Carolyn Kennett

"I work in the field of astronomy and archaeoastronomy, with most of my practice being in the far southwest of the UK," Carolyn Kennett writes on her own site. "Cornwall has a great astronomical history and a wealth of ancient sites right on my doorstep." Her work on Dartmoor looks at how the moor's Bronze Age stone circles and stone rows may have been aligned to the sun and moon, using a mix of modern and historic photography and computer modelling to reconstruct how the night sky would have looked over these monuments thousands of years ago.

She is the current chair of the Society for the History of Astronomy and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and runs Archaeoastronomy Cornwall, offering tours and talks across the south-west, including a recurring Dartmoor walking series run jointly with Dartmoor guide Paul Rendell.

On 28 September 2026, Kennett spoke alongside archaeologist Alan Endacott at the Dartmoor Preservation Association's "Written in Stone and Stars" evening at Sandridge Barton. Endacott presented his ongoing PhD research into the prehistoric ritual landscapes of north-eastern Dartmoor, including his 2007 discovery of Sittaford stone circle; Kennett presented "The Celestial Landscape of Prehistoric Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor," discussing how solstice alignments at Dartmoor's stone rows and circles remain intact today even as equinox alignments have shifted slightly with the tilt of the Earth's axis over thousands of years.

Sources: Archaeoastronomy Cornwall, Dartmoor Preservation Association. She also posts on Mastodon.