Rich tapestry?

Admiring a welcome New Year gift of a calendar featuring the otherwise wonderful Great Scottish Tapestry, I sadly noticed no acknowledgment of one of our finest ancestral achievements – the many megaliths 
and stone circles that we so take for granted, misunderstand and largely ignore.

Work by several reputable mathematically competent archaeologists (Thom, Linacre, Macaulay et al) have shown these sites often exhibit an understanding of Pythagoras 2000 years before that man was born, and use of the Fibonacci sequences 3000 years before that “discoverer”.

Our henges and large stones are the first known permanent buildings on the planet and were well in place long before anything on that scale in China, India, Mesopotamia, the Americas or Egypt.

The sorrow is that all this secret wisdom was, as Caesar records, protected by memory in lieu of clay tablets or paper and so was lost when the Romans (Church and State) more or less wiped out the ancient sages. It would be reassuring to have evidence of these missing artefacts somehow included in the warp and weft of our story.

Why, we might even once again celebrate Hogmanay on the correct date: the winter solstice. (Now there’s a political policy worth voting for).

Tim Flinn

Garvald, East Lothian