Anne Macaulay
March 11, 1924 – 1998
Musicologist, Author & Lecturer
Anne Macaulay (born March 11, 1924) was a British musicologist, author and lecturer.
Anne was born in Aithernie, Fife in Scotland near Lundin standing stones, the youngest child of Sir David and Alison Russell. Her family soon moved to Silverburn near Lundin Links where her father managed a paper-making business through the Great Depression. She attended St Leonards School in St Andrews during the Second World War going on to briefly attend the University of Edinburgh which she departed for South Africa she learnt to become an aeroplane pilot. Around this time her brother, Patrick Russell died and she accompanied her father to Istanbul where he had funded an archaeological excavation. It was here that she met Bill Macaulay, curator of the Glasgow Museum of Art and an expert in mosaics and Byzantine art whom her father held in high esteem. In 1953, they married and moved to Johnsburn House in Balerno near the Pentland Hills.
Macaulay had five children, the last in 1957, when she began to develop an interest in classical guitar, which she learnt to play to an exceptionally high standard. This led her on to an interest in Pythagorean mathematics and its relationship with music. It was from this that her interest in stone circles and prehistoric geometry developed and she began to read the work of Alexander Thom. Over the next several years, she proceeded to resurvey much of Thom's work and travelled widely to Turkey, Malta, Egypt, Greece and throughout the British Isles in search of further evidence of his ideas.
After the break up of her marriage to Bill in 1971 she worked for seventeen years trying to bring her work and the mass of data she had recorded into order. Her work became well known to other academics and musicians. She lectured at conferences and symposia in the United States and Britain and in 1994 was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the University of Edinburgh. Macaulay's research interests included the origin of the alphabet, history of the guitar, the deity Apollo, and pythagorean mysteries.
Macaulay's work was posthumously collated, edited and published in 2006 by Vivian T. Linacre and Richard A. Batchelor. The book contains a critical re-assessment of the geometry used in over one hundred and eighty of the stone circles surveyed by Alexander Thom along with their mensuration using the megalithic yard and the megalithic rod.
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