Stonehenge

It was on my life-list, and Julianne's bucket-list. Whatever you call it, we wanted to go there. 

Stonehenge - the main structure

We opted for a very special privilege - going into the circle among the stones after the park closed at 7 pm. We got the last places on the only tour still available during our time in England. Anderson tours, well recommended by us. Our guide, Patrick Shelley was excellent--find his tours and take them.

Oh, it rained. Not cold, but it sure was wet -- yet better to go than not!

Our guide, Patrick Shelley, wet

Three stops on this tour - Avebury, West Kennet Long Barrow, and Stonehenge, in order of distance from London. 

The earliest stones at Avebury

Avebury presents itself as a large stone circle enclosing two smaller circles and some free-standing stones. It started with a single stone (see above, on the left) about 5000 years ago. Then over time a deep circular ditch, a henge, was dug with very simple tools - antler picks, shovels from the shoulder-blades of oxen, and wicker baskets to haul the debris. The ditch, about a mile around, was surrounded by a circular bank, and gradually more than a hundred stones were erected inside the henge.  

It fell out of use after about a thousand years, its purpose then forgotten. Thousands of years after that, during the Middle Ages, many stones were toppled and buried at the behest of the Church which had nothing good to think about them. Some stones were broken up and used to build a village in the center of the circle. 

House (now a shop) built from Avebury stone

The village is still there, but an early archaeologist named Alexander Keiller bought the whole place and reconstituted the circle as much as possible starting in the 1920s, digging up the old stones, putting markers where stones are gone, and taking down houses inside the circle. The National Trust owns the land now and continued his project so that only a few buildings remain and there is a better sense of the original.

We stood in the rain and tried to imagine how people living then might have thought about the circle. It was hard. 

Julianne and I didn't go up to West Kennet Long Barrow, a wet hike of half a mile. We had seen similar graves in the Orkneys in 2005, and we'll see more in Morbihan in about 3 weeks. So, wimps that we are, we let that go.

As we got on toward Stonehenge itself the rain stopped and bits of blue sky appeared. The bus stopped at the visitor center, from which we took a park-owned shuttle. As we approached the site, the last day visitors were leaving (they were confined behind a fence, and couldn't get very close at all), and little sprinkles hinted at a return of the rain. 

 Visitor center

Almost there!

And then, there we were! Rain again, but there we were, standing where people stood, and labored, and dreamed, some 4500 years ago. 

We figured probably the builders and users of Stonehenge got rained on many a time. The evening got darker (I've lightened these pictures). No glorious sunset this time. You can read the next 4 pictures left to right, top to bottom in a row.

 

Top to bottom, left to right, in a string

A couple more shots

If you look back at the first picture of me and Julianne standing under the entry arch, behind us is a stone standing with a bump on its top - that's this stone that's standing here in this left-hand picture, with people looking at it. Its partner has fallen and is closer to the camera. 

The right-hand picture shows grafitti carved into the stone. The top carving is the name of a watercolorist from the 19th century; then older and older going down until you see those shadowed dents in the rock at the bottom of the picture, that seem to have been made when Stonehenge was in active use. They seem to represent a dagger (left) and an upright axe head (in the middle). There are actually a few dozen of these axe head carvings, but the rest are so shallow they don't show in this picture. (Thus Nancy...Julianne follows)

Stonehenge is grand for thinking big thoughts about the thousand years that it was used.  Much archaeology has been done in recent years and somewhat more is known now than before.  The earliest stone, the heel stone, was set about 3600 BC and the ditch built just after that.  But the area had been used for other unknown ceremonial purposes for several hundred years before that, and the National Trust park includes many other barrows, circles and other prehistoric alterations of the land.

At the museum of London, I learned that farming groups probably entered what is now the British Isles about 5000 BC with their farming and animal husbandry systems more or less intact.  Their way of life was not invented here, rather the farmers who had gradually moved across Europe with their cattle, wheat, barley, etc. brought their way of life here too, eventually and gradually. No signs of warfare until much later.

One of the relatively recent discoveries at Stonehenge is of a living area fairly nearby which had houses almost exactly the same as those at Scara Brae in the Orkneys, which we visited in 2005.  The Stonehenge houses were not inhabited all year round and it is thought they were used in the winter for working and feasting gatherings.  The living area seems to have been built over about a year, and required about 6,000 people to do the work. 

Sample houses at Visitor Centre

Stonehenge was apparently a ritual center and was actually built and rearranged several times over some 1,000 years of active use. The area around Stonehenge is not very good farm land and most food will have been carried in. An analysis of the animal bones in the living area, thought to have been food brought and eaten by people gathering there, shows that the animals came from as far away as Scotland.  

6,000 people working away in the winter rain about 5000 years ago.  It boggles my mind.

The recent discoveries lead current theories toward the idea that the winter solstice was the important feast day, not the summer solstice.  The stones do line up for the sunset on the winter solstice, possibly more perfectly than the summer one.  

As our guide pointed out, farmers are very busy in the summer. It is unlikely that you could hold the work parties and feasting in summer - but winter is a good time for gathering and doing grand mutual projects. He repeated what one of the archaeologists had proposed - that Stonehenge was a winter-time center for the three Fs: fighting, feasting, and frolicking. That was fun to think about.

The cultural similarities between Stonehenge and stone circles elsewhere in the British Isles, as well as stone ovals and avenues in Brittany, are striking.  Dating is a bit ambiguous but it appears that the stone avenues in Carnac, France are older.  Some sites in Ireland may be older too.  Some of the sites may have been created by migrants from the earlier sites; some of the smaller places may have been of local ritual interest while Stonehenge and Carnac and some others attracted pilgrims from quite far away.  

Around 1500 BC the use of Stonehenge and other culturally-related sites diminished significantly, coinciding with a cooling climate. Later graves and earthworks show different type of burials and other notable differences, indicating different populations moving into the area and recognizing a good ritual site when they found one.

Stonehenge was intact but deserted and overgrown when the first written accounts were made by the Romans during their exploration of England. It remained relatively intact even as other sites such as Avebury and Brodgar (in the Orkneys) deteriorated. 

The Orkney stone breaks easily; Avebury was deliberately mined for its stone. Other places have fallen apart for different reasons. Saxons, Normans and later Britons have written about it and drawn it so we know where and how the stones were placed in addition to the archaeology. But we will never know what the builders were really thinking.

Since the next thing we plan to do on our voyage is to visit Brittany and Carnac, we will have more opportunity to think about of these early farming inhabitants of Europe.

Nancy and Julianne