In Bronze Age Britain, writes archaeologist David Miles in his magisterial 2005 The Tribes of Britain,

You could have any kind of house you liked provided it was round, 8 metres across and had a south-east facing entrance (96).

From the Bronze Age well into the Celtic Iron Age, ancient Britons “seem to have had a particular fondness for circular houses” (Miles 96), an architectural fashion rarely seen on the Continent.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that the circle had a deep meaning for these ancestors. Remember that these are the people who built the stone circles.

In virtually every culture, the house is an icon of the universe: floor = earth, walls = world, roof = sky.

(Cellar = underworld, one might add.) One might mention here as well the round barrow, house of the dead.

Stone circle = house = universe. Remember this next time you cast a circle.

So: the ancestral roundhouse, also—as you will appreciate—known as a "wheelhouse". (We'll leave aside the 8 meter—26 foot—diameter for now. Clearly, houses have to be of a size to hold their inhabitants.) Why did the door of the roundhouse need to face the southeast?

(One thinks of the traditional Diné [“Navaho”] hogan, always built with its door facing the rising Sun.)

Roundhouses had no windows; often, they didn't even have smoke-holes. (Smoke filtered up through the thatch.) Roundhouses were dark. A southeastward-facing doorway ensures morning light.

Southeast is also the general direction in which the Sun rises during Winter, when its warmth is most needed, and—in particular—at the Solstice, the Sun's annual rebirth. Think of the many megalithic monuments oriented to the Sun's rising (or setting) at this time of year. It's difficult not to see some deep symbolism here.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why, I would suggest, it is a roundhouse, and not, as proposed, a longhouse, that we need to build here at Sweetwood Temenos.

With door facing southeast, of course.

I hereby rest my case.

David Miles, The Tribes of Britain: Who Are We? And Where Do We Come From? London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005