The avenue on Downtor is said to point to sunrise on April 29, and so also a line drawn through the centre of the circle at Merivale to a menhir about 300 yards away; and other lines are said to point to sunrise on other days about that time of year--Lockyer, _Stonehenge_, page 481, ed. 1909--the theory being that they pointed to the sunrise on the Beltane day--page 309. I presume the Beltane fires were what we call ‘swayling’ now, that is, burning off old gorse and heather to make way for fresh shoots that will be soft enough for beasts to eat. This swayling is done at any odd times now, and with insufficient care, fires often getting beyond control and burning down plantations of young trees; but in my early days it was done on Maundy Thursday with as much regularity as potato planting on Good Friday. It perhaps was done in former times on some fixed day about May 1, and that was Beltane day; but I fail to see why Beltane day should be picked out for setting up an avenue or circle, or why a circle should be used for marking a straight line. Many of the Dartmoor avenues can never have faced the sunrise, as they point too much to northward or to southward of the east. And then the theory says--One side of the larger avenue at Merivale faced the rising of the Pleiades in 1400 B.C. and the other side faced their rising in 1580 B.C., the smaller avenue faced the rising of Arcturus in 1860 B.C., the avenue on Shovel Down faced the rising of Alpha Centauri in 2900 B.C. and the avenue at Challacombe faced its rising in 3600 B.C., and so on with many more--pages 483, 484. The church theory has an intelligible base--the saint’s-day sunrise--though the base is insecure; and the Beltane sunrise is intelligible also, though still more insecure: but this stellar theory has no base at all. You pick out any star you please and get a date accordingly. Looking out on Dartmoor with its rain and mist and fog, it seems improbable that anyone would trouble much about the stars out there, or take them as a guide in setting up an avenue. The ancient Egyptians may have done such things in their pellucid air, and theorists say they did; but that, I think, is a mistake. The rising of Sirius is recorded in inscriptions of Rameses II and VI and X--engraved in Lepsius, _Denkmaeler aus Aegypten_, part 3, plates 170 and 227 to 228 bis--and these inscriptions cover a length of time in which the rising would have varied a good deal, yet the variation is ignored. The entries cannot have been based on observations--otherwise the variation would appear--and this Rising of Sirius must have been as great a fiction as our ecclesiastical Full Moon that gives the date for Easter.