The Modern Antiquarian. Stone Circles, Ancient Sites, Neolithic Monuments, Ancient Monuments, Prehistoric Sites, Megalithic MysteriesThe Modern Antiquarian

The Modern Antiquarian for Google Earth



The Modern Antiquarian now offers its extensive UK & Eire megalithic sites database to Google Earth users.


Features:
  • Filter sites by type - e.g. show only stone circles.
  • Click a site to see an image (if available), brief details and a link back to the site's page on TMA.
  • Explore the landscape both at ground level and from the air to check out the relationship between sites and their surroundings.
  • Enjoy novelty site colour-coding as the land is inundated with delicious-looking megalithic confectionery.

Downloads:
  • Download Google Earth
    Free download for Mac, PC or Linux from Google.com

    (link opens in a new window)

  • TheModernAntiquarian.kml (Google Earth v4 Beta only)
    Download and open this small file (around 2kb) with the Google Earth application.
    Google Earth will then connect to TMA and download the latest site data (currently 814kb) every time you open it.

  • or

  • TheModernAntiquarian-20240319.zip (Google Earth v3 or above)
    A snapshot of the TMA site data as of Mar 19, 2024ce (815kb)
    Unzip this archive and open the 'TheModernAntiquarian-20240319.kml' file with the Google Earth application.
    (You may need an application such as WinZip to unzip this archive)



Notes:
  1. Google Earth is a CPU-intensive application that may not perform well on all computers. System requirements are listed on the download page.
  2. So as not to completely hose your computer with over 7000 locations, the TMA data initially loads with all the site types turned off. Navigate to the 'Sites' folder in the 'Places' window and turn on the layers you wish to see.
  3. The database updates every 24 hours, so you may not immediately see recent additions appear within your downloade filed.
  4. These files have been tested on both the stable (v3) PC and beta (v4) Mac versions of Google Earth on both Mac and PC. However, if you encounter any problems—or have suggestions for ways in which it could be improved—please post them in our forum.
  5. TMA is largely based on user-submitted data, which while constantly vetted, comes with no absolute guarantee of accuracy. That said, most site locations in these files will be within 100 metres of the actual site. We are looking to improve the accuracy of this data by shifting away from the 6-digit Ordnance Survey map references to both 8-digit and highly-accurate longitude and latitude co-ordinates.
We're thrilled to be able to bring you integration between TMA and Google Earth.

Since we started the Head Heritage website back in 1997ce, we've been wanting to provide a fantastic interactive map of ancient sites, and have strived to do this with our own Technicolour Map Browser which we launched in 2001. However, there will be few of you who haven't experienced the gradual slowing down of the Map Browser as more and more sites have been added to TMA, and we've been wondering about how we can expand into Europe while offering the same quality of mapping and avoiding overloading the Map Browser.

All that changes with Google Earth integration. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel using Flash (as we did with the Map Browser and which is far better suited to other applications), we can now piggy-back Google Earth and overlay our site data.

Holy McGrail
(TMA Webmaster)
August 2006ce