Overview
Stonehenge (henge means ‘to hang’) is Europe’s most famous prehistoric monument. Its first recorded history is that of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was a chronicler writing in about 1136. According to him a fifth century king of the Britons wished to commemorate a momentous victory in battle against the marauding Danes. He sought the advice of the magician Merlin, and on his suggestion sent an army to Killare, a mountain in Ireland where a fabled stone circle would be found – giants had transported it to Ireland from Africa. When the army got there they were unable to move the stones because they were so large. Therefore Merlin was called upon to use his magical powers to transport the huge stones from Ireland to Wiltshire.
There are a multitude of stories about these stones, each of which tells us more about the age in which the story developed than it does about the true origin of the stones. Geoffrey I’s story is certainly colourful, but we now know by means of geological tests that the Bluestones (inner circle) in fact came from the Preselli Hills in Wales – still a considerable distance away of some 130 miles. The horseshoe of trilithons (the formations of three stones with one as a lintel across the top) came from the Marlborough Downs some 25 miles away.
If not Merlin’s work, then whose was it? The shape of the monument suggested the idea of a temple, which seemed to fit the increasing awareness of pre-Christian religions that accompanied the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century King James I sent his architect Inigo Jones (not Indiana Jones as someone was overheard to say, nor Indigo Jones) to prepare a report on the site. Definitely, Jones told the King, it was a Roman temple to the god Coelus.
Contemporaries of Inigo Jones were not so sure, and noticing the apparent alignment with solar movements, began to speculate that the Druids built Stonehenge. This would explain why there was a stone in the middle – for human sacrifices. It was from this theory that names for the stones such as the ‘Altar Stone’ and the ‘Slaughter Stone’ are derived. The Druids were a Celtic priesthood who arrived in England in about 500 BC, and their modern day successors still attempt to celebrate solstice festivals at Stonehenge (against the efforts of the police and local landowners who are less than enthusiastic about encampments of itinerant hippies!).
The modern age has been equally imaginative in its interpretations, with every suggestion being made – from an astronomical observatory to marking a gantry and launching pad for visiting UFO’s.
Scientists often attempt to spoil the mysteries, which make history so interesting, and by using radio-carbon dating they have, in one callous swoop, scorned the theories of Geoffrey of Monmouth, of Inigo Jones and of the modern day Druids in their peace convoys. What they have now told us is that the first stones were brought to this site on Salisbury Plain in around 3100 BC, over five thousand years ago. That is two and a half thousand years before the Druids, three thousand years before the Romans and three and a half thousand years before Merlin.
As you see the monument today, the inner ring of Bluestones was erected around 2500 BC and the horseshoe of trilithons added in around 2000 BC. Archaeologists estimate that around 18 million man hours were involved in constructing the trilithons alone transporting them over 25 miles, with each weighing about 26 tons, and cutting them, dressing then, and levering them into position. This tells us something very important about Bronze Age man, and the society in which he lived. It must have been an organised society. This is consistent with the finds at many of the burial mounds, which you will see dotted about on the Plain, where treasure symbolic of princely power has been unearthed. This suggests that by 2000 BC, society had moved on from scattered agricultural communities, to a system of centralised authority akin to modern society.
The logistics of erecting Stonehenge are fascinating to us, in an age before mechanisation. The heaviest of the stones weighs as much as fifty tons, which would take at least 1500 men to haul (over 130 miles, remember). And how would they shape them? Probably they heated animal fat along the lines, which they wanted cut, and then quenched it quickly with water to create cracks. Into these cracks they could drive wedges.
How to keep the lintel stones in place must have taxed the primitive mind, but not for long. They used mortice and tenon joints, just as carpenters do today, whereby a protruding tongue corresponds with a socket. Some of the tongues are still visible where the lintel stones have fallen off. A system of gradual leverage onto an ever-rising wooden scaffold must have been employed to raise up the lintels into place.
Mention, and, if possible, quote from the passage in Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Urbevilles’ where Angel and Tess stumble across the stones in the mist.