STONEHENGE - The Ultimate Magic Roundabout

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                                                  The ultimate magic roundabout





Andy Letcher reviews Stonehenge

by Rosemary Hill
JUNE 28, 2008

Think of a stone circle, any stone circle, and there's a fair chance you'll picture Stonehenge. Its gap-toothed silhouette is impressed on us from an early age, endlessly reinforced by postcards, films, adverts and cartoons. Whether casting it as archaeological treasure, romantic ruin or long-lost pagan temple, all these images proclaim its singular importance: Stonehenge, they say, is where our story begins. As such, it is one of the most written about (if poorly understood) of our prehistoric monuments, and so if the thought of yet another guide does little to quicken the pulse, then Rosemary Hill's concise and lively book will come as a delightful surprise.

Hill's sprightly narrative takes us rapidly through the monument's prehistory and the vexed issue of who built it and why - "the short answer is that nobody knows" - concentrating instead on the more interesting question of what it has meant to people at different times. For 18th-century antiquarians, still operating within a biblical time frame, Stonehenge was a druid temple built just after the flood. Romantics such as Wordsworth, Turner and Blake saw it "overwhelmingly [as] a focus for psychic menace". Victorian geologists placed it in some great, imagined scheme of cultural evolution, while, in our time, it became a counter-cultural symbol for hippies, pagans, bikers and revived druids, as they sought unfettered access to the famous (if questionable) midsummer-sunrise alignment.


Along the way, we learn that Charles Darwin studied the activity of earthworms among the stones; that Stonehenge ultimately gave us that staple of road-building, the roundabout; and that mischievous planners at Milton Keynes aligned the new town on an identical axis so that the rays of the rising midsummer sun would strike "a large kinetic structure and a branch of John Lewis". And, of course, the legendary Spinal Tap moment gets a mention. With no archaeological axe to grind, Hill's even-handed approach is refreshing. "Stonehenge does not belong to archaeology," she reminds us, "or not to archaeology alone." Consequently, she evaluates ideas about the monument not on their adherence to academic orthodoxy but on their continuing influence.

A case in point is her rehabilitation of Inigo Jones, whose fantastical 17th-century reconstruction of Stonehenge as a Roman temple, built to the plan of a hexagon, has long been lampooned by antiquarians and archaeologists. Hill asks us to look again, to read Jones's plans as "allegory, not logic", to see them in the context of his being chief surveyor to James I. In fitting the monument to a Platonic ideal, Jones was "seeking to dignify architecture itself, placing it among the arts, high above the lowly world of trade". He was giving architecture a powerful "foundation myth".

Here Hill, author of God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, is on safe and familiar territory. She fares a little less well on the monument's more recent history, muddling the name of one contemporary druid order and, perhaps understandably, getting a little too bogged down in the details of planning controversies over the proposed new visitor centre.

And while she deals with the "troubles" at Stonehenge fairly - the free festival, its forced closure and the eventual re-opening of the stones at the summer solstice under the "managed open access" scheme - she passes over them a little too breezily, missing some of the context that makes her earlier chapters so compelling.

Impressively researched, full of charming anecdotes and engagingly written, Hill's Stonehenge deserves to become the standard introduction to the monument for professionals and amateurs. If, as Jacquetta Hawkes observed, "every age has the Stonehenge it deserves", then Hill's book shows that we deserve a more considered monument, one in which many meanings jostle and co-exist and no one singular Stonehenge dominates.

Stonehenge, Hill says, satisfies our "desire for knowledge and our love of mystery", and precisely because so little is known about the original monument, both fact and fancy will always be needed in our quest to make sense of it. For, "while a pure fantasist can contribute nothing, neither is a pedant likely to have much insight".



http://www.archaeologynews.org/link.asp?ID=301795&Title=The%20ultimate%20magic%20roundabout

[Bianca]

In Stonehenge I, about 3100 BC, the native Neolithic people, using deer antlers for picks, excavated a roughly circular ditch about 98 m (320 feet) in diameter; the ditch was about 6 m (20 feet) wide and 1.4 to 2 m (4.5 to 7 feet) deep, and the excavated chalky rubble was used to build the high bank within the circular ditch. They also erected two parallel entry stones on the northeast of the circle (one of which, the Slaughter Stone, still survives). Just inside the circular bank they also dug--and seemingly almost immediately refilled--a circle of 56 shallow holes, named the Aubrey Holes (after their discoverer, the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey). The Station stones also probably belong to this period, but the evidence is inconclusive. Stonehenge I was used for about 500 years and then reverted to scrubland.



During Stonehenge II, about 2100 BC, the complex was radically remodeled. About 80 bluestone pillars, weighing up to 4 tons each, were erected in the center of the site to form what was to be two concentric circles, though the circles were never completed. (The bluestones came from the Preseli Mountains in southwestern Wales and were either transported directly by sea, river, and overland--a distance of some 385 km [240 miles]--or were brought in two stages widely separated in time.) The entranceway of this earliest setting of bluestones was aligned approximately upon the sunrise at the summer solstice, the alignment being continued by a newly built and widened approach, called the Avenue, together with a pair of Heel stones. The double circle of bluestones was dismantled in the following period.



The initial phase of Stonehenge III, starting about 2000 BC, saw the **** of the linteled circle and horseshoe of large sarsen stones whose remains can still be seen today. The sarsen stones were transported from the Marlborough Downs 30 km (20 miles) north and were erected in a circle of 30 uprights capped by a continuous ring of stone lintels. Within this ring was erected a horseshoe formation of five trilithons, each of which consisted of a pair of large stone uprights supporting a stone lintel. The sarsen stones are of exceptional size, up to 9 m (30 feet) long and 50 tons in weight. Their visible surfaces were laboriously dressed smooth by pounding with stone hammers; the same technique was used to form the mortise-and-tenon joints by which the lintels are held on their uprights, and it was used to form the tongue-and-groove joints by which the lintels of the circle fit together. The lintels are not rectangular; they were curved to produce all together a circle. The pillars are tapered upward. The jointing of the stones is probably an imitation of contemporary woodworking.



http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/stonehenge.html