We had returned to Easter Aquhorthies for a second visit. It was still raining, but this time the sky was much brighter than the iron-grey deluge of the day before and there was already a sense of revisiting an old friend as we each returned to our stones. For myself, I was pondering some of the things we had learned here the day before… beginning with a rather obvious question from Running Elk.

“Where does the sun rise?” He was answered by silence. Twelve intelligent, fairly well-educated people had all apparently reached the same conclusion. The answer was so obvious that stating it was obviously going to turn out badly. Only the dog grinned. The sun rises in the east… that’s what we learn in school and that’s exactly what we think we see whenever we watch a dawn. Only, apparently, it isn’t. Who knew?

Well actually, I did. Except I didn’t know that I knew. It is one of those things simply taken for granted. Sunrise. East. Yet, my garden doors face east and I watch the sunrise most days. But thinking about it, I realised that while the winter sun rises directly opposite my doors, I only see the summer sunrise  by looking across the garden next door. At a guess, maybe forty-or-so degrees difference. So the sun does not rise due east, but in the eastern skies, or ‘east of centre’.

As an opening gambit, it was a masterstroke. I cannot have been the only one wondering what else I was simply taking for granted… and that one question opened the mind to considering possibilities that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Continue reading at France & Vincent