Few megalithic decipherments that I have made over the course of the last 35 years have been so satisfying as this one of the "Stanton Drew" Stone Circles and Cove, because that decipherment ties in so nicely with all the other megalithic sites deciphered by this author as regards Ancient Britain. Below is a Hermetic Planisphere of Ancient Britain as it appeared in my book Stars Stones and Scholars nearly 9 years ago:
Hermetic Planisphere of Ancient Britain (England and Wales)
The Stars Served as the Basis for the Mapmakers on the Ground
The Stars Served as the Basis for the Mapmakers on the Ground
When I first deciphered the megaliths of Ancient Britain and wrote Stars Stones and Scholars to present my results showing megalithic sites to be a hermetic planisphere of the heavens in Neolithic days, that decipherment was of course not perfect, it was a pioneer effort.
I knew especially that I was missing the stars of Leo, a very large part of the heavens that had to be there somewhere in the hermetic map. I assigned Leo provisionally to Thretevy Quoit, which is properly a part of Hydra, even though it does seem to show Leo on a capstone there. Nevertheless, it was clear that this gigantic constellation had to be pictured on Earth higher up toward Bristol, but, as you can see, it is missing from the above decipherment map. I was aware of no megalithic site that fit the picture and the stone circles of Stanton Drew were simply unknown to me when I wrote my book.
What I did know then was that the ancient mapmakers had struggled in this corner of Ancient Britain to mirror-image the heavens on earth. This was because the Bristol Channel forced them to split the heavens artificially at the line of stars we today know as the constellations Corona Borealis, Boötes, Virgo, down to the southern stars below them. These stars must have been known to ancient seafarers, though of course the exact constellations or asterisms will have differed in ancient days from what we have today, even though the difference does not appear to be that great.
Here is my decipherment of Stanton Drew as Leo:
I was surprised that the ancients apparently used stars along the ecliptic rather than the traditional stars in the tail of the modern Leo, but this is the only fit to the stars that I could see, also including the stars of Cancer. If you use the traditional stars of Leo with the tail above the ecliptic, then the third circle at Stanton Drew would have to be the head of Hydra -- not impossible, but unlikely. Plus, then the sizes of the circles do not fit. The only fit of circle sizes and stars for Leo is the one that I produce above.