Stonehenge

Stonehenge is one of hundreds of stone circles in UK though it is the best known. It shows us a lot about the cure of the country at time - changing from hunters and gatherers to settling down and starting to farm and raise crops. They actually had the time to build this monument now they weren't constantly looking for food. 

 

 

The area where it was built is in the middle of a clearing among the forest and he valley of the area where they hunted woolly mammoths. 

 

Stonehenge was started in 3,050 BC when the circular ditch was begun and dug out of he chalky earth. It was grassed over with a barrier and the white chalk would have gleamed for miles. Because of the tools they can tell when it was built using carbon dating. The tools used were their hands, the shoulder blades of cattle and the antlers of deers. 

 

There's a pathway going into the circle called the avenue which is a processional route into the circle that lines up exactly with the sunrise in the midsummer solstice. There are 56 "Aubrey" holes about 2 feet wide and they are just inside the perimeter of the ditch. These holes had cremated remains at the bottom of them. Filled in and painted now, they are named for the man who discovered them in the 17th century working for the king to study Stonehenge. He was the first to suggest it was built by the Druids but he was incorrect because of the dates. 

 

In 2600 BC the stone started to arrive. The blue stones arrived first, the smallest weighing abut 4 tons. They come from the mountains of South Wales - a lengthy distance but close to the water, so they floated them down the river in rafts to get to the henge. The blue stones were probably mounted in a circle or two within the ditch but over  the years they have been moved several times to accommodate arrival of the Sarsen stones. They started to arrive around 2300 BC and they are up to 50 tons. To move them  took  200 people to pull one stone using ropes made from vegetation or animal skins and 200 more people to look after the rollers stone on the sled. It took 10 years to get all of the stones to the site. It was an elaborate process to get the stones lined up and mounted using ropes and pulleys - quite an engineering feat!

 

Even more impressive is the particular placement of the stones so the sun shines through the window perfectly on the day of the midsummer solstice. These people had an understanding of geometry hundreds of years before the Greeks defined mathematics!

 

Stonehenge is unique in several ways form other stone circles.  It is the

• only one with blue stones
• only one to be "dressed". Each stone's outer edge was beaten to be smoothed and curved to make the circle border round and not squared

 

Over centuries many have fallen down. It was plundered and people took the stone away and it was defaced. At one people could hire stone and chisel and chip off a piece as a souvenir!

 

As to why it was built, common legends say it was a temple, a sacrificial place, or that Merlin the magician created it for King Arthur.  It was thought at one point to be a temple to the sun and mark the season - an early clock telling you the time of year. There were huge parties on the Solstice days. It may have even been like a Cathedral of the time. 

 

In the last few years after lots of archaeological digging around the area, the consensus is his was a burial site. Quite a few burial mounds surround the area and there is evidence of a huge Neolithic village of 300 houses. When people died they would be cremated and dropped into the river Avon. They would save the special people for the big party, take the ashes along the processional route into the middle of the stone and bury the ashes underneath the stone. They have found evidence of cremated remains of abut 200 people. 

 

Stonehenge was finished around 1600 BC and ironically around the time of he start of new burial techniques which brought an end to cremation. At this point Stonehenge became a monument to the dead instead of a burial site or monument to the sun.