by Hugh Thomson
In my pack, I have a tie, which I put on, and a clipboard. Experience has taught me that no one will ever question a man with a tie or clipboard in case they get questioned themselves. It’s the end of the day and most of the coach parties have left. And so I can slip quietly inside the ring of stones.
*
Stonehenge stands so solid and monolithic both in photographs and our imagination that it is difficult to imagine the fluidity of the changes that took place over the millennium of its main construction from around 3000 to 2000 BC.
For this was not a monument built to a simple blueprint, a snapshot of Neolithic man; rather it was a continually evolving design that met changing requirements at which we can only guess. Stonehenge remains a wonder because we do not understand fully to what purpose the great effort to raise the stones was expended.
That it was an epic undertaking can be understood by the contemplation of a single fact: the transporting of the bluestones from the Preseli Mountains on the western coast of Wales, some 240 miles away. That distance is almost incomprehensible. We marvel at the ability of the inhabitants of Easter Island or Machu Picchu to move great stone statues or ashlars respectively, again without the aid of mechanised transport; but that was over a relatively short haul of a few miles. A distance of 240 miles beggars belief, when one remembers that the bluestones weighed up to four tons each. While they were almost certainly transported some of the way by water (although that in itself raises both doubt and wonder), Stonehenge still lies inland and is hardly a convenient destination; so improbable does it appear that there have been recent inconclusive efforts to show that the bluestones may have come from elsewhere, or were left as glacial deposits.
Around 3000 BC, at a time when ancient civilisations were stirring in Mesopotamia, China, India, Egypt and Peru, the first of these Preseli bluestones were erected at the site of Stonehenge within a laboriously created circular ditch (labourers used deer antlers to scoop the rubble out and build its inner bank – deer antlers that can be dated). Fifty-six pillars were arranged in a double crescent shape within the circle. These are no longer visible; only the holes they stood in remain.
What we think of as the archetypal Stonehenge, the circle of thirty or so sarsen stones linked by stone lintels, was erected only around 2500 BC, half a millenium after the first monumental development of the site. These grey sarsen stones had come from much closer, the Marlborough Downs, about twenty miles to the north, and the lintels were carefully carved with tongue and groove notches so that they fitted together. Within this circle of grey sarsen stones were arranged a further horseshoe of five giant trilithons, each made up of two freestanding, upright stones with a third placed across the top, like the mathematical sign for pi: π.
The original bluestones were not abandoned after the arrival of the grey sarsens. They were moved from their old positions at some stage between 2280 and 2030 BC to form an outer circle and an inner oval beside the trilithons. Almost all the bluestones of this inner oval have either fallen or been removed. One of the largest fallen bluestones is now known, imaginatively if unhelpfully, as the ‘Altar Stone’.
By contrast more than half of the sarsen stones are still standing in their outer circle and were sculpted and erected with unusual care and skill, with mortise-and-tenon joints connecting the uprights to the lintels.
Just this brief summary of the monument’s complicated history shows the need for an on-site museum or display centre to explain its timeline and development: over the millennium of its construction, the furniture was moved around the room several times, the smaller bluestones in particular being arranged first one way, then another; once the big sarsens were in place I imagine that, like a large wardrobe, nobody would ever want to move them again.
Archaeologists like William Hawley and Richard Atkinson, who tried during the twentieth century to make sense of the complicated old post-holes and stone pits that pockmark the chalk ground, reeled back from the complexity of the task and did what most archaeologists do when faced with a conundrum: fail to publish the full results of their excavations. Only recently, in 1995, did an English Heritage project try to put together their findings; considerable controversy remains over when each stage was built and whether the outlying part of it was roofed. But it is clear that, like many a medieval cathedral, the construction took place during many centuries, from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, during which time architectural fashions changed. If it were a cathedral (and in some ways it is), the ruins would have Gothic, Perpendicular and Renaissance sections.
British archaeologist Francis Pryor has offered the insight that for Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples the process of construction may have been as important as the result; that they were often more interested in the collaborative effort needed to build their ceremonial centres than the actual final structure. In some instances he cites evidence that they tore down part of a finished structure so that they could continue building it.
We are so used to a mindset that insists on giving primacy to the finished building that we find this difficult to assimilate; but if we accept it, then seeing Stonehenge in its current partial and complicated state may be more suitable than we realise – for this was always meant to be a work in continual progress.
My first thought when I slip inside the site is how small the bluestones are that were brought hundreds of miles from the Preseli Mountains. The lichen that has grown up over centuries (zealously preserved by English Heritage) makes it difficult to see their distinctive dolerite rock grain.
It is of course the main stones, the grey sarsens from the nearby Marlborough Downs, that make the bluestones seem so small: whales among dolphins, they tower over them.
Because the grass is so little trod between the stones, it looks quite fresh. Oddly, given that 1 million visitors a year patrol the perimeter, the actual stones feel abandoned. I notice a few ravens who have made their homes among the lintels of the trilithons, the biggest of all of the stones that nestle at the heart of the site in a horseshoe shape. Ravens were often associated prehistorically with places of burial – and for good reason, as they would pick the corpses clean.
I recall an intriguing theory that Mike Parker Pearson put forward. Mike is head of the Stonehenge Riverside Project. His team have been investigating a separate circle down by the River Avon, dubbed ‘Bluestonehenge’ by the press, an unfortunate term that makes it sound like a shopping mall. He suggests that Neolithic man built in stone when commemorating death, and in wood, at sites like Woodhenge, when celebrating life. The avenue leading from that wooden circle at nearby Durrington Walls to Stonehenge might therefore have been ‘a ritual passage from life to death, to celebrate past ancestors and the recently deceased’: a fascinating idea which, while highly speculative, makes sense of the sacred landscape around Stonehenge.
It is through one of the stone trilithons that the sun’s rays would have set at the winter solstice, but that particular trilithon has not been restored: the lintel and one shattered support lie inert on the ground, covering the so-called ‘Altar Stone’. It seems irrational that other stones have been restored to their positions and not this one.
That said, if just one trilithon was standing, Stonehenge would still be a fabulous monument: to have three upright, with an outlying circle of smaller sarsens, is just out of sight, as James Brown would say.
I feel a far greater peace than I had expected. From afar I can hear the last tourists circling the ruins, the traffic on the road, even a distant helicopter from one of the airbases. But in my heart I feel grounded and centred; and that every visitor should be allowed inside.
As I leave, I glance back and see the tourists still walking around the ‘designated walkway’, holding the audiophone guide to their ears. At this distance they look like celebrants, in their bright neon anoraks, making a final last outer circuit around the stones.
*
I follow the processional Avenue away from Stonehenge. This broad Neolithic track heads nor
th across the meadows and then hangs a right towards a ridge with a line of twelve burial mounds called the King’s Barrows.
The barrows intrigue me because they have never been excavated; the local farmer was reluctant to let archaeologists cut down the trees to get at them. Some are buried in a beech copse at one end of the mysterious Cursus, the long depression so named because the antiquarian William Stukeley thought it was built by the Romans for chariot races, although actually it is even older than Stonehenge.
One of the King’s Barrows stands out on its own in a field, with four beech trees as guards. I leave the path and make my way over. Inside the bower of the beeches, the rise of the mound is covered by cow parsley; right at the centre is a small patch of bluebells that must be a recent planting, as they have certainly had 4,000 years to spread since its unknown occupant was laid to rest in the mound.
It is a peaceful place, and after a long day walking, the temptation just to lie in the long grass and cow parsley and watch the sun descend is seductive. Fields of dandelions and buttercups lead back to Stonehenge over the meadow. The late sun coming down through the translucent leaves of the beech trees above makes it feel brighter than it really is, and when it fades, I feel a sudden lethargy and just sink into sleep, with my pack as a pillow.
When I wake, it is cold and past midnight, and I pull on extra clothes. Across the meadow, I can see the distant lights of the A303 as it passes Stonehenge, the cars gleaming like fish passing in a stream across the horizon. The stones themselves are invisible – no son et lumière here in the way of the Pyramids or Acropolis – but the stars above are crystal clear. The large expanse of Salisbury Plain lessens the usual light pollution of southern England. For once, I can see each star of the dagger that hangs from Orion’s belt.
Lying back in my nest of cow parsley and long grass on the King’s Barrow, I try to sleep again. Sleeping on a grave isn’t off-putting – indeed is oddly restful – but I had forgotten how long grass always rubs you up the wrong way, even if you’re sleeping in all your clothes.
Far too early next morning, and with the dew still on me, I walk up past the Cursus, stretching away for over two miles to the west. I can see why the usually reliable William Stukeley thought that it was built by the Romans, for the dimensions are both imperial and gladiatorial, and it calls out for a horse to gallop along. Archaeologists since Stukeley have always been mystified why the Cursus was built, until 2011 when a team from the University of Birmingham showed that it too may have helped mark different solstice points, and provided a way to process between them.
On a cold but sunny dawn the sheer beauty of the Cursus is unmistakable. The idea of ‘a sacred landscape’ is one I am used to from Peru. The great achievement of Andean civilisation was to give meaning to a harsh and difficult environment, to create a complex sacred landscape where once had been plain rock and water: the Nasca lines being the most famous example, but with plenty of others to choose from, including the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, along which every viewpoint is designed to frame a sacred mountain or alignment.
The Neolithic culture of Wiltshire works in much the same way, but is less recognised. Gerald Hawkins, the British scholar who did most to establish the accuracy of the solstice alignment at Stonehenge and to create the discipline of archaeo-astronomy, went on to investigate those same lines of Nasca. Yet it has still taken longer for us to appreciate that Stonehenge is not an isolated monument but part of the wider ritual landscape that surrounds it: the King’s Barrows, the Avenue, the Cursus, the other nearby henges. It doesn’t help that, unlike the Peruvians, who have carefully preserved the Nasca lines, we have built roads through most of our sacred landscape, or made it inaccessible on private or military land.
Which is why I have tried to support the creation of a new walking trail through this landscape, to be called the Great Stones Way and linking Stonehenge with Avebury; I wrote the first article promoting the project, for the Guardian, arguing that it is high time we arrived at Stonehenge by the only sensible and appropriate route – on foot. The comparison that immediately comes to mind, and which I know well, is that same Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. The experience of trekking to both sites is immeasurably richer, not just ‘because you’ve earned it’, but because both sets of ruins can then be understood in the context of the surrounding landscape.
I am following that same suggested Trail now, leading me from the Cursus past the ‘Cuckoo Stone’, as a fallen sarsen standing alone in a field is called, and on to Woodhenge: here the original wooden posts in concentric rings have been marked by concrete pillar stumps less than a foot high that look like parking bollards.
While I understand the purist archaeological vision that wants just to indicate not re-create, I can’t help wishing that a little more imagination might have been shown. What would be the harm in re-creating the wooden posts, with a clear health warning attached that this was just that, a reconstruction? No one in the Americas, from a tribal reservation in the north to Peru in the south, would have hesitated for a second. One can be too austere in these matters. I remember a well-respected American archaeologist saying, off the record, that ‘British archaeologists need to lighten up. Get out of the trench once in a while and have a party.’
It is not a concern that has troubled Buddhists in Bhutan or Japan, who reconstruct their temples regularly after fires; Douglas Adams once took time out from hitch-hiking around the galaxy to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and was
mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.
‘So it isn’t the original building?’ I asked my Japanese guide.
‘But yes, of course it is,’ he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
‘But it’s burnt down?’
‘Yes.’
‘Twice.’
‘Many times.’
‘And rebuilt.’
‘Of course. It is an important and historic building.’
‘With completely new materials.’
‘But of course. It was burnt down.’
‘So how can it be the same building?’
‘It is always the same building.’
(Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See)
Woodhenge in its prime may have been as evocative as Stonehenge for celebrants, with circles of high wooden posts rather than stone. It is a reminder of the way in which wood had an equally central place in the Neolithic ritual world, even if for obvious reasons that wood has not survived as well. Only at sites like Seahenge on the Norfolk coast, towards which I’m heading, has a wooden monument been preserved intact by the peat until being uncovered just a few years ago.
Woodhenge, and the huge circle of Durrington Walls beside it, are far less well known than they should be. Yet excavations show this is where the builders of Stonehenge may have lived: excavations that happened only because a road was built through the area in a brutal fashion.
Looking at the concrete posts of Woodhenge and the unnecessary road running through Durrington Walls makes me feel a little melancholy. I notice a transit parked up beside the sites in the lay-by, the only vehicle. It’s painted a dark forest green and looks too spruce and well kept to be your average travellers’ van.
Brendan and Sue are pottering about inside, a middle-aged couple in cardigans from London who look like they too ought to be in a Mike Leigh film. Brendan is frying bacon. He notices me lurking outside, like a dog with its tongue hanging out, and takes pity. After giving me tea and sympathy (Brendan’s special masala chai), they tell me together, in chorus, that they spend two weeks every year travelling the country to visit prehistoric sites.
‘Well, it gets you out and about,’ says Brendan.
‘Yes it does, it gets you out and about,’ adds Sue.
They are coming at me in stereo, in the way of some couples.
; It emerges that they prefer Woodhenge to Stonehenge and have spent some days there. I am impressed by the purity of their approach and depressed by my own corresponding lack of imagination, which has failed to make Woodhenge come alive in the same way.
‘Oh no, it’s not that,’ says Sue. ‘It’s just that the car park here is free. You have to pay at Stonehenge.’
*
Until a few more rights of way are opened, Salisbury Plain is not easy to access. Nothing wrong with the terrain – it’s wide and flat and inviting. But the army have carved a great deal out of it for their firing ranges, and if the ‘red flags’ are up, you can’t walk across.
So I take a detour along the quiet upper Avon Valley that Cobbett liked so much and meander with the river past a series of sleepy, pretty villages: Coombe and Fittleton, with their Judas trees and millponds and dovecotes; Enfold, with its flint and stone church, and old funeral wagon waiting on standby in the nave; Longstreet, with the Swan pub appearing at just the right moment for a lunchtime reappraisal of the route.
At Fighealden (pronounced ‘file-dean’), an allotment holder tells me he doesn’t grow courgettes ‘because they’re foreign food’. An older man, he’s working in his vest and trying to hoe ground that’s rock hard after an unusually long period of sun. He grows spinach and potatoes mainly, with a prized asparagus bed. There is hardly a weed to be seen on his section: particularly gratifying in an allotment, as the comparison with more slovenly neighbours alongside is so apparent.
Before retiring, he used to work as a gamekeeper on one of the local estates. ‘These days, of course, we encourage all the predators and raptors – the buzzards and the sparrowhawks and the red kites, although kites are more carrion. But what no one ever points out is what it’s doing to the songbirds. Used to get a lot of skylarks on Salisbury Plain. Not any more. There were clouds of peewits over by the aerodrome. But they’ve all gone. What people don’t understand is that there is a reason to control predators. You ever see a sparrowhawk come down on a garden table and take a few songbirds for breakfast? The ones hopping about on the little bird-feeders people put out, like bait. Might as well poison the blue tits and the chaffinches as lure them for a sparrowhawk’s breakfast!’
