Stonehenge (2 page)

To begin with, let us imagine Stonehenge away for a moment and visualise Salisbury Plain as it looked in the Neolithic or late Stone Age, about 3000
BC
. This was already a populated and largely man-made landscape of brownish-yellow chalk downland. Most of the once dense woodland had been cleared. Near the place that would become Stonehenge there is evidence that wooden posts, perhaps with some ritual significance, were raised as long ago as the Mesolithic period, between 8500 and 6700
BC
. Three and a half millennia later, by the time the monument was begun, its site was surrounded by long barrows, seventeen or so of them within three miles. These large communal graves, earth mounds raised over stone or wooden burial chambers, were originally faced with chalk and would once have gleamed brilliant white, but by the late Neolithic the earliest of them was more than a thousand years old. They were passing out of use when work on Stonehenge started. There were other constructions too. On a low ridge about two and a half miles to the north-west of the site was what is now called Robin Hood’s Ball, an earthwork of interrupted concentric banks and ditches, its purpose unclear. More recent, and just about 875 yards north of the Stonehenge site was the earthwork known as the Cursus, from the Latin for racetrack. This is a pair of banks, about 100 yards apart and running over a mile and half. To its north-west lies another, smaller, cursus, no longer visible on the ground. Whatever these cursus forms were, they were not racetracks. Their true purpose is one of the few Stonehenge mysteries to which hardly anybody has claimed to know the answer.

1. Stonehenge and the surrounding area.

2. A plan of the central part of the monument showing the numbering of the stones established by Flinders Petrie in 1880, as used in the text here.

Salisbury Plain today is a landscape on which death has left more obvious traces than everyday life, but the people who inhabited it can be identified as a settled farming community. They were genetically identical to ourselves if rather shorter – the men about five feet five and the women five feet two – and usually shorter-lived. They kept cattle, pigs, sheep and dogs and grew cereal and other crops. They made pottery, used tools, fashioned arrowheads from flint, wove cloth and made rope, and their world was not entirely bounded by the limits of the plain. Widening the picture further, the people and the monuments of Wessex take their place in the broader landscape of Neolithic north-western Europe. In Brittany there were comparable burial mounds, some of them older than the British ones. At Carnac the great stone rows and circles had already stood for eight hundred years. Across what archaeologists call the Atlantic zone, from Brittany to the coast of Ireland and up to Orkney and the Hebrides, megalithic architecture spread and developed local variations. The Neolithic village of Scara Brae on Orkney, the standing stones of Callanish on Lewis and the monuments of Carnac have elements in common with Stonehenge and the structures near it, though none is identical. Exactly which cross-currents of influence flowed most strongly to and from Salisbury Plain is a much debated matter.

For Stonehenge itself, however, everyone agrees that there was no exact precedent, nor indeed, it seems, was there anything like it ever again. The monument as a whole was constructed over fourteen or fifteen hundred years, the work of seventy generations. How much if anything the last builders
knew of the intentions of the first is impossible to guess. Nor is it clear why, when work began, they chose this particular site. It lies on a slight, north-easterly slope, in neither a prominent position nor an obviously easy one on which to build, yet the choice can scarcely have been random. This must have already been a place of some significance. The long and complex process of construction is divided by archaeologists into three phases. Phase One was a simple earthwork, a circular ditch with an internal bank and a small outer bank or counterscarp. It was dug in sections with picks made from antlers, which were discarded when the work was done, and it is from them that carbon-dating sets it at about 3000–2920
BC
, one of the few nearly precise and undisputed dates available. When it was finished this chalk-white and almost perfect circle measured 331 feet in diameter, with several breaks which might be called entrances. The largest was to the north-east, with another smaller one to the south and a possible third at the south-west. As well as the casually discarded picks, the ditch contained some deliberately buried cattle bones. These were already ancient when they were laid there and might be what we would call relics, objects imbued with significance.

The most recent research confirms that this first phase also included the digging of the fifty-six pits inside the bank which came to be known as the Aubrey Holes. It is thought that at first they held wooden posts. Later they were filled and became the repositories for cremated human bone. Now marked with concrete plaques and ignored by most visitors, they remain one of the most mysterious and discussed features of the monument.

Phase Two began in the late Neolithic age before about
2400
BC
against a background of more general social change and expansion. Between these first two phrases there may have been a period when Stonehenge was neglected and abandoned, but the evidence is not conclusive and the most recent findings make it seem less likely that the monument ever fell out of use. By the time work recommenced there were more people living in the area and they were keeping more livestock. They also had new styles of pottery. The incised jars known as Grooved Ware began to appear and ‘henge’ monuments – that is, banks and ditches enclosing elaborate timber constructions – were multiplying. To the south-east of Stonehenge was Coneybury, built in about 2700
BC
, while to the north-east lay Woodhenge, as it came to be called, which dates from around 2300
BC
, and the much larger henge, known as Durrington Walls, which is about two hundred years older. At Stonehenge itself there is evidence of a great deal of timber construction. Posts were erected inside and outside the earthwork. Whether they formed structures, and if so of what sort, or whether they were independent posts, something like those from the Mesolithic period, is a matter on which archaeologists are divided, although the case for structures is clearer round the edge of the monument. At some point a substantial fence or palisade was built to the north-west, while gradually over time the original ditch was allowed to silt up and many cremated remains were buried. The purpose of this second Stonehenge might fairly be described as a cremation cemetery. Of the first Stonehenge and its use, its relationship to Durrington Walls and the light it casts on the possible meaning of both, there will be more to say in a later chapter.

But whatever Stonehenge was by now, four hundred
years or more after construction began, it was nothing like the picture on the front of this book or indeed anything that most people would associate with the name. It was only in Phase Three that the stones arrived, and with the coming of the big ‘sarsen’ stones and the smaller ‘bluestones’ the monument we recognise today took shape. Sarsen is an immensely hard sandstone that occurs in large surface deposits on the Marlborough Downs and is known locally as greywether for its resemblance to sheep. It is from there that many people believe the Stonehenge sarsens were brought. The bluestones are smaller and more mysterious. They are mostly about six feet six inches long and are a medley of dolerite, rhyolites and volcanic ash not local to Salisbury Plain. It is generally agreed that they came from at least ten different sources in the Mynydd Preseli area of South Wales, from where most archaeologists and anthropologists believe they were brought to the site by people. There is, however, a fiercely argued minority view that they arrived naturally by glaciation in the ice age. Some of the bluestones have been worked like the sarsens into lintels with sockets and one has a groove down its side. Clearly they had been used before for another structure and may have been set up at one time as a miniature Stonehenge either there or elsewhere.

At what date all the stones arrived, in what order they were erected, moved and re-erected, and over what period of time are not only uncertain but some of the questions under energetic review at the time of writing. Archaeology, which traditionally likes to divide its subjects into three phases, has found it necessary to divide Phase Three of Stonehenge into two separate sets of sub-phases, 3i, 3ii and 3iii, as well as 3a, 3b and 3c. What is generally agreed is that with the arrival
of the stones the site was reoriented. The axis was shifted by three degrees to the south-east, where it aligns with the rising sun at midsummer and the sunset at midwinter. It seems that some bluestones and some sarsens came first, with what is now known as the Heel Stone perhaps the earliest in place, followed by the rectangle of Station Stones. The bluestones were set up next, possibly in pairs in two concentric arcs. The holes where they stood in this phase are now known as the Q and R holes. These are no longer visible and give an ambiguous impression of what this formation, later dismantled, was like and how many stones were in it. Next came the sarsens, carried probably on some kind of sledge and erected perhaps with the use of staged platforms.

Nobody knows whether the stone monument was ever completed. Sarsen stone
II
is far too small to have supported a lintel, and this suggests to some archaeologists that the builders ran out of big stones and the work was never finished. If it was completed, Stonehenge would have consisted of an outer circle of thirty upright sarsens, evenly spaced except where stones 1 and 30 stand further apart, as if to emphasise the north-eastern entrance. Across the top of them and held in place by mortise and tenon joints were lintels which would have formed a continuous ring, linked with tongue and groove joints. These are timber construction techniques. Stonehenge is a timber building imitated in stone. Inside the sarsen ring there stood a matching circle of bluestones, and within this double circle stood the five great free-standing three-stone structures, shaped like doorways and known as trilithons. They made up a horseshoe, with, inside them, a matching formation of bluestones. There were other stones as well, within and beyond the central monument, and these
have, over later centuries, acquired names which recollect the myths and theories that have gathered about Stonehenge. Their naming belongs to later chapters. Most famous and disputed is the Heel Stone, a great sarsen boulder 16 feet high, that stands outside the circle, leaning towards its centre. There is a ditch around it and it was originally one of a pair. At the entrance to the circle, half submerged, lies the Slaughter Stone, which once stood upright with, perhaps, two companions, one on either side. Near the centre, crushed under the fallen upright and lintel of the central Great Trilithon, lies the Altar Stone, a huge piece of Cosheton Bed sandstone from Preseli. Beyond the circle and within the bank, close to its edge, stand, or stood, the four Station Stones, marking out a rectangle. Two of them, small sarsens, survive, the sites of the other two are marked by low mounds known as the North and South Barrows.

The stones at the centre of the monument have all been shaped. Sarsen is immensely hard and it had to be worked with stone mauls or hammers. The mauls, held in leather slings, were whirled and slung at the surface with force. Even so the shaping and tooling must have been laborious. Then there was the business of getting the stone uprights the same height to keep the lintels horizontal, which was much more difficult, especially on a slope, than cutting wood to length. Probably the builders used plumb lines and they could certainly have made effective spirit levels using water. Even so, some of the uprights were balanced precariously in holes too shallow to support them. The first to fall may have come down in prehistoric times. There were other mistakes. Lintel 156 has two little mortise holes on the top side which indicate a false start. The bluestones within the trilithons were set up first as
an oval, which was only later opened up into a horseshoe. It was probably at this point in the last phase of stone building, that the approach road, the great Avenue was constructed. It is a broad earthwork with a low bank and ditch on either side and it runs from the entrance along a curving course for a mile and three-quarters down to the River Avon.