Hello Rhianon,

I think your analysis is quite good. It is more or less unique, every 18.61 years the moon will have a very low (or high) path in the sky (this is due to its movements around the earth: lunar nodal cycle).
In the period 2005/2006/2007 this is thus happening. The lowest path of a full moon happened on June 11/12 (anywhere in the world, so also at your plave). There are many other dates that this more or less happens (but nor with such a full moon). I myself don't value the full moon that much, so I will be more thrilled when the moon reached the real lowest path in this 18.61 years period (that is perhaps visible in september 29, depending on the wetaher).

Why Calanais I; that is because some people think that this could have been a ceremonial place where they celebrated this event every 19 years.
This is a quote in Diodorus of Siculus (first century BCE) who might have refered to Calanais (although some other think it is Stonehenge or Newgrange):
"... They also say that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance from the earth and to have upon it prominences, like those of the earth, which are visible to the eye. The account is also given that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished; and for this reason the nineteen-year period is called by the Greeks the year of Meton. ..."

You can also be just thrilled to see such a high or low moon. There are many reason why people get thrilled;-)

Hope this helps.

All the best,

Victor

I hope that a fairly definitive answer to the original question can now be seen on my updated web-site http://home.clara.net/gponting/page42.html and the pages linked from it.

This all started from Professor Thom's original 1967 book, Megalithic Sites in Britain, in which he showed the extreme southern moon, as seen from the Callanish Stones, setting behind Clisham and the other hills of Harris. He'd made his horizon profile from maps and not returned to the site. Gerald Hawkins, in a very obscure 1971 paper, proved by photogrammetry that the small rocky hillock just to the south of the site (Cnoc an Tursa) blocks the view of Clisham when standing among the stones - something that is perfectly obvious just standing at the site and using one's eyes! (Hawkins, as far as I know, never visited Callanish.)

Margaret (now Curtis) and I did an enormous amount of work in the late 70s and early 80s surveying horizons and calculating sun and moon positions. Obviously, with the work that had been done before, one of the directions that most interested us was looking towards the extreme southern moonset. In our paper presented to a 1980 conference, we first linked the moonset with the alignment of the Callanish avenue towards the circle and the same moonrise with the hilly profile of a 'female figure' on the southern horizon, known as the 'Sleeping Beauty'; and that this may have been an intention of the original builders. See brief quotations from this paper at http://home.clara.net/gponting/page47.html

This was put forward as a THEORY. I'm not sure what Margaret and Ron have claimed since I ceased to be involved in the project in 1984, but I have never claimed that the prehistoric builders of Callanish *definitely* built the Callanish avenue in order to have a ceremony watching the moon set through the stones, on the few rare occasions that it happens, with an 18-year gap betwen such ceremonies. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But it is still a wonderful experience to be there and see the moon slide along the body of the hill figure. To see the setting moon among the stones must be even more amazing, but I've not been lucky enough to see this yet. Good luck with the weather, those of you who are planning to go in July. (See timing on my web-site; please let me know if you find it helpful.)

Others have taken the theory much further since 1980, including identifying the Sleeping Beauty with an/the earth goddess, etc. The idea has taken on a life of it's own, and it was amazing to me (and, incidentally, to Margaret) to realise that the crowds there on the night of June 11th-12th had all travelled to Callanish as a direct consequence of what we had published 26 years ago!