The Stonehenge Enigma (Prehistoric Britain Book 1)

by Langdon, Robert John

  At Stonehenge, the raft would be guided to the shallow North West side of the peninsula, where the groundwater was shallowest and the mooring posts had cross posts attached. The lifting system for getting the stones out of the water would have needed only a minimal number of men, as it used the tide to lift the blocks in the air. The stone was brought to the mooring at high tide and lashed to the cross bar with large ropes. When the tide retreated, the stone would be left hanging above the water, allowing the removal of the flotation logs. A track could then be laid so that the stone could be levered to the site, or a sledge could be brought under the stone to slide it the short distance to the monument.

  This is what was constructed in the Visitors Car Park of Stonehenge to removed the stones from the boats

  Either system would require a minimal number of workers: 10 to 20, far less than conventional estimate of 200+ men lugging rocks across Salisbury Plain. This lever system would be second nature to a water-based civilisation. Using trees as their main source of materials, they would quickly have adapted to use wooden levers to manoeuvre their boats, either through punting, or by adding a couple of upright sticks to the side of the boat to create oars that could propel their boats much faster than punting or canoeing.

  Palisade and Excarnation

  This was the conclusion of Phase I at Stonehenge – a facility that had a dual purpose. Firstly, it was a place of healing; we have seen in previous sections that the stones, when used in water, could heal the sick. But it would have been clear that not all the people who came to Stonehenge could be successfully cured. The monument would also have been used as a place for the dead and the journey to the afterlife. Indeed, we still use the same custom and practice today in our modern hospitals. These are our centres for the sick, but hospitals are also the place where we keep the dead in a mortuary prior to their burial. Our Mesolithic ancestors clearly had the same philosophy of sickness and death, and kept them close to each other at Stonehenge.

  To understand the construction of Stonehenge, you must be able to interpret our ancestors’ beliefs and motives. The dead had to return to the land in the sky, and the only way that could happen was through giving the body to the only creatures that shared the sky with the ancestors – the birds.

  Archaeologists have found evidence of these excarnation practices at other sites in Britain. One similarity of these sites lies in the presence of a palisade to protect the bodies from animals other than the birds who fed on the corpses. Such a palisade was found at Stonehenge in the early 1990s, during excavations in the new visitor’s entrance. The palisade successfully cuts the natural peninsula off from the heavily wooded mainland to which it’s attached.

  As there are several main burial mounds on higher ground overlooking Stonehenge, we can only imagine that the entire site was sacred, and may have been completely cleared of woodland so that it appeared much as it does today, laid bare of trees and bushes. One of the remaining 15 barrows overlooking Stonehenge was constructed at the same time, to take the excarnated bones from the site; this area is known as Normanton Long Barrow. Unfortunately, not much of the barrow still exists, but it would have had a distinctive boat shape, surrounded by a moat. This design was a representation of an object and concept the Mesolithic people knew well, as it was their symbol for survival in everyday life.

  But the most remarkable aspect of Normanton Downs and Stonehenge is that there are no barrows outside this peninsula, neither below the groundwater line nor West of the palisade. Moreover, even today, the existing tracks reflect the ‘ghosts’ of the former landscape. If you look at the pathways around Stonehenge, you will notice that they change direction without reason. As most paths follow a straight line between the beginning and the end, we should look for reasons if the track changes course. The path that runs from the car park at Stonehenge to the barrows at Normanton Down tracks over simple grassland; there are no obstacles or field systems to divert the path, yet there are two distinctive changes in direction.

  When we introduce our predicted shoreline and palisade, the reasons for the changes in path direction become clear. As the path cuts through the palisade, it changes direction and heads for the nearest shoreline inside the peninsula – could this had been one of the old entrances to the site?

  Then when the track reaches the groundwater’s edge it changes again! This is a flat track in grassland – there is no obvious reason for it not to be straight. If that is not enough, the track turns east and runs along the shoreline – the only reason we see this topology is because the palisade and the shoreline existed in the Mesolithic Period.

  Wooden Palisade

  Archaeologists know of the palisade and its probable use as a type of shield for the site (in fact, some recently suggested it was a snow barrier!). But without the groundwater, it doesn’t make sense, as you could just walk around the thing to gain access. The only possible reason for the palisade is to join the two areas of groundwater, isolating the peninsula as a sacred place and preventing anything without a boat accessing the site, allowing the dead to go to their maker without being eaten by land animals.

  PHASE II Construction – 4000 BCE to 4300 BCE

  As the groundwater of Britain slowly started to subside and separate into what would become the Irish Sea, North Sea and English Channel, the landscape of Britain altered significantly. The earlier immense waterways were reduced to lakes and smaller rivers. At Stonehenge, the mooring station at what is now the car park had dried up by the end of the Mesolithic Period, and the site needed to change if it was to survive as it had over the last 3,000 years.

  The Avenue

  A clear indication of the changes that were introduced in Phase II of Stonehenge can be seen in the development of the Avenue to maintain the ceremonial link between Stonehenge and the river system. Our ancestors started by backfilling the ditch in the North East sector of the site. Both Hawley and Atkinson observed that the secondary filling was not natural. This backfill extended to a depth of 1 m, at which pottery and bluestone fragments are first seen, clearly indicating that it preceded the arrival of the bluestones.

  When the Avenue was first constructed, it would have had a dual purpose: to serve as the new mooring processional way for the dead, and also to help maintain the groundwater levels, because the moat had been reduced to a trickle as a consequence of the lower river levels. We have seen in the archaeological section of our hypothesis that Hawley had found a liner in the moat. This liner would not have been required when the moat was first constructed, as the groundwater tables were sufficiently high to fill the moat, whether daily or periodically. But a liner would have been necessary once the tidal groundwater no longer reached the base of the pits.

  The Avenue to the Neolithic shoreline

  To keep the moat at a suitable bathing depth, the pits would have needed to be topped up from time to time with groundwater from the receding rivers around Stonehenge. If the prehistoric people took the waters directly from the rivers, it would not have been the clean filtered water that the Stonehenge moat was built for, so they needed to devise a system that let them fill the moat on a daily basis with fresh filtered water. The solution was the Avenue. The Avenue is a processional causeway that had a deep trench built into both sides. This trench is totally unnecessary unless there is another reason for its use, and that reason was to top up the main moat at Stonehenge with filtered water.

  The ditch allows clean filtered water to travel along the Avenue all the way up to the existing moat. It would have been simple for Neolithic man to transport this water from the lower Avenue ditch to the higher Stonehenge moat, either by hand or using a wooden hand pump system. It may even be that as a consequence of moving the groundwater so close to the original site moat, it could fill the main moat by natural seepage through the porous chalk rocks – until more engineering studies and excavations of this point are undertaken, we can only theorise. The growth of the Avenue can be seen in the post holes found inside the causeway. There is no
good reason to place post holes in the causeway, except to act as a mooring stations to the river. As the river shrank, the mooring stations were moved further away, until eventually they reached the last traditional use of the mooring stations at the ‘elbow’ of the Avenue.

  Sarsen Stones

  The Sarsen stones would have been brought to the Stonehenge site before the river disappeared from the immediate plain to become the River Avon of today. The reason why our ancestors used Sarsen stones is very interesting, as the original structure, which consisted of Welsh bluestones, lasted over 3,000 years as a centre for curing sickness. Clearly, they had a requirement for a very large monument built of a different stone.

  From an engineering point of view, the size and structure was very important, and because of the size of these stones, the most effective means of transportation to this site would again be by boat. Even though the deeply forested landscape would have started to thin, the sub-soils would still have been waterlogged and marshy after the groundwater had receded, making it impossible to drag heavy stones across large distances.

  The construction of the Sarsen monument is of even greater interest, because if they were building only for aesthetic pleasure then you would imagine that simply laying one giant stone on top of another would be sufficient, as seen at other megalithic sites. But our ancestors wanted to do something special with these stones, so they carved mortise and tenon joints on their surfaces. The only engineering reason for this method of construction would be that the Sarsen stones were to take weight-bearing loads or for the structure to be strong enough to last many generations after the builders have left.

  The exact date of this process may never be fully known, for we have yet to find massive post holes in the Avenue similar to those in the car park at Stonehenge, which would give us an accurate date. But we still have a few clues to give us an approximate date, as we know that the river must still have been present at the end of the Avenue for the unloading of these stones to take place. And it must have been after the groundwater left the North West shoreline, but before the groundwater reached the ‘elbow’. This gives us a date between 6000 BCE and 4000 BCE.

  The arranging of the Sarsen stones has left archaeologists without any clues about the dating of Stonehenge. The current theories are based on pottery and the dating of antler picks found in the ditch; all these items could have been left at a later date. For traditional archaeologists to be correct, then the pottery and the antler picks had to be left ‘in situ’, the archaeologist’s way of saying that something has not moved from the place where it was originally deposited – unfortunately, they were not! As an example, the antler picks were found in the ditch. If the ditch had been dug and then left untouched for 5,000 years, then you could have a good accurate date – but we have proved that the ditch was in fact a moat filled with groundwater. These picks would have floated away. All we can say regarding the picks is that the last time the moat was cleaned out was about 2500 BCE – and that’s it! And the same can be said about the pottery.

  Moreover, there is one antler pick that was found under a Sarsen stone! Now this one can’t be explained away like the others, as a 12 ton stone was on top of it for thousands of years, guaranteeing that it could not have been placed there at a later date, or floated away to another part of the site. It was found in the ‘packing’ for Sarsen Stone 27. This gave a carbon dating of 4175 BCE +/- 185, which was consequently dismissed as it did not fall into the same dating range as the antlers left in the ditch, which was supposed to be its contemporary. This date is in the same range as the groundwater table for the Avenue, and therefore should not be ignored.

  Let’s revisit the Avenue. It clearly follows a path to the river, but the river reached all the way to the East of the site in Neolithic times, and therefore in theory the Avenue could have been built anywhere. So why did they build it in that particular direction? The North West entrance is oriented quite deliberately towards the midwinter moonset, perceived as the place of the dead and afterlife. After 3,000 years, is it possible that the monument changed its purpose? 3,000 years is a colossal amount of time – the same period before now, we were in the Bronze Age living in mud huts and dancing to druid music. In the landscape, we see that the monument’s use changed, as round barrows started to appear and burial practices started to change.

  Is it possible that Stonehenge as an excarnation site was ‘out of date’?

  Neolithic midsummer solstice over the Avenue

  If so, perhaps they decided to still use the trusted waters of the past, and change from curing the sick to celebrating life and the sun?

  This would explain why the Avenue was oriented to the summer sunrise and, this being the case, give us our third clue to the date the site was built. We are familiar with the masses that welcome the midsummer sunrise over Stonehenge – people wait in expectation, then (if you’re lucky) the sun creeps over the Heel Stone to welcome another day; everyone’s happy and goes home drunk. When you look at the Heel Stone, it is on the extreme right-hand side of the Avenue, bent over at a silly angle. Our ancestors did not build it that way – the monument was very nearly completely rebuilt at the end of the last century, and stones were moved.

  The most sensible alignment is straight down the middle of the avenue, obviously! This is obvious to anyone with half a brain, so why has it never been questioned or investigated?

  The sun does not always rise and set in the same place in history as you may expect. The earth ‘wobbles’ on its axis in a process known as ‘procession’ - I will not go into detail here, but all you need to understand is that the Sun and moon rises and sets in a different location over a period of 43,000 years.

  This means that the summer and winter Solstice moves in the relation to the horizon a fraction every year. This movement is TINY. Its 0.0002 of a degree every year, but over a long period of time, say 10,000 years ago it’s a whole two degrees. It may not sound much, but when you consider that the moon is half a degree in diameter, then two degrees is the same as four moons (or suns) in a row on the horizon.

  We can also ‘reverse engineer’ this figure to give us a date for the construction of the Avenue. The centre of the Avenue is 49.21º ; the current Summer Solstice Sunrise above the Heel Stone is 50.62º - this is a difference of 1.41 º. If each year the sun moves 0.0002247 (exactly) then we will have the exact date (when the sun is at the centre of the Avenue) and construction date of 4275BCE.

  Station Stones

  The Station Stones seem to have been added during Phase II of the site’s development. Aubrey post holes would have been obscured by the introduction of the Station Stones; therefore, they must post-date the original bluestone circle but predate the filled moat, as they have moats of their own. Whether the knowledge of the tides was no longer necessary, or the station posts held a special purpose, we currently don’t know. Modern theories use astro-archaeological alignments based on these posts to speculate on the reasons for their existence. Unfortunately, only two of the four Station Stones have a moat, which really does not make sense if they are as important as these theorists believe. These moats were directly connected to the main moat, as we have proved in the previous section. Our ancestors built barrows as signposts, not burial mounds. These markers are aligned to show not only where to go but, more importantly, how to get home.

  Does it also follow that they would use the same method to point the way to the afterlife?

  If you lived in the countryside or became a fell-walker in the days before GPS and OS maps, you used to have to rely on points on the horizon for guidance. The same simple principle would have been used by prehistoric man to get from A to B without getting lost. Initially, these features would have been on islands, as people used boats to transport themselves and trade. Then, as the groundwater fell, they would have used barrows as markers on the horizon to walk from point to point. We still see milestones today on the side of roads; barrows were the milestones of prehistoric man.

  So
, looking at the Station Stones, where would that direction have taken our ancestors?

  Well, if you follow the line from the centre of the site through the Northern Station Stone, you will go past no less than 5 long barrows, 15 round barrows, Casterley Camp, Knap Hill Camp, and the White Horse, finally arriving at Avebury. This is not bad, for just 36.4 km of travel. That’s one barrow every 500 metres; not even I could get lost with that frequency! In fact, mathematically, the chance of this number of barrows being in line over such a small distance is less than half of one per cent (0.05 %), or 2000 to 1 in layman’s terms.