CHAPTER 10

CONCLUSIONS

We've now looked at several collections of megalithic constructions all within a 50 mile radius from Stonehenge and its Cursus. Stonehenge is about 8 miles north of Salisbury town in England. Avebury is about 17 miles north of Stonehenge. Whitehorse Hill is about 17 miles north of Avebury. There is Dragon Hill, another artificial hill with a flat top, very close to the White Horse, but Dragon Hill is not as large as Silbury. If we can accept what the book of Exodus tells us (and that may be a big 'if' for some people), it looks as though Dragon hill was the place to land if you wanted to ride fast horses, or perhaps to hunt, and Silbury hill was for landing if you were Apollo going to Stonehenge or some other Immortal visiting him there. There is an old canal near Dragon hill, but I don't know how close or whether there is or was water surrounding this artificial hill.

There are various white horses cut on a variety of hill sides. The Uffington White Horse is by far the oldest, and created by the most effective method. Its construction was by digging trenches and filling them with chalk. By Optical Stimulated Luminescence the dating of chalk in the lower levels is 1400 - 600 BC. That's a very wide range, and may reflect various attempts to keep its shape by digging down and perhaps replenishing the chalk. Other later white horses just cut by removing the turf above the chalk have mostly grown over. None of them show the remarkable artistic ability that distinguishes the Uffington White Horse.

Here's where Silbury Hill is in relation to West Kennet Long Barrow and to the Avebury Circle, a complex circle of standing megaliths so large that a modern village is inside it:

So Silbury Hill was an important part of a large neolithic complex and only a few miles from Stonehenge and its Cursus. Calculations indicate all these together would have taken about 100 million man hours to complete. In many cases the architectural and engineering know-how and astronomical knowledge used were very sophisticated. I suggest to you that this was the work of an advanced civilization that was capable of world-wide travel by air when required, not work designed by a small collection of Stone Age farmers who could have had no use for these constructions.

Five thousand years ago Britain was densely forested. If you were travelling by air at speed, how would you navigate over it? Today downed aircraft can be lost in forests. How would you find the trapezoidal residence you were looking for?

There are fifteen known Cursuses in England. These are all on white chalk, white gypsum or yellowish gravel. There are probably many more, because they've been ploughed down by thousands of years of farming. Nearly all of them have been identified from the air in the 20th century. Most of them run in an easterly-westerly direction which might have something to do with the prevailing wind (usually south westerly). The ends of the Cursuses were generally carefully levelled platforms and we're told "There are many indications that the Cursus ends were places of particular importance." They seem usually to end at right angles to a river, or close to a river bank, and with a long barrow nearby. Let's look once more at the larger Cursus at Stonehenge ( the image in chapter 3):

This Cursus seems to be close to an urban area, with the principal building being Stonehenge. We must remember that the round barrows came later, and that the round barrow people were probably the ones who did away with the long barrow people. The long barrows are contemporary with Stonehenge and the Cursus.

It's very tempting to compare the view from above Stonehenge with 20th century cities and their airfields:

4500 years ago in Western Europe with forests, scrub, or bush in most areas, there were no roads to navigate by from the air. But rivers can be clearly seen and followed, and a white chalk Cursus, or a yellow-brown gravel Cursus set at right angles to a river could be clearly seen from the air.

I said the civilization of the Immortals was a stone civilization, and if there was, as the ancient writers tell us, air travel, we can understand why there were trapezoidal "long barrows" or residences as I have called them, as far away as Poland and Czechoslovakia. And there are two small clues that may help to establish these Immortals as a different type of being:

First, we are told that the bones of all or nearly all the skeletons found in long barrows are different from ours. These would be, on my hypothesis, descendants of mixed mortal-Immortal matings, not the Immortals themselves.

Next, in the highlands of Scotland there are'fans' constructed of large stones laid in rows, with the rows further apart at one end than at the other, so creating a fan-like appearance when seen from the air. The stones were believed to possess great healing properties. Water was poured over them and sick persons bathed in it. This practice survived in the Highlands until recent times. The stones were presumably connected with the Immortals and their 'magical' powers, or as we would prefer it, their "know how", not understood by the simpler mortal folk.

William Ewart Gladstone, an English 19th century Prime Minister, and scholar with a "double first" from Oxford, found time to make an exhaustive study of the ancient Greek legends. He said the distinctive qualities of the Olympian (Greek) Immortals were that they were immortal moulded in human form and enjoyed powers far exceeding those possessed by mortals. They were, however, liable to certain limitations of energy and knowledge, and subject to bodily wants and human-like affections.

His earliest source would have been Homer writing about the Trojan war and the part the Immortals played in it, becoming involved because their mixed-marriage mortal-immortal children were fighting there. Achilles was one, the son of the goddess Thetis and the mortal King Peleus. The Trojan War used to be called a "myth" but then a businessman turned archaeologist is generally agreed to have found it from clues in Homer, and dug it up. Now it's said that the Trojan War really did take place, about 1,250 BC.

With no disrespect to Gladstone, who was basing his information on Greek "myth", which really began very late, and after the Immortals had left the planet or died out, the much earlier Egyptian information about their Immortals was that they never regarded them as truly immortal but only long-lived. If we agree that Stone Age farmers were not likely to design and build Stonehenge or the 15 or more Cursuses that we know about in England, then perhaps it was these beings referred to as the Immortals who raised Stone Circles ranging from Callenish in the Outer Hebrides off the west Coast of Scotland to Edirne in Turkey at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Now whether these beings, the Immortals, came into existence here on earth, or came from somewhere else, apparently they instigated a number of astronomical observations which were of importance to them. They seem to have needed to establish the length of a "year" (time for one circuit of the earth around our sun), the summer and winter solstice, eclipses of sun by moon, the sidereal year (due to earth wobble) and the 18.61 years moon winter solstice cycle.

If the Immortals were a new breed of humans here on earth they may have been the Cro-Magnons, who had larger brain cases than ours and who we're told appeared about 100,000 years ago. These people would have been developing their skills and knowledge of the world around them, particularly after the end of the last ice age. If the Immortals came from somewhere else, we don't know whether they came voluntarily or were exiled here. We have faint echoes in our traditions of a war amongst the gods (The Valhalla epic, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Atlantis story, and ancient Mesopotamian epics). Perhaps some Immortals went away again and the losers who were left here died out gradually after cross-breeding with mortals.

It looks as though visitors from elsewhere is the more likely event. Earth-born superhumans would have gradually developed their skills, and we lack evidence for that. Further, these constructions we've discussed are all alien to us. We don't really understand the 'White Horse". It's no ordinary horse - if it is a horse. We don't understand Dragon Hill. We don't understand Silbury Hill and its surrounding water. We don't understand Stonehenge. We don't understand Avebury Circle, or the Cursuses, or the 'fans' of stone in the Scottish highlands, or the Callenish stones. Why are they astronomically oriented? We don't understand why a long barrow might be 350 feet long with only a small residence at one end. Why all the extra built-up length? What we seem to find is fully developed skills, producing the Cursuses, and Stonehenge, for example, and ability to travel by air, as ancient writers tell us. It seems efforts were made to establish a permanent and accurate record in stone of earth, moon and sun patterns of movement, which were certainly not needed by stone age farmers, but may have been needed by the Immortals. Perhaps they did it to create a sense of awe and obedience in their subject humans. In that they certainly succeeded. Humans worshipped them as 'gods.'