Stonehenge (3 page)

Until very recently this stone construction phase was thought to have taken place over a period from about 2550 to 2300
BC
, but current research suggests that these stages were both earlier and more rapid, that the sarsens were in place by 2400
BC
at the latest and possibly two centuries earlier. The rearrangement of the bluestones and the building of the Avenue are currently thought to date from around 2280–1930
BC
. In about 1600
BC
two more rings of holes, now called the Y and Z holes, were dug. This last addition seems never to have served any function, the holes never contained posts or stones or ashes, and after them no more work took place at Stonehenge. At some point, probably after the upright sarsens were in position, at least eight of them were carved with images of axes and a dagger. Some time between 2400 and 2140
BC
the body of a young man who had apparently been killed by arrows, and is now known as the Stonehenge Archer, was buried in the main ditch. These flickers of activity strike the only sparks in the surrounding darkness of the prehistoric record.

It is impossible to know how long the site remained in use after the Y and Z holes were dug but perhaps not long. In the fourteen hundred years of its construction the landscape around Stonehenge and the culture it supported had changed profoundly. The latest date thought possible for the Y holes is 1520
BC
and by then the Neolithic had given way to the
Bronze Age. The plain was much more intensively farmed. There were permanent field systems and settlements. Indeed it would have required a relatively large population, able to survive by only seasonal labour, to find the workforce and the time to build the stone stage of Stonehenge. A recent calculation of the labour involved suggested that the raising of the lintels would have taken a team of twenty men a hundred and forty-five days. They must also have been highly organised and so, perhaps, a hierarchical society was emerging. Certainly it was more individualistic. By the time metal and so-called Beaker Ware (the pottery associated with a late-neolithic western European culture) begin to be found, the long barrows were being replaced by round barrows, centred on single graves. The communal traditions of the last two thousand years were breaking down. By now the view from within the stones embraced a skyline punctuated by newer barrows, including those at Normanton Down and the King Barrow Ridge, while away beyond the horizon lay Silbury Hill, which dates from 2700
BC
, and the great stone circle at Avebury, one of the largest in Britain, built, probably, between the first and second phases of Stonehenge. At Winterbourne Stoke, to the south-west, lies what the archaeologist Julian Richards calls the ‘final great cemetery’, a spectacular group of barrows of every type whose history encompasses the whole period of the building of Stonehenge.

How long the site retained its resonance or any of its intended meaning we cannot know. After the Middle Bronze Age the physical history of Stonehenge is one of disuse and dilapidation as stones fell or were removed, and roads, rabbits and farming all took their toll until the twentieth century, when restoration work began. All of this belongs to what follows. But before passing from prehistory into history it is perhaps worth pausing to reflect that the Stonehenge described here is in some important ways, both physically and intellectually, a work not of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, but of the present. Strictly speaking, the sight that greets the visitor today is less than half a century old, dating back no further than 1964, which was when the stones were last moved. Only seven of the twenty-five remaining uprights and two of the lintels are still as originally placed. The rest have been lifted and repaired at least once. Stone 60 has been substantially filled and many of the rest are set in twentieth-century concrete.

3. Aerial view, courtesy of SacredSites.com, showing the path for tourists and the A344 which runs just behind the Heel Stone.

As for the mental pictures of Stonehenge formed by successive ages, if they were captured and run in sequence like a film they would show almost the opposite of what is described here. The great sarsens would come first, the Aubrey Holes only much later. The full length of the Avenue would appear, vanish for two hundred years and be rediscovered by other means. The earliest post constructions would be seen almost last and all the pictures might seem to go in slow motion until, in the last sixty years or so, they speed up and a succession of quickly changing snapshots flickers past. As recently as the mid-1990s Stonehenge took a great leap backwards in time when it was found to be a whole millennium older than had been thought and changed abruptly from a Bronze Age to an almost entirely Neolithic structure. By 2001 respected archaeologists were talking of the need to ‘reinvent’ Stonehenge, and their latest findings have not only made the stone circle older, again, but thereby placed it in a different cultural landscape.

Meanwhile the figures that have inhabited this imaginative
scene, the supposed builders of Stonehenge, have been a mixed and sometimes raucous crowd. Saxons have alternated with Romans and Danes. The Beaker People have appeared, vanished again and now hang tentatively around the edge, while the Druids first moved in over three centuries ago and have never left, despite the best endeavours of archaeologists to shoo them away. Such, then, is the nature of the ancient monument from which this book takes its departure and of the modern one to which in due course it will return.

‘These antiquities are so exceeding old that no Books doe reach them so there is no way to retrieve them but by comparative antiquitie … writ upon the Spott.’

John Aubrey

After about 1600
BC
, when work stopped on the construction of Stonehenge, there follow more than two millennia of silence. Prehistory turned into history without shedding any recorded light on Salisbury Plain. None of the Roman historians mentions the monument – an omission into which great significance has sometimes later been read – and the Venerable Bede said nothing about it either. It is first glimpsed in history in a deed of 937, when ‘Stanheyeg’ features as a boundary marker for the land given by King Athelstan to the abbey of Wilton. Otherwise for Stonehenge, the Dark Ages are dark indeed. It is only after the Norman Conquest that details begin to emerge. In Henry of Huntingdon’s
Historia Anglorum
, written in about 1130, ‘Stanenges’ is listed as one of the wonders of the country, but ‘no one can conceive’, Henry notes, ‘how such great stones have been so raised aloft, or why they were built here’. Nor was anybody sure about the exact
meaning of the name.
‘Stan
’ comes from the Old English for ‘stone’, but whether ‘heng’, or ‘henge’ or ‘henges’ as it variously appears from now on, derives from hinge or hanging place, or whether it refers to the construction or the shape of the trilithons, which resemble an early English gallows, remains, like much else, uncertain. In medieval Latin it became Chorea Gigantum, meaning Giants’ Dance or Ring.

Many of Henry of Huntingdon’s questions were answered, in what he considered suspiciously ample detail, by his contemporary Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey’s
Historia Regum Britanniae
, or
The History of the Kings of Britain
, covers the period from the founding of Britain by Brutus through the rise of successive dynasties to its decline after the Saxon invasion. The story of Brutus, a Trojan descendant of Aeneas, from whose name ‘Britain’ was said to derive, was one of the medieval foundation myths to recur in connection with Stonehenge. The other is the tale of Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph, in whose tomb Christ was buried, was said to have come to England after the resurrection, bringing with him twelve apostles and, it was later believed, the Holy Grail, the cup used at the Last Supper. There he built the first Christian church at Glastonbury. By the fifteenth century, in Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
, Joseph, Glastonbury and the Grail had all become interwoven with the Arthurian legends and together they continue to haunt Stonehenge, but the process began with Geoffrey, whose book is the main source of the Arthurian stories as well as that of King Lear. His Stonehenge became the burial place of Uther Pendragon, having been built by King Aurelius as a monument to the Britons murdered there by the treacherous Saxon Hengist. The story of the massacre was already recorded in the early
ninth-century
Historia Britonnum
, a work often credited to the Welsh monk Nennius. Geoffrey elaborated it, however, as he did much else. He explained that Aurelius was advised by Merlin to bring over a Giants’ Ring from Mount Killaraus in Ireland, which feat was eventually accomplished with the help of the wizard’s magic skills. The source for all this new information was, apparently, an ancient book borrowed from his friend Walter the Archdeacon. The book was never produced and Henry of Huntingdon was not the only sceptic. In 1190 William of Newburgh complained of Geoffrey that ‘everything this man wrote … was made up’. Yet whether by coincidence or through some faint echo of received tradition, his account is not entirely fabulous. The idea that the stones, or some of them, were brought from the west was proved to be true in the last century and another of Geoffrey’s claims was revived in the present one. Merlin, he said, had recommended the Giants’ Ring for its healing properties. Baths prepared at the foot of the stones with water that had washed over them would, apparently, heal wounds. Nine hundred years later, in December 2006, the
Guardian
newspaper ran the headline, ‘Stonehenge was a Hospital’, over a story about a paper presented by Professors Geoffrey Wainwright and Timothy Darvill to the Society of Antiquaries, arguing that the bluestones were indeed brought to Wessex for their supposed healing properties.

The visual record for the Middle Ages is also sparse. Two depictions survive in illuminated manuscripts of the fourteenth century, while a fifteenth-century drawing discovered recently in Douai in France is notable for showing four standing trilithons and for clearly indicating the pegs inserted into the lintels. The first detailed depiction of Stonehenge to survive is a watercolour, now in the British Museum, by Lucas de Heere. De Heere was a Flemish artist who lived in London from 1567 to 1577 and seems to have made another, less distinguished, contribution to the subject by carving his name on sarsen 53. Meanwhile, despite doubts about its reliability,
The History of the Kings of Britain
remained popular and its account of Stonehenge was repeated by other authors. Only with the Renaissance, the revival of classical scholarship and the dawn of the New Learning towards the end of the fifteenth century, did it begin to fall out of favour, for the nature of history writing itself was changing. England’s next great historian, Polydore Vergil, had no time for old ‘monkish’ texts, which were, he thought, for the most part ‘bald, uncouth, chaotic and deceitful’. Vergil, whose
Anglia Historia
was first published in Basel in 1534 and dedicated to Henry VIII, was an Italian priest who came to England in 1502. He wrote his history methodically, on the basis of critical comparison of the documentary sources, and he was caustic about Geoffrey of Monmouth, whom he accused of ‘moste impudent lyeing’. There were patriotic complaints that Vergil was ‘polutynge oure Englyshe chronicles … with his Romishe lyes’, but the argument was lost. History from now on required documents and so Stonehenge, for which there were none, disappeared from history as abruptly as it had arrived.

4. One of the earliest images of Stonehenge, this drawing comes from a Scala Mundi, or Chronicle of the World, of about 1440–41. It shows four standing trilithons and clearly indicates their pegged construction.

Nearly a century passed before another sort of enquiry, antiquarianism, began to shed some light on it. Antiquaries were a relatively new intellectual species, largely a product of the Reformation, and they were interested in what could be discovered of the past by looking beyond the written records. They studied anything that was old – stones, metal, pottery, coins – attracting in the process much derision from
contemporaries who thought it an ‘unnaturall disease’ to be so ‘enamour’d of old age and wrinkles’. Yet the antiquaries were the first archaeologists. They were also the first oral historians, costume historians, art historians and folklorists. They opened up vast intellectual horizons and if, as later archaeologists have sometimes been quick to point out, they made mistakes, they were not alone in that and, working in an age before academic specialisation, before science and the arts had parted company, they were also able to make daring and useful connections.