Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain, north of Salisbury in
southern England, is the most celebrated of the megalithic monuments in
England. It dates from the late Stone and early Bronze ages and was probably
built in three stages between 3000 and 1000 B.C.E. Stonehenge was once believed
to have been either a Roman or Druid temple; it is now thought to have been a
type of astronomical clock or calendar, or a temple for sun worshippers.
In 1964 Gerald S. Hawkins, an American astronomer, reported findings obtained by supplying a computer with measurements taken at Stonehenge together with astronomical information based on celestial positions in 1500 B.C.E. when Stonehenge was in use. According to Hawkins, Stonehenge could have been used to predict summer and winter solstices, vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and solar and lunar eclipses. His conclusion was that Stonehenge functioned as a means of predicting the positions of the sun and moon relative to the earth, and thereby the seasons.
Stonehenge is surrounded by a 430 ft diameter, 5 ft deep ditch, within which is a bank and a ring of 56 pits, named Aubrey holes after John Aubrey, a British antiquarian, who discovered them. At the northeast end a break in the ditch gives access to a ditch-bordered avenue, 75 ft wide and 2 miles long, that leads northeasterly towards the east Avon river.
The monument is formed of four concentric ranges of stones. The centremost is a horseshoe-shaped range of blue stones which enclose the Altar Stone, a slab of micaceous sandstone. Near the entrance to the avenue lies the so-called Slaughter Stone, a sarsen stone that may originally have stood upright. The blue stones are enclosed by a horseshoe-shaped range of five lintelled pairs of large sarsen stones. The next outer ring is a circle of smaller blue stones consisting mainly of spotted dolerite, with four specimens each of rhyolite and of volcanic ash; and the outermost range is a 100 ft diameter circle of large lintelled, sandstone blocks or sarsen stones. The blue stones are from the north flank of the Mynydd Preseli (Prescelly Mountains) in Wales. The Altar Stone is believed to have come from the region near Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire.
The outer bank, the ditch, and the Aubrey holes encircling the main construction, are probably from the late Stone Age or early Bronze Age (circa 2000 B.C.E.) The main structure is dated between the early Bronze Age and the end of the Iron Age. On some of the fallen sarsen stones shallow carvings were found depicting bronze axheads of a type used in Britain between 1600 and 1400 B.C.E. and a hilted dagger of a type used in Mycenae, Greece, between 1600 and 1500 B.C.E.
Sometime between 55 B.C.E. and 410 C.E., Stonehenge was desecrated by the Romans who tore down a number of the upright stones. In addition, two uprights and a lintel west of the Altar Stone fell in January 1797; and two other stones, an upright and its lintel, fell in 1900. In 1958 these five stones were raised, giving the monument the approximate appearance it had during the Roman occupation.
Except on rare occasions, you can’t get to the monument itself now (there’s a visitor centre, etc.) but I was able to visit it back in the 1970s when it was still possible to walk round and touch the actual stones.
Text © Owain F Carter 1999. Image supplied with Claris HomePage.
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