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had used a fortieth part of a Megalithic Yard, which he called a ‘Megalithic Inch’ (MI) because it was 0.8166 of a modern inch (2.074 cm). The system worked like this:
        1 MI = 2.074 cm
      20 MI = ? MY
      40 MI = 1 MY
    100 MI = 1 MR
    Thom was a first-class engineer and he was therefore perfectly qualified to analyse the structures created by other engineers – albeit 5,000 years before his own time. He would survey a megalithic stone circle or lines of stones and estimate, from the general layout, what the builders had set out to achieve. So good was his intuition in this matter that he could often deduce a missing standing stone in a plan – and predict the socket hole that would be found when the ground was examined.
    The lifetime work of Alexander Thom and his rediscovery of the Megalithic Yard resulted in a stunning conclusion that created an immediate paradox – how could an otherwise primitive people build with such fine accuracy? Why did they do it and how did they do it? Thom made no attempt to answer these questions. He reported on his engineering analysis and left the anthropological aspects for others to explain. He did comment that he could not understand how these builders transmitted the Megalithic Yards so perfectly over tens of thousands of square miles and across several millennia and he acknowledged that wooden measuring sticks could not have produced the unerring level of consistency he had found.
    Thom’s mathematical ability was called into question by archaeologists who could not reconcile such amazing levels of measurement perfection from a culture they considered to be primitive. We read as much as we could of the criticisms of Thom’s findings and found that, to a large extent, people would refer to his errors by quoting each other, without much in the way of substance at the root of the repeated claims. Today there are people who set themselves up as expert on megalithic sites and who refute Thom without apparently having even a basic grasp of the statistical analysis used to verify Thom’s findings.
    Ten years has passed since we first set out to try and find if Thom was a genius or simply a deluded eccentric who wasted his life’s work. As non-mathematicians ourselves we could not hope to gain any new insight from delving deeper into Thom’s published data, so we set out with a much simpler and more direct hypothesis. Our premise was that if the Neolithic people of the British Isles had established a universal unit of measure it is likely to have been derived from nature rather than a complete abstraction.
    After a great deal of delving and thought we eventually came to realize that there is only one way that any unit of measure can be repeatedly and reliably derived from the natural world. This is through measurement of the passage of time as expressed by the Earth spinning on its axis, and perceivable by the apparent movement of stars in the night sky. Appendix 4 explains the process in detail for those who want to delve deeper, but the principle relies on using a pendulum to measure the passage of a star or planet across a predefined gap.
    We think it is fair to suggest that the first machine ever invented by man was the plumb-bob/pendulum. A small ball of clay on the end of a piece of twine or long strand of straight hair is a wonderful device that interacts with the Earth in a very predictable way. Held stationary, it will always point downwards to the centre of the planet, which allows the user to check verticals during construction of any sort. Verticals are also necessary for good observational astronomy. When the device is swung gently to and fro in the hand it becomes a timekeeper, like a modern metronome (which is only an inverted pendulum).
    But the real beauty about pendulums is that the frequency with which they swing is only determined by their length, so if you count a set number of beats for a given period of time (such as the period it takes a star to