D'here can be few people who have not heard of Stonehenge, and judging by the vast number of visitors each year, most people have been there too. \ ith all the restrictive fences and guards, and the milling crowds (unless you can visit in bad winter weather), you may not find it easy to sense the power of this place. But the power does miraculously survive, despite the fortifications, and despite the ballyhoo at midsummer, when the Stonehenge Free Festival across the road is in full swing, and when the modern Druids come to perform their spurious ceremony. 'Fhose who visited Stonehenge before the 1950s will retain the best memories of it, for then it stood nearly deserted in elemental grandeur on Salisbury Plain, and few visitors came. .s we write there are plans afoot to completely redesign the whole Stonehenge complex, including diverting the.344 and opening a new museum and information centre nearly a mile away, so that visitors will be able to walk across the downs to Stonehenge via other prehistoric sites. This scheme is to be welcomed, as it should improve the appearance and atmosphere of the area, as well as reducing the numbers of people actuallv at Stonehenge - only those seriously interested in seeing it will be bothered to walk there.
Geoffrey of Movmouth, ttcelfth-century chronicler, referred to Stonehenge as ‘Giants’ Dance', zchich may refer to an earlier belief that the stones were once giants. Another belief was that the monument was set up by Merlin, the magician of the King Arthur legends. The photograph shows a good example of a trilithon on the left, with others in the distance; and in the centre middle distance one of the bluestones, an upright and leaning pillar dwarfed by the huge trilithons. The ‘knob’ on top of the tall right-hand stone is a tenon carved to fit into a corresponding hole or mortise on the underside of a now fallen lintel stone, to hold it in place.
Pie, but it is now known that Stonehenge was in existence 2,000 years before the Druids were active, and was probably in ruins during their time. Little is known about the real Druids, but they were believed to have conducted their rituals within groves of trees, and their only constructions were of wood, not stone. But the lurid picture of Stonehenge as a centre of Druid ritual and sacrifice was difficult to eradicate, and even today the misapprehension continues, fuelled by the modern Druids whose history dates back only to thejr foundation in 1833.
In the twentieth century Stonehenge has emerged as an astronomical observatory, following the computer-aided researches of Professor Gerald Hawkins in the 1960s. More recent discoveries have pointed up the existence of errors in the supposed alignments of certain stones with astronomical events, which has led to a reassessment of Stonehenge’s role as an observatory. Some researchers have concluded that although Stonehenge may have been used in this way, the observations were not precise but only approximate, the intention being not to carry out scientific research as we understand it, but to follow the movements of the sky gods.
It is impossible to know whether the final use to which Stonehenge was put was the same as the use for which it was originally built, for it is clear that the monument underwent big changes throughout its approximately 1,500 years of active life. It was begun around 2800 BC, and the first Stonehenge consisted of a bank and ditch, a ring of fifty-six pits, and the so-called Heel Stone, the first stone to be erected. By 2100 BC, the eighty bluestones had been brought from Wales and erected in two concentric circles, but they were soon dismantled and the great sarsen stones were set up, some of the bluestones being reused inside the horseshoe of sarsens. By about 1800 BC the final Stonehenge was completed, the bluestones having again been dismantled and repositioned as they stand today.
People are now so distanced in time from the builders of Stonehenge that they find it difficult if not impossible to understand them and to appreciate what Stonehenge meant to them. Were some of the sarsens erected as trilithons (two uprights with a lintel carefully fitted across the top) simply to look impressive, or did this arrangement have some significance which eludes us? Why was it necessary to fetch eighty 4-ton stones from Wales? There are many more unanswered questions surrounding Stonehenge; if the builders of the final phase intended to leave behind them a monument to astound and mystify future generations, they have certainly succeeded.
World History
