Stonehenge

 Stonehenge is Britain’s most famous prehistoric landmark. In its heyday four thousand years ago, it attracted people from across Britain and across Europe. Today, largely ruined thanks to time and human endeavour, nothing has changed.

Stonehenge was built and rebuilt several times over a 1500-year period, in a chalkland landscape which was already of great sacred significance. A series of colossal wooden posts, their significance now long lost, were raised in what is now the Stonehenge carpark 5000 years before the monument was begun. Two linear monuments known as cursuses and several long barrows were built nearby in the preceding centuries. And the spring known as Blick Mead attracted votive offerings for several thousand years.

The Amesbury Archer, who was brought up in the Alps and was buried a mile from Stonehenge around 2400BC. He was perhaps one of the earliest metal workers in Britain.

The earliest construction at Stonehenge was a circular ditch and bank, dug around 3000BC, with a ring of 56 Aubrey Holes around its inner edge. These were once the sockets for the famous bluestones, brought several hundred miles from the Preseli Mountains in South Wales. Many, perhaps all, of the holes also contained cremation burials, perhaps interred as the stones were raised and perhaps of people with particular associations with that stone.

Around 500 years later, the horseshoe of huge trilithons – paired and shaped stones with a horizontal cap – were raised in the centre, along with a circle of capped sarsen stones. The bluestones went through several rearrangements which took place over the next few hundred years. It seems a final rearrangement was abandoned uncompleted around 1500BC.

The approach up the avenue, with one of the ditches still visible. The Heel Stone, a glacial erratic raised in the entrance almost in its natural position, is on the left.

Stonehenge seems to have been a place linked to death and funerary rites. The remains of over 150 people were interred at the site, and no evidence of feasting or other signs of occupation have been found. As is perhaps fitting with its unique structure, people came here only for important and austere rites.

Stonehenge was approached along an avenue, over 3km long and 22 metres wide, which led from the river Avon in a circuitous route to cross King Barrow Ridge, later the location of several Bronze Age barrows, and the first view of the stones in the distance. They are in fact barely noticeable, lost among the grey-green of Salisbury Plain, and soon vanish from view as one drops into the valley of Stonehenge Bottom, probably once a seasonal watercourse.

Then comes the climb up the hillside, and the stones gradually rise from the ground and stand proud on the skyline, displayed in all their glory as the walker approaches. The world beyond them remains invisible. It is a remarkable piece of landscape engineering, which would have been all the more powerful with the banks of the avenue funnelling the viewer’s attention.

The view from the entrance.

The stones seem very distant from the outer ditch, today’s permitted viewing point, and this was probably intentional to reinforce the point that only the select few were permitted into the stones’ presence. The ten-metre high trilithons crowding over the initiate would create a near terrifying sense of claustrophobia and power. It would feel like the most powerful place in Britain, in the world, as it was intended.

The Stonehenge Archer, buried in the ditch around 2200BC. He had died after being shot by three arrows which broke his sternum and one rib, shown in the picture. Was this a murder or a sacrifice?

The avenue and entrance align to the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, and recent investigation has shown that beneath the avenue lay several periglacial channels, deep ditches naturally formed during the Ice Age and by coincidence on exactly the same solstice alignment. These were incorporated by the avenue’s builders. Were they seen as a natural sun channel, created by the Gods, spirits or ancestors, and eventually incorporated into Britain’s most important sacred site? It seems very likely.

One of the many Bronze Age barrows which focus on Stonehenge.

Stonehenge’s final modification was during the mid Bronze Age, around 1500BC, but it was the focus of attention, good and bad, long after this point. Bronze Age barrows were raised where they would be visible on the skyline from Stonehenge. Roman-era pottery was found in large quantities, perhaps the result of religious rituals. It seems some of the stones were toppled by the Romans, perhaps an attempt to break the site’s power. In the Saxon period, when the site became known as the ‘Stone Hangings’, it was used for executions.

Today, it is a tourist attraction.