The stone was built on a custom foundation, some 4,000 years ago

Mar 27, 2012 09:04 GMT  ·  By

Located on a ridge called Gardom's Edge, in the Peak District National Park near Manchester, England, an ancient monolith is believed to be one of the oldest astronomical markers in the world. The purpose of the huge rock was unknown until new archaeological evidence pointing to its use was found.

According to the conclusions of carbon-dating studies, the monolith is no less than 4,000 years old. It stands some 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) tall, on a basis made up of many, smaller rocks. This is a very important detail, because it show its builders took special care to place it in this exact position.

Experts recently discovered that the stone's orientation and slant angle point towards the altitude the Sun takes in the sky at midsummer. Such a position must have been planned deliberately by the people who built the monolith, otherwise the chances of them erecting it in this precise manner would be very slim.

Establishing this is made difficult by the fact that experts cannot dig at the basis of the monument. They are concerned that they may alter the precise alignment, since the soils on which the monolith is based are easily destroyable.

“Given the sensitivity of the site, we can't probe under the surface of the soil. However, through our survey, we have found a higher density of packing stones on one side, supporting the case that the stone has been orientated intentionally,” Daniel Brown explains, as quoted by Space.

The expert holds an appointment as an astronomer at the Nottingham Trent University, in England. He adds that the area in and around the Peak District National Park shows signs that human lived here millennia ago, back in prehistory.

Artifacts, buildings and monuments found in this region range from Bronze Age roundhouses (built between 3200 and 600 BC) to a late Neolithic enclosure. The Neolithic Age began some 10,200 years ago, and marks significant progress in the way our ancestors used technology for survival.

In fact, researchers believe that Neolithic people erected this monolith, around 2000 BC. “The stone would have been an ideal marker for a social arena for seasonal gatherings,” Brown explains.

“It's not a sundial in the sense that people would have used it to determine an exact time. We think that it was set in position to give a symbolic meaning to its location, a bit like the way that some religious buildings are aligned in a specific direction for symbolic reasons,” he goes on to say.

Details of the discovery will be presented today, March 27, at the National Astronomy Meeting, held in Manchester, England.