Eye on Nature/Michael Viney: The Hunter's Moon, which rose in full glory last night, demands a wild and primal landscape to do it justice.
Climbing golden and enormous from the ridge above Six Noggins, it rolls up the peak of Mweelrea and hangs for a long while above Killary Harbour and the jagged black frieze of the Bens. It makes a silver ribbon of the road running towards the mountain and lights the white cards of the planning applications nailed to fence-posts along the way. There will be earth lights, more and more of them, but still nothing to challenge October's majestic mirror to the sun.
Somewhere out there in space between me and the Mare Imbrium is the little washing-machine of Europe's new probe, solar panels spread to power its gentle, ionised drive into lunar orbit, 15 months from now. Taking x-rays of moonglow, it will map, at last, what the moon is made of, relegating the samples brought back by Neil and Buzz to mere local bric-a-brac.
At some point, presumably, it will scan the great walled plain of John Birmingham's Crater, waking in its brief fluorescence the memory of an amateur astronomer peering from among the ivy-covered backwoods of east Galway, where candles and oil lamps gave no challenge to the stars. At Millbrook, near Tuam, Birmingham slid back the roof of his little wooden observatory to point a six-foot telescope at a pristine night sky. The telescope had cost him a considerable £120, an expenditure encouraged by his discovery, in 1866, of a star quite new to astronomy.
At this time, almost all astronomers accepted a volcanic origin for lunar craters, rather than the impact of meteorites. Birmingham was no exception, but his science was otherwise impressive and his essay 'Craters in the Moon' (quoted in Paul Mohr's recent biography - John Birmingham, Esq., Tuam and Ireland's New Star, published by Millbrook Nova Press in Galway) had a memorable style: "Were all the volcanoes of the moon in eruption together they would be as noiseless as, to human ears, the cushioned feet of a butterfly lighting on a flower." It further impressed the international guardians of lunar science and clinched the reward of having his name on the face of the moon.
Galileo usually gets the credit for the first attempts at mapping the moon, but, a few years ago, a Canadian planetary cartographer found an earlier pointer among the spirals and lozenges inscribed on the 5,000-year-old passages of Knowth in the Boyne Valley.
Dr Philip Stooke of the University of Western Ontario, a mapper of asteroids for NASA, was convinced that ancient lunar maps must exist. Delving among manuscripts and records of Neolithic archaeology, he came in 1998 to a series of arcs carved in a stone at Knowth known as Orthostat 48.
Even without the circular boundary of the moon (which, Dr Stooke says, may have been painted or chalked on the stone) the carved markings line up perfectly with the overall pattern of lunar features, such as Mare Humorum and Mare Crisium, even to isolated spots at the boundaries of the seas. Perhaps the best of the Knowth lunar maps, according to Dr Stooke, is at the end wall of the east-facing passage. When the full moon strikes along this passage, "it shines on a map of itself".
The received archeological wisdom about Ireland's passage mounds, epitomised by the work of Prof George Eogan at the Boyne Valley, has seemed to deprecate any primary role for stone age astronomy in the alignment and function of the tombs. For years there has been brisk, often heated, alternative commentary (provided at websites such as www.global-vision.org/Ireland/stones and www.mythicalireland.com and in the Pulse newsletters emanating from a stone tower in Tipperary: cranagh@eircom.net).
The 1983 book The Stars and the Stones, by US researcher Martin Brennan, spread the search for astronomical significance to mounds and monuments other than Newgrange. Most recently, at Carrowkeel, on the Neolithic heights of Co Sligo, Irish researcher Martin Byrne has found another tomb with a lightbox that admits both sun and moon on apparently significant occasions.
The need for lunar calendars to shape the passage of time, and to record and predict the passage of seasons, must have been basic to Neolithic farming life. So, the tension between conventional streams of archaeology and the "astroarchaeology" of committed outsiders seems increasingly unfortunate.
If archaeology is a science, it still has to find ways of relating to the myth and magic in the lives it purports to reconstruct. Quadrats and ley-lines may not mix, but to be alone in the dark with the huge Hunter's Moon is still to share a heartbeat with the druids.
[ viney@enu.ie ]