While making the following entry for 300 BCE in my forthcoming book S.T.E.M. Chronicle about a recently recognized ancient solar observatory, I was taken back to an personal spiritual adventure, visiting Castlerigg near Kenwick in England’s Lake Country. Here is the new entry for S.T.E.M. Chronicle:

The Thirteen Towers solar observatory is constructed at Chankillo in Peru. The Sun’s motion from solstice to solstice can be tracked by viewing the towers at sunrise from one location and at sunset from another.

Castlerigg, about 700 years older than the Thirteen Towers, is not a series of towers, but a henge, or stone circle—in this case, flattened at one end. There is a rectangle of stone in the middle. As you stand in the rectangle, you can see clefts between the nearby hills that appear to be sight lines for viewing the Sun as it stand still at the solstice—or perhaps the Sun appearing in the notch would signal one of the equinoxes, heralding spring or foretelling the coming winter.

Alas for science, but hooray for mystery. Apparently scientists who have studied Castlerigg can locate no solar alignments at all. No one today knows what purpose the henge was.

All I know, what that I felt some spiritual peace just being there, even more than I had found some years earlier at Stonehenge (before it was off bounds to casual visitors). That might be purpose enough.