Massive Lightning Strike May Have Inspired This Scottish Stone Circle

Massive Lightning Strike May Have Inspired This Scottish Stone Circle

Katherine Wu

Using remote sensing techniques, the researchers mapped the underground landscape swaddling the stones. They were surprised to come across some unusual signatures around a single stone occupying a site called Airigh na Beinne Bige. Buried in the earth were remnants of fragments of the same type of rock that makes up the Callanish stones—called Lewisian gneiss—which, unlike the peat and clays that stud the island’s dirt, are poor conductors of electricity. This, the team contends, suggests that the solo stone was once part of a larger circle.

Beneath the peat was a more ancient layer containing bits of magnetized earth—an indication that lightning had struck near the long-gone circle’s center at least 3,000 years ago. The dirt’s star-like shape could have been the result of a single massive lightning strike, or a series of smaller strikes that hit the same spot. Either way, the event would have been a rarity, says Bates in a statement. And given its timing, he explains, the strike’s link to the stone circle is “unlikely to be coincidental.”

The evidence can only put a ceiling on the strike’s chronology, not a floor, leaving open the possibility that lightning hit the stones or their surroundings after they were dragged into place.

But as study co-author Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at Bradford University, tells Alberge, other stone circles across the United Kingdom appear to have roots in unusual phenomena hailing from the cosmos.