Stonehenge

Look up any sort of "Top 10" or "Top 12" or "Top Whatever" list of tourist attractions in England and Stonehenge is bound to be on the list. Before I started writing this post I Googled some top 10 lists to see if my supposition was correct and found Stonehenge first on two lists, third on another and ninth on the last. Yet in early August of this year, despite spending some of my youth in the United Kingdom, I had never been there. Neither had my parents. Or my sister. Or my grandparents. Or any of my cousins. I found one aunt and uncle (out of three couples) who had actually been to Stonehenge and that was years and years ago. If this recent trip to England was about fixing holes in my English experience (and it was), I knew I had to add a trip to Stonehenge to my itinerary.

So maybe just a sentence or two about Stonehenge is required before launching into what I found earlier this month on my trip there. Before I arrived at the site, I really knew very little about the circle of stones that makes up Stonehenge.  I knew it was world famous, thousands of years old, had a purpose that nobody seemed to agree on and somehow was connected to the solar cycle. Other than that, I would have struggled to describe anything more about the place. It is one of the most famous places in the country where I was born and I basically know nothing about it. It was time to find out.

The excuse I had always been offered (by my parents I suppose) as to why I had never been to Stonehenge was that it was (a) difficult to get to and (b) crowded. From that description, I imagined the stones in the middle of some densely populated English town with throngs of tourists milling around and within the circle, touching and leaving whatever was on their grubby paws on the centuries old stones. In some of my imaginings, the circle was in a traffic roundabout with packs of people crossing the road to get to it dodging cars and lorries like a game of Frogger. None of that turned out to be true. Not the Frogger. Not the roundabout. Not the tourists touching the stones. Not the crowded. Not even the difficult to get to.

The first sighting of Stonehenge.

OK, so it's not super easy to get to, but it is by no means difficult. For those folks with a car, it seemed really easy. The roads are both pretty and also pretty wide and the parking lot outside the visitors' center is huge. I didn't have a car while I was in country so my trip was perhaps a little longer and more involved but again by no means difficult. Sure, getting there involved the Tube from our hotel to Waterloo Station in London, a train from London to Salisbury, a double decker bus from the train station to the visitors' center and then a coach (of sorts) ride to the stones themselves. I managed to make it one step more complicated by getting off the coach halfway and wondering through a field of cows before finally making it to my destination.

Despite how involved all that seems, it was remarkably easy. Trains and buses run on schedule in England so the process of transferring from one mode of transportation to the next was super simple. The most difficult part of the whole thing was dealing with the South West Trains' staff who proved to be incredibly unfriendly and utterly unhelpful. I don't suppose they care that much but the next time I'm in England, I'll do what I can to avoid their train service.

So after the Tube, the train, the double decker bus, the coach (of sorts) and walk through a field of cows, you finally find yourself on Salisbury Plain, which is an absolutely gorgeous unspoiled English countryside dotted with prehistoric burial mounds, strange and very large scale markings on the ground and a fairly prominent henge. The place is peaceful (if you ignore the tourists) but it is clear looking at the stones in front of you that something pretty spectacular at one time or another was happening here. You can't get within probably 50-75 feet of the stones any more but the size and mass of the individual stones is pretty obvious. It's not surprising folks have been trying to wrap their brains around these things for a century plus.

Stonehenge is not the only circle of stones in the British Isles that pre-dates written history or befuddles scholars as to its exact meaning.  There are spectacular circles of smaller stones some of which look like they have been thrown into the ground by giants all over Scotland and the islands off the coast of northern Britain. But Stonehenge is much different. There are actually two circles of standing stones at Stonehenge surrounding a series of smaller stones which are either lying on their side or standing up. The larger standing stones are local to the area; and by local, I mean brought from 30 kilometers or about 20 miles away in an age where machine power didn't exist. These things weigh about four tonnes each (a tonne is a metric ton or 2,204 pounds). That's a long way to roll something that big.

The smaller stones on the inside of the circle are NOT local to Salisbury Plain. Those stones (and by smaller I mean "just" one or two tonnes) were brought to the site from southwest Wales which, while being the closest part of Wales to Salisbury, is about 240 kilometers or almost 150 miles away. Again, without machine power. Amazing!

The biggest differentiator between Stonehenge and other circles of stones in Britain, however, is that Stonehenge is the only circle with lintels, meaning the horizontal pieces of stone which span over the top of two adjacent vertical stones. While I imagine it is very difficult to get a stone weighing about 9,000 pounds to stand on its end without any machinery, I can't begin to fathom how difficult it is to put a stone on top of two other stones when the tops of those stones are about 12 or 14 feet off the ground.

This is likely the understatement of this entire blog (including the parts that aren't written yet), but the people that built Stonehenge were obviously extremely motivated. I mean, think about it. In an age where probably most of any human's time was spent trying to just survive, a group of people took time out of their day to move huge stones hundreds of miles on primitive wheels, then surrounded those huge stones with even bigger ones erected vertically after shaping those stones into roughly rectangular masses using other pieces of stone (metal tools were not used when Stonehenge was erected). And as if that weren't enough, they then decided to cap those stones with other stones which is not like tipping a big stone into a pit and then straightening it; you have to actually get the whole thing off the ground using a lot of men and I imagine levers and pulleys of some sort. It's absolutely astounding what these people did.

I can honestly say after spending an hour walking around Stonehenge at a distance slowly, that I understand a lot more about the place. However, I still don't know what they were used for and neither does anyone else. The audio guide you pick up as part of your admission ticket does an excellent job of narrating the history of just about every theory advanced about the stones but wraps it up with absolutely no conclusions, because there is no consensus about the purpose of these things. I get that "sacrifice site" has been ruled out but "observatory", "burial ground", "shrine to honor the dead" and many other things are still on the table and likely will be forever. This is a puzzle we are not solving any time soon because there's nothing written down by the people that built it (hence the term prehistoric).

I do know that the place is younger than 5,000 years because scholars know (or think they do, I guess) that the earliest burials at the site were taking place at about 3,000 B.C. when the stones were not in place. And there has to be some kind of solar connection because the design of the henge starting at the heel stone creates an axis that aligns with the rising sun on the solstices. I also know that I'm impressed by what I saw earlier this month near Salisbury. I don't have a bucket list and don't imagine I will ever make one (I refuse to have a list of things that when completed allow me to give up and die) but Stonehenge was surely on my must see in England list and it was worth the 90 minute train ride and 20 minute bus ride and 20 minute walk through a field to get there. Now at least when my niece asks me years from now if anyone in our family has been to Stonehenge, I'll be able to say yes.

And in case you are wondering...cows do not get spooked by Spinal Tap's "Stonehenge" being played on an iPod while walking through their field. At least they didn't the day I was there. I kept a watchful eye out just in case though. I had to listen to Spinal Tap while walking there. Just had to.