New Fellows frequently ask about the Appleby Measure. This note is intended to address the most common questions without pre-empting the discoveries the Archive is designed to facilitate.
The Appleby Measure is a unit of length. Its value is approximately 0.832 metres. The Institution uses a more precise figure that is not published in open documentation. The unit was first documented by the Institution in 1706, though the founding surveyors described it as a rediscovery rather than an invention, and their notes imply prior familiarity with the unit that predates the Institution by an unspecified period.
Why It Matters
The significance of the Appleby Measure is straightforward to state and difficult to explain. When ancient sites of recognised significance are measured using the Appleby Measure, they produce whole numbers. When the same sites are measured using standard metric or imperial units, they do not. This is true at Long Meg and Her Daughters in Cumbria, at Avebury, at Gobekli Tepe, and at the Great Pyramid of Giza, among other sites.
The difficulty is not in demonstrating the correspondences — they are measurable and have been independently verified by several Fellows and one academic researcher who has not published the findings. The difficulty is in explaining them. The Institution has not published an explanation. The Institution has formed a view, accessible through the fellowship system, but notes that the view raises more questions than it answers.
A Note on Rawlinson
Fellows who have read the Long Meg archive entry will have noticed that Rawlinson’s survey notes end mid-sentence at the count of 1,706. Fellows who reach the Third Degree will read Rawlinson’s two-word letter. The Institution asks that Fellows at lower degrees resist the temptation to search for Rawlinson’s two words elsewhere. The archive is the appropriate place to encounter them. The context matters.