted by Thorgrim
Mike Burgess has completed his nine-year project examining Dr. Ernest Rudge's doubtful Puddingstone Track theory. The write-up is now available on his web site Hidden East Anglia. Mike has photographed and measured every stone he could access from Norfolk to Oxfordshire and finds that sadly the idea doesn't hold water. But as we like cataloguing and 'collecting' stones in the landscape we're glad he did it.
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Submitted by Andy B on Tuesday, 31 March 2020 (13176 reads)
Neolithic and Bronze AgeA fresh look at the Neolithic Cotswolds brings to light how its people lived their lives. Research has traditionally focused on the tombs and monuments of the period but Dr Nick Snashall (National Trust archaeologist for Avebury) makes it a matter of life as well as death, in a lecture that that explains how new evidence is revealing Neolithic life.
Image submitted by h_fenton
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Submitted by DavidShepherd on Wednesday, 25 March 2020 (2272 reads)
Natural PlacesDavid Shepherd writes: A little while ago I was in contact with Tony Blackman regarding propped stones we had noted in Cornwall, the South Pennines and the Yorkshire Dales (Blackman 2011, Shepherd 2013), sadly our projected collaborative paper never happened because of Tony’s untimely passing. A recent visit was a belated attempt to follow on from our discussions, and these notes are, in a sense, an outsider’s view of Cornish propped stones. My time was limited and each site was visited once. I was only able to gather sparse details before my trip, but I did succeed in locating at least ten features – without getting into the ‘possible/probable/definite’ debate. The following seem to be well-known already, although not formally recorded, and I have supplied GPS-derived grid references, photos and inevitably incomplete commentaries.
Image submitted by DavidShepherd
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Submitted by SolarMegalith on Tuesday, 28 January 2020 (1234 reads)
Neolithic and Bronze AgeThe commune of Orroli is located in the region of Sarcidano in Central Sardinia. This beautiful town is famous due to some of the most amazing prehistoric and protohistoric monuments in Sardinia, as well as fascinating landscapes and important examples of religious architecture. This article is an overview of the major archaeological sites in the commune of Orroli.
Image submitted by SolarMegalith
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Submitted by Andy B on Friday, 15 November 2019 (4044 reads)
ResourcesThe history of cannabis cultivation goes back thousands of years. Cannabis plants, also known as hemp, have been cultivated for many different reasons, it is an incredibly versatile plant. Here we look at evidence for the first medicinal, ritual or recreational uses for cannabis.
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Submitted by Andy B on Tuesday, 03 September 2019 (5136 reads)
ResourcesThe Megalithic Portal has had the facility to log sites you've visited for some time, and our dedicated contributors have now logged almost 35,000 visits to ancient sites on our pages! We now have a new and better way to show off all these visits, in your own 'blog' format with images and customised maps. It's really easy to get started with so please do have a go.
Image submitted by StoneLee
This is worth a re-run as a reminder - you can also use these to mark sites you'd like to visit in future...
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Submitted by Andy B on Thursday, 08 August 2019 (2092 reads)
ResourcesIn this article we’ll be looking at some of the best ancient sites to visit around Dubrovnik and the southern Adriatic coast of Croatia. The greatest gems of this area are its magnificent hillforts, begun in Iron Age times with megalithic or cyclopean walls, and later taken over and added to by the Romans.
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Submitted by Anne T on Friday, 02 August 2019 (1965 reads)
Neolithic and Bronze AgeAnne Tate writes: When a recent update from the Stone Rows of Great Britain website popped into my email inbox late on Sunday evening a few weeks ago, it was simply headed “Seven Years”. In this latest news bulletin, Sandy Gerrard quietly announced “It is more than seven years since I embarked on the journey to visit, record, and interpret the known stone rows of Great Britain …. Later this week I will be setting out to visit the two most northerly rows. Once these have been visited all of the surviving original rows identified from documentation will have been inspected”.
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Submitted by Andy B on Thursday, 25 July 2019 (1899 reads)
Neolithic and Bronze AgeSomething we did in our book The Old Stones, was have a go at making an objective rating of the best of various types megalithic monuments to visit in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. We did this by analysing numbers of visits, and ratings left for the various sites by visitors to the Megalithic Portal. Here is one of the lists we worked out - a run down of the best stone rows to visit in England - featuring many wonderful Dartmoor examples, and others you may not know.
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Submitted by Andy B on Wednesday, 26 June 2019 (1577 reads)
Multi-periodUp until the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, the Megalithic Temples of Malta were thought to be the oldest free-standing structures in the world. They are still some of the oldest known structures, having been built sometime between 3600 BC and 3000 BC. Seven of the Megalithic Temples of Malta have been designated World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.
Image submitted by Jon
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Submitted by Andy B on Tuesday, 25 June 2019 (4594 reads)
Neolithic and Bronze AgeHere's a look at a few of the very best megalithic sites to visit in Germany. To select these sites I used the same basic technique in selecting the sites for our Old Stones book, that is to start with the voting and photo stats from the Megalithic Portal itself. First up is Sophienhof Dolmen in Schleswig-Holstein. This is one of the few very well preserved German dolmens in its original location. All of the other sites in my top 15 are either in Schleswig-Holstein or Lower Saxony, making these the best areas of Germany for a megalithic site tour.
Image submitted by krautrock
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Submitted by Andy B on Monday, 01 April 2019 (2146 reads)
Multi-periodHere's a look at some of the best ancient temples and cities to visit across Thailand and Indonesia. There are many Khmer temples, including the well known and not so well known, ancient cities from after the Khmer period and also evidence of some of our earliest hominid ancestors. Many of these are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, making for some wonderful places to visit.
Image submitted by Roesler
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1 news/comment
Wednesday, 23 May 2018
The Origin of the Prehistoric Dog - a Story Full of Scientific Controversy
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Tuesday, 27 February 2018
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