Norman Lockyer at the Rollright Stones – David Shirt

Sir Norman Lockyer (1836-1920), one-time Astronomer Royal and founder of the science journal Nature, is well known for having had an interest in archaeo-astronomy, which began in about 1890 and culminated in some significant books. What is not generally known is that from 1868 he paid several visits to the Rollright Stones, which he was perhaps already acquainted with in his early life in Rugby. Furthermore, he did much of this at the height of his most productive period of scientific work, and his investigations at Rollright suggest that his interest in archaeological monuments began more than twenty years earlier than is generally supposed.

In 1868 Lockyer was working for the War Office and living in London. That was the year in which he confirmed the existence of a bright emission line in the solar spectrum and concluded that it was caused by “an unknown solar element”, though that element (helium) was not named for another two years. A year later, in 1869, Lockyer founded the prestigious journal Nature, and remained its editor for the next fifty years.

The visits to Rollright resulted in the drawing of an annotated plan of the Stones which remained unpublished until it appeared in George Lambrick’s book The Rollright Stones in 1988, and much of the information here is taken from Lockyer’s annotations on that plan. He gave it the heading The “Roll-Rich” (now better known locally as “the Kingstones”)

I suspect that this rather odd wording is taken from an 1871 book by Charles Kirtland, who began his notes on the Stones with the words

Rollrich Stones, or, as they are popularly called, The King’s Stones.

Fig. 1. Norman Lockyer in 1873

Lockyer’s plan has the caption

Measured Saty. 26 Sept. 1868, Corrected Saty. 16 Augt. 1873

...and the date of the present plan is clarified by another annotation:

made in 1873 from corrections of my 1868 plan made on this spot. In other words, on his first visit in 1868 he measured out the layout of the circle and sketched out a plan of it on site. In 1873, five years later, he returned to check and correct the original measurements, resulting in this more carefully drawn plan. The circle of stones is depicted, criss- crossed with numerous lines showing the distances in feet between particular stones.

Fig. 2. Lockyer’s plan of the King’s Men (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)

One diagonal line through the centre is extended outside the circle “To the ‘Kingstone’” and is labelled

In line with “Kingstone” 130 SW to 310 NE (135 - 315 in 1905) In fact these rather unusual azimuthal bearings are measured anticlockwise from the north, and translate as “from 230o to 50o, corrected to 225o - 45o in 1905”. The corrected bearings correspond exactly to the SW-NE axis, though this was still inaccurate (as Lockyer himself later realised).

This is the earliest evidence I have come across that Lockyer was developing an interest in alignments in ancient monuments, but there is as yet no mention of any astronomy. He later wrote that his interest in archaeo-astronomy began with a visit to the Parthenon in Greece in 1890, and he went on to work in Egypt in the early 1890s. In 1901 this work was extended to Stonehenge, and (following his retirement in 1902) he became much involved in investigations into the astronomical alignments of British monuments.

On his plan of Rollright, Lockyer added the following to the ‘correction’ date of August 1873:

and Saty. 26 Augt. 1905,

when I found iron railings round the circle, Kingstone & 5 Knights.

Fig. 3. Norman Lockyer in 1909 So, 32 years after his previous visit, Lockyer paid his third and final visit to the Rollright Stones. In the intervening years there had been several changes there: the landowner had re-erected a third of the stones in 1882, the Ancient Monuments Act became law the same year, and the owner of the Kings Men and Whispering Knights, Joseph Reed had put them into the guardianship of the Office of Works on 1883, and by 1895 railings had been put up around all three monuments. Lockyer seems to have been caught by surprise: on the western margin he wrote I found more stones in 1905 than were on this plan (especially on this side)... I could not have missed them then so I conclude they were dug out & set up or perhaps only uncovered when the fence was put round (1880-90 I believe). He again re-measured the dimensions of the circle and made several further annotations to the plan, some of them in pencil and not very legible.

So, still no mention of any astronomical alignments. But the following year, 1906, saw the publication of Lockyer’s famous book on archaeo-astronomy, with the catchy title Stonehenge and other British Stone Monuments Astronomically Considered. The Rollright Stones are mentioned in a list of sites giving the bearings of outlying stones to the centres of their respective circles:

Roll-rich, Oxon. – Kingstone...... N. 27o E.

(Note that this is significantly further north than the 45o of the plan.) He commented

“If these alignments mean anything at all they must of course refer to the rising of stars, as the position on the horizon is outside the sun’s path”.

However, that was all he had to say about Rollright, and nothing further was added in the expanded second edition of 1909. This included solar and stellar alignments of some 200 monuments, and Rollright was not among them. He must have been unconvinced by his investigations at the Stones as far as astronomy went, but he still left a unique record of what was done to the Kings Men when they came to be one of the very first ancient monuments in Britain protected by law.