For many people living in urban environments today, the Summer Solstice means little more than Midsummer’s Day, or the longest day of the year, however for those of us fortunate enough to live in a more rural environment such as Dartmoor with it’s abundance of Bronze Age and earlier archaeological sites, one tends to be more aware of such dates and the significance they had for those early inhabitants of the Moor.
The Summer Solstice or Estival Solstice occurs when one of Earth’s poles has its maximum tilt toward the Sun. It happens twice yearly, once in each hemisphere (Northern and Southern). For the northern hemisphere, the Summer Solstice is the day with the longest period of daylight and shortest night of the year, when the Sun is at its highest position in the sky. At either pole there is continuous daylight at the time of its Summer Solstice. The opposite event is the Winter Solstice. Midsummer is a celebration of the season of summer usually held at a date around the Summer Solstice. It has pagan pre-Christian roots in Europe.
In 2021 I was invited by my friend, renowned local Dartmoor photographer of note Chris Chapman, to join him and local archaeologist Alan Endacott to photograph the Solstice sunrise over Sittaford Tor on Dartmoor from the site of the recumbent Bronze Age stone circle that Alan had discovered adjacent to the tor at Sittaford back in 2008.
It was an early start – up at about 03:00 hrs, a drive across northeast Dartmoor to Chris’s studio at Throwleigh, then a drive to the edge of Fernworthy Forest on the Moor, followed by a trek up to Sittaford in the early light of the breaking dawn ready for the sunrise shortly after 05:20 hrs. (The actual sunrise at Mean Sea Level would have been at about 05:05 hrs, but would not appear from behind the tor at Sittaford until around 05:25 hrs due to the difference in altitude of our horizon.)
The solitude of the Solstice Sunrise at Sittaford was a far cry from the mayhem usually observed at Stonehenge, when hordes of several thousand people descend upon the ancient monument to observe the sun rising behind the Heel Stone in the north-east part of the horizon as it sends its first rays shining into the heart of Stonehenge. The sun came up on cue over the tor, and Chris got some stunning images of Alan photographing the Solstice sunrise from the centre of the stone circle, with his camera mounted on an extended pole.
By about 05:30 hrs we were finished, lying back in the heather drinking hot chocolate basking in the dawn sun and listening to the skylarks playing all around, whilst thinking of all the poor saps about to wake up and have to get up to go and do a day’s work in an airless office… For us, life couldn’t get much better at that moment!
In 2023 I was keen to photograph the Solstice Sunrise a little closer to home – partly because I had a hospital appointment later that morning and so could not be trekking for miles into the remoter parts of the High Moor, so instead I invited Chris to join me at Scorhill Stone Circle, arguably one of Devon’s finest and best preserved stone circles, and situated only a 10 minute walk across open moorland from the nearest parking location. Although I was hoping for solitude and no-one else to be around, I was also partly hoping that there would be some ‘drum bangers’ and other ‘druidical’ types there that I could photograph as they celebrated the sunrise. In the event only about half a dozen other spectators turned up to witness the sunrise, and disappointingly no one was banging drums or creating New Age revelry or mayhem. It was all very subdued and peaceful.
Chris and I arrived around 05:00 hrs with plenty of time in hand, to a deserted stone circle with dew thick on the long grass, but fortunately a lot of the gorse surrounding the stones had recently been cleared by DNPA for archaeological studies (being conducted by Alan Endacott). The actual timing of the sunrise at Scorhill is a little later than the ‘official’ time, due to the stone circle being below a ridge to the northeast, so it takes about 30 minutes or so for the sun to reach a sufficient altitude to break over the horizon as viewed from the stone circle.
We could see the glow of the sunrise as it arose below our immediate horizon line with the NE-SW azimuth along which the sun would have risen at Mean Sea Level running through the middle stone of a group of three upright stones on the SW flank of the circle, through the centre of the circle, and then through the middle stone of another group of three upright stones on the NE flank of the circle. From GoogleEarth I estimated the azimuth through the central stones to be about N 046′, i.e., to within 1′ of the true Solstice Sunrise azimuth.
Note that the photo above is a High Dynamic Range (HDR) composite image comprised of 7 separate images taken at different exposures to retain highlights and shadows, as the high contrast or dynamic range of shooting into the sun from shadow meant it was impossible to have everything optimally exposed in a single exposure. In high contrast settings such as this, HDR can be a useful solution to capture detail in both shadows and highlights, when the midtone range from a single image is just too narrow. A major issue with HDR can be getting the right colour balance – the green colour in this image could be improved upon and would definitely benefit from further work, but for now at least it works as a photographic record.
Eventually the sun broke above Scorhill at about 05:41 hrs, as shown in the photo above (which is a panorame of four adjacent images stitched together in Photoshop). The sun breached the horizon some 36 minutes after true sunrise on an azimuth of about N 058′. As it did so, it was in direct alignment with the middle stone of the three in the central foreground on the SW flank, a single small stone on the NE flank midway between two groups of three stones on the NE flank (the northern group being the group of three referenced for true NE azimuth), and an outlying larger stone (a ‘Heel Stone’?) some 8.2m beyond the perimeter of the stone circle.
Who really knows what the significance and purpose of so many of these archaeological sites was? We can do lots of mathematical modelling, study astronomy, conjecture about astrology and find many coincidences and astronomical, solar and lunar alignments, but we just don’t have any hard direct evidence for their original purpose. A good example of this is at the Summer Solstice Sunset at Merrivale, on the western flank of Dartmoor above Tavistock, when the setting sun disappears below the horizon at a notch on the skyline in Middle Staple Tor, when viewed from the stone circle on Long Ash Common.
Merrivale is probably the best known and most visited of the prehistoric sites on Dartmoor, partly due to its ease of access and partly due to the wealth of monuments, the most conspicuous of these being a pair of long stone rows that cross the landscape of Longash Common, with a nearby settlement site that includes a stone circle with an apparently significant outlying stone, a stone circle with a tall outlying menhir stone, several cairns and a large cist.
To avoid the possible crowds at the Summer Solstice Sunset, a group of us from the village of North Bovey on the East side of the Moor thought that it would be fun to have a picnic supper the following evening and watch the sun setting in the notch at Middle Staple Tor when it would be quieter. About 14 of us set off across the Moor from the Green at North Bovey around 7:00pm, driving across the Moor in a convoy of about four cars enjoying the golden evening sunlight.
Merrivale wasn’t too busy – a few other people wandering about around the stone rows, etc., but not many. We set up camp in the middle of the stone circle, and as the sun began to go down we took a look at some of the other nearby artefacts, and with the aid of dowsing rods experienced the bizarre properties of the nearby menhir… even the sceptics were puzzled by the responses of the dowsing rods. Conventional science doesn’t yet have all the answers!
As the sun lowered on the horizon towards Middle Staple Tor we gathered by the outlying stone just a few metres eastward of the stone circle. We were joined by a few other onlookers – fortunately no ‘drum bangers’ – soaking up the atmosphere of the sunset as our forebears would have perhaps done 5,000 years or so ago.
The sun did indeed set in the notch on Middle Staple Tor as expected, albeit about a minute or two later than on the 21st, the previous day, the true Solstice date. And here is where it gets interesting, and perhaps a bit pseudo-archaeological… I was talking with one of the other onlookers about the event and he volunteered the following information…
I am not a great fan of what I believe is referred to as ‘cognitive archaeology’, I prefer archaeology based on hard evidence – pot shards, arrowheads, bones, etc. But this person explained to me that from the outlying stone at the stone circle from where we were observing the sunset, the profile of the hills from Roos Tor and through Little, Middle and Great Staple Tor is like that of a woman lying down… Roos Tor is her head, Great Staple Tor her breasts, Middle Staple Tor with the notch where the sun sets is her mons veneris area, so representing fertility and conception etc, and Little Staple Tor is her feet or knees… I can see the silhouette likeness, and I agree that conception in June is good timing for a 9-month term for newborns to arrive in spring with a warming climate and receiving milk from their Mother, and subsequent gathering of food to see them through their first winter etc., but to then say that the adjacent menhir represents a male phallus etc. sounds just a bit too convenient and ‘New Age’ cognitive mumbo jumbo…
The fertility aspect and the reclining woman is an interesting idea, and there are plenty of landscapes around the world with silhouettes that have associated legends and beliefs, many of which can be quite subtle unless the light is in the correct position. Hound Tor just a few miles to the south on Dartmoor is one example where unless one views it from the precisely correct angle, there is little resemblance to anything other than a pile of granite rocks! but the idea of the sun creating life is not unique – we have well documented evidence that the ancient Egyptians had their beliefs with Isis and Osiris, with the sun and the moon, so who are we to say that in the absence of written and hieroglyphic evidence as in Egypt, there was not a similar belief here in the same millenium?
More importantly perhaps, can you see the female likeness of the silhouette?
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