Stonehenge (17 page)

‘At Stonehenge no antiquarian cause is ever finally lost.’

John Michell,
Megalithomania

As a new century dawned it was obvious that something had to be done about Stonehenge. What Sir Edmund Antrobus did was to put up a fence and impose an admission charge. For the first time in history free access to the stones was stopped. No matter that it was done to protect them, or that, as Lady Antrobus wrote in the guide book, the barrier was ‘composed of lightest barbed wire of a neutral tint, and absolutely invisible at a distance’, it caused uproar. The Commons Preservation Society, John Lubbock (now Lord Avebury), Flinders Petrie, the National Trust and Amesbury Parish Council were among those who saw it as an unwarrantable act of enclosure. In fact Stonehenge had never been on common land and, despite a writ being issued against Sir Edmund by Flinders Petrie and others in 1904, no legal case could be brought. The dispute, however, set the tone for the century. Who was to own Stonehenge, who was to visit it, when and on what terms, were questions that remained unsettled into the next millennium. In all its long history this twentieth century of the Christian era was the best of times and the worst of times. Great advances in understanding and appreciation were countered by irreversible damage and a struggle for ownership that occasionally became violent. Some of the scenes that have taken place on Salisbury Plain in living memory are like Blakean visions of apocalypse. Razor wire and searchlights have surrounded the stones, and police helicopters have throbbed overhead, drowning out the Druid rituals, while fighting broke out nearby.

26. George MacGregor Reid and his fellow members of the Universal Bond of the Sons of Men celebrating the summer solstice, in 1913 or 1914 in front of curious onlookers. In both years ‘riotous scenes’ later occurred and the celebrants were ejected from the site.

For better and worse, this was the century that brought professional archaeology to Stonehenge. Between 1901 and 1994 there were 123 digs and other ‘interventions’, some of them now seen to have been highly destructive. The first excavations, however, which took place in 1901, were among the least invasive and the best. Once the beleaguered Sir Edmund had fought off the unwanted advice of Flinders Petrie and others he did what his late father would have done. He turned for help to William Morris’s Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings and to the Arts and Crafts architect Detmar Blow. For the first time in two centuries architectural expertise was applied to Stonehenge and Blow urged the need for ‘experienced craftsmen’ to work on the site. He undertook operations with William Gowland. Gowland was an antiquary and a professor at the School of Mines who had spent sixteen years in Japan investigating burial mounds and laying the intellectual foundations for Japanese archaeology. Neither there nor in England has he yet received the credit he deserves. Gowland and Blow shored up some of the stones with timber, deciding to move only stone 56 of the Great Trilithon, which was tilting rapidly and bearing down on a bluestone. While restoring it to its upright position, Gowland dug
a small area around its base and, working on the principles he had established in Japan, sifted what he found, recorded its location to within a few inches and published his findings in months. It was a standard that sadly few of the professionals who followed him were to match, but it made a resounding case for archaeology.

From this little dig a vast amount was discovered and questions that had puzzled generations of antiquaries were answered almost overnight. In the stone hole Blow and Gowland found the tools the workmen had used, the stone mauls or hammerstones that had shaped the sarsen and the antler picks with which the chalk had been dug. The stone hole, Gowland noticed, had been cut with a slope down one side to create a ramp in order to slide the upright into place. This explained how the stones had first been raised. Blow’s assistant, Basil Stallybrass, worked out by experiment how the tooling had been done with quartzite hammerstones. He compared their effect with other possible tools until he matched the result exactly. From the fact that the nearest bluestone, 68, was set in the rubble infill for stone 56, Gowland deduced that the bluestones had been placed in their present position after the sarsens, thus answering one of the most teasing questions of the previous century. He found no metal tools or artefacts and so concluded that Stonehenge was Neolithic, a work of native Britons, dating from about 1800
BC
. It was a brisk, modestly presented piece of work that marked a gigantic leap in knowledge and understanding.

It was not enough, however, to allay suspicion about Sir Edmund’s worthiness as a custodian. Attempts continued to bring Stonehenge under public control and in 1913 it was scheduled, compulsorily, under the Ancient Monuments Act,
thus preventing the owner from demolishing or exporting it, which he had never intended to do. Sir Edmund, meanwhile, who shared the family dislike of officialdom, joined the Ancient Order of Druids, into which Winston Churchill was initiated a few years later. The Ancient Order came to celebrate at Stonehenge in 1905 and for some years afterwards, affording their detractors an easy target by wearing false beards but otherwise causing no trouble. The same could not be said of George MacGregor Reid and his Universal Bond of the Sons of Men. Reid was a believer in natural medicine and universal religion rumoured to have invented the tonic wine Sanatogen. It was with him that modern Druidry began its move away from the fraternal Masonic model back to the radical, countercultural style of Iolo Morganwg. Reid believed that the Druids were the British interpreters of the one original faith and that Stonehenge was its prime site. The Universal Bond accordingly set off from their headquarters at Clapham in their distinctive Indian-style costumes and held their ceremonies at the solstice from 1909 onwards. In 1912, however, there was a dispute with Sir Edmund about whether they should pay the admission fee and the next year the police were called. The same undignified scene was repeated with even greater acrimony the following year, with Reid haranguing the curious onlookers and pronouncing terrible curses on the Antrobus family.

Overall, however, the most intrusive presence at Edwardian Stonehenge was the military. Infantry manoeuvres made the ground shake. Army buildings sprouted up at Larkhill, to the north, and were accompanied after 1910 by a new phenomenon, the aeroplane hangar. Planes flew over the stones, occasionally crashing nearby, and manoeuvres increased as
events in Europe moved inexorably towards war. By 1914 the old order in England was already under sentence and it required no Druidic curse to bring it down. Sir Edmund’s son was killed at Ypres in 1915. He himself died seven months later and the Amesbury estate, like so many others, was broken up. Stonehenge, with the parcel of land immediately surrounding it, was put up for auction at Salisbury and bought, on impulse, by a local man, Cecil Chubb, for £6,600. As the war went on the army camps sprawled. An aerodrome was built and tanks rolled within yards of Stonehenge, where it now sat, fenced off on its shrivelled site, like some shorn Samson in captivity. Then at last, in October 1918, just before the Armistice, came the moment that Charles Dickens, John Lubbock, Flinders Petrie and many others had longed for. Chubb decided to make a gift of Stonehenge to the nation. The title deeds were handed over to the Commissioner of Works in an elaborate ceremony and the stones were at last public property. But the public is a hydra-headed entity. Its ownership of Stonehenge brought a change of difficulties rather than a solution, difficulties which began, inevitably perhaps, with the Druids. In the summer of 1926 a series of misunderstandings with the Office of Works led to a confrontation in which George MacGregor Reid incited a crowd of onlookers to storm the fence. It was the first but by no means the last violent invasion of Stonehenge. The removal of the remaining right of way across the site caused more dispute with local people. For the archaeologists, however, national ownership was a boon, removing all obstacles to the large-scale excavation they had been itching to do for so long. Digging began in November 1919.

William Gowland was too old to undertake the work
and it was his assistant, William Hawley, who took charge, with a brief to ‘excavate Stonehenge completely and at the minimum expense’. The verdicts of later archaeologists on what followed vary from unfortunate to catastrophic. Many now feel that Hawley was left to flounder by the Society of Antiquaries, to whom he was supposed to report, and that his efforts, unlike those of some of his successors, were competent and responsible. Others, including Christopher Chippindale, refer to this as the period which saw ‘the destruction of half Stonehenge’. Operations started with some of the more precariously leaning stones and their lintels, which were put straight and set in concrete. Then the digging began. Hawley and his assistant, R. S. Newall, worked for seven years with diminishing enthusiasm. One problem was the lack of spectacular discoveries, the glamorous treasure that might capture the imagination of the public which now owned Stonehenge. In November 1922 Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun and the world was dazzled by the face of the boy king. Hawley and Newall, meanwhile, carried on turning up broken flints, Roman coins, fragments of pottery and old clay pipes. Even the Society of Antiquaries lost interest.

Hawley nevertheless made important discoveries. Encouraged by Newall, he decided to look for the ring of holes that John Aubrey had mentioned and found them. They had been filled in but were detectable when the ground was struck with steel rods. There were fifty-six, of which Hawley and Newall excavated thirty-two, finding them to be filled with chalk and cremated remains. As well as the Aubrey Holes, as they decided to call them, they found the Y and Z holes. Discoveries in what Hawley named the ‘Stonehenge layer’, the debris that lies just beneath the turf, enabled him to establish
that the outer earthwork was older than the stone circle, for there were chips of stone in the filling. It was the beginning of another immensely important realisation, that Stonehenge was not all of one date, that it had been built in phases over time. Hawley suggested three phases (three being the number beloved of archaeology) and it is a schema which, much modified, still obtains today. He also kept detailed notes while he carried on stoically with his increasingly thankless task. Newall, meanwhile, seems to have been the first to propose the now popular theory that the ritual significance of Stonehenge was based on alignment with the midwinter rather than the midsummer sun.

Yet undoubtedly he and Hawley did a lot of damage as they stripped, sieved and sorted. Digging, as Stukeley had noted, is like dissection, it destroys its own evidence. The finds that were later reburied as being of ‘no interest’ might in their original positions have interested the age of carbon-dating very much. It was a pity, too, that when Hawley sent the two skeletons he discovered to the Royal College of Surgeons he did not pack them up better, for they were broken in the post. All in all, it was fortunate that the Society of Antiquaries let the operation fizzle out in 1926. More light was cast on Stonehenge in these years from less obvious directions. In 1923 the geologist Herbert Thomas proved, to almost everybody’s satisfaction, that the bluestones had come from the Preseli Hills. Two years later Group Captain Gilbert Insall, one of the most decorated pilots of the First World War took a single-seater Sopwith Snipe over the stones and noticed, about a mile and a half away from them, evidence on the ground that something similar in scale and shape had once stood there. Insall’s observation was the beginning of the discovery of what became known as Woodhenge, a bank and ditch within which were concentric circles of pits that had once held wooden posts. The structure dates from about 2300
BC
and buried at its centre is the skeleton of a child with its skull split in two, an apparently macabre relic, which has since turned out to be capable of less sinister interpretations. The story of the excavation of the Woodhenge site is a subject in itself. As far as Stonehenge was concerned, the effect of this and Insall’s later aerial find, the wooden circle at Arminghall in Norfolk, was to place it in a wider landscape of prehistoric architecture. Once again the language had to expand and in 1932 Thomas Kendrick of the British Museum coined the word ‘henge’ as a generic term for this kind of construction, which is found almost exclusively in Britain. The new word was helpful up to a point, but his definition of a henge as a circular enclosure with a ditch inside a bank does not in fact apply to Stonehenge, where the bank is inside the ditch. So although there would be no such concept without it, Stonehenge itself is not, as far as archaeologists are concerned, a true henge. But archaeologists, even once they got their hands on them, did not have a monopoly on the stones.