Updated Last: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 8:33 AM
English Heritage | National Trust | Mid Summer's Day
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/nav.16465
Avebury and Stonehenge, the two most important prehistoric temples in Britain, are sited just 28km apart. Why should this be? Although it may not be immediately apparent, they occupy a central position as far as ancient tracks are concerned. Many ridgeways converge on Salisbury Plain, following dry ridges free of natural dense woodland from Cornwall, the south coast, Kent, East Anglia, the Midlands, the North of England, and Wales. Their importance to prehistoric man is confirmed by evidence of long-distance trade along these routes. The most vital ridgeway of all was the Harroway (Hoar, or Hard, Way) along the Cretaceous chalk ridge of the North Downs from Dover to Stonehenge. This was the main route for all of Britain’s immigrants from Europe – the Dover Straits was still a land-bridge until about 8000 BC. The focus of ridgeways is perhaps why neolithic man chose the chalk downs of Wiltshire for the temple at Stonehenge, for the massive henge at Avebury, and for Silbury Hill, the largest prehistoric mound in Europe, looming 40m above the Bath road near Avebury. Bronze Age people built large numbers of barrows around these early sacred sites, as if in homage to the shrines of their predecessors.
Henges are lonely and inspiring pagan temples that never occur outside the British Isles. Nearly 100 henges survive, scattered as far apart as Cornwall and the Orkney Isles. But, above all, it is in Wessex that henges are found, the four largest – Avebury, Durrington Walls, Marden and Mount Pleasant – as well as the most famous, Stonehenge.
A henge is a circular or oval area defined by a bank and a ditch and approached by one or two entrances. The bank is usually outside the ditch, so that the bank forms the boundary to a sacred area, separated physically and spiritually from the everyday world. Stonehenge itself is a curiosity on two counts: its bank is inside the ditch and within the henge stands the most elaborate set of prehistoric stones in Europe.
What Can be Seen Today?
The outer boundary of Stonehenge consists of a ditch, and a low bank that originally stood about 2m high. The boundary is interrupted by the broad entrance of the Avenue on the north-east side, and by several narrower entrances. Within the Avenue, near the road, stands the Heel Stone, and at the entrance to the site is the Slaughter Stone, now fallen, which formed part of a ceremonial doorway. Discs of white cement mark some of the 56 Aubrey Holes, arranged in a ring just inside the bank, and on this ring are two Station Stones, and two ditched enclosures that once contained similar stones.
The outer circle of standing stones is known as the Sarsen Circle. This consisted of a ring of 30 uprights crowned by a continuous ring of 30 lintels. Within this ring is the incomplete Bluestone Circle, originally consisting of about 60 stones. The Sarsen Trilithons inside these circles originally numbered five and formed a horseshoe shape, and within this stood the Bluestone Horseshoe, originally of 19 stones that increased in height toward the centre. At the very heart is the Altar Stone, now buried in the ground beneath fallen stones.
Visitors always want to know when Stonehenge was built, but only recently have we been able to give the right answer. John Aubrey, in the 17th century, ascribed it to the ‘ancient Britons’ who lived here before the Roman invasion of AD 43; others attributed it to the Danes who followed the Romans; William Stukeley, in the 18th century, got carried away by his false Druidic fantasies and so started a misconception still current today. The first to establish the correct period was Professor William Gowland who, in 1901, excavated the base of a leaning stone so carefully that he was able to conclude that Stonehenge had been constructed ‘during the period of transition from stone to bronze’.
When Stonehenge passed into public ownership in 1918, the Society of Antiquaries supported a long campaign of excavations by Colonel William Hawley from 1919 to 1926. In many ways this was a disaster, because Hawley’s patient but unthinking digging, only described in the briefest of published summaries, has damaged the evidence forever. The involvement of Professor Richard Atkinson from the late 1940s began with an attempt to recover the information lost by Hawley’s endeavours and ended in triumph in 1963, with the whole sequence of construction clearly understood. Far from being built at one time, drastic remodelling of the monument had continued over some 1,700 years, straddling very broadly the ‘transition from stone to bronze’. Atkinson divided the sequence into four main phases (see plans on p.5).
Phase I
In this phase, corresponding to about 2800 BC, a rather modest henge about 91m across was dug, with a standard north-east entrance. For a Wessex henge, however, it already had unusual features: the bank inside the ditch, instead of the other way around, and a circle of 56 Aubrey Holes, small, steep-sided, round pits dug just inside the bank. This date falls in the middle of the British neolithic period and the characteristic finds here are fragments of pottery known to specialists as ‘Grooved Ware’ from their style of decoration. During Phase I the Heel Stone, which weighs about 35 tonnes, and its companion were erected like a gun-sight just beyond the entrance to the henge.
Phase I may have ended with a time of abandonment: snails called ‘Zonitidae’ became abundant, indicating that ungrazed grassland took over the site. In the surrounding plain, tracts of formerly agricultural land became a wilderness. Perhaps the henge continued to be used in a state of partial dereliction merely as an enclosed cemetery. Hawley found about 30 cremation burials from the later neolithic period, cut into the chalk filling of the Aubrey Holes.
Phase II
In c.2100 BC there were developments by the ‘Beaker’ people, so called from the characteristic shape of their pottery. Their arrival marks the earliest phase of the Wessex Bronze Age. A new north-easterly alignment was emphasised by the Avenue, a broad embankment extending 510m outside the ditch and still visible today. The entrance to the henge had to be widened by throwing down part of the bank to make it symmetrical with this slightly different axis. The four Station Stones were placed in a huge rectangle which has an undoubted astronomical significance (see pp.5 and 13). At the same time, the mysterious bluestones were introduced as two modest circles in the centre of the henge, each with an entrance looking straight along the Avenue.
Phase III
It was Phase III that made Stonehenge such a remarkable monument. Professor Atkinson discerned three separate episodes of remodelling. The first, known as IIIA and dated c.2000 BC, was the most spectacular and is the part that everybody remembers – the giant Trilithon Horseshoe and the Sarsen Circle around it. The sarsens – natural sandstone blocks found on the Marlborough Downs to the north of Stonehenge – were worked to a precise shape with stone hammers. The geometry of the continuous lintel is truly amazing: it is accurately circular and precisely level despite the sloping site. Each component is cut to form a circular arc, linked to its neighbour by a vertical tongue-and-groove joint and held on its upright by a mortice-and-tenon joint. This daring and unique monument corresponds to far-reaching changes in society. The Bronze Age was not simply a time of advancing technology: society underwent profound changes, particularly with the strong development of a hierarchy. Status became supremely important and this is reflected in the magnificent style of the Stonehenge burials.
Stonehenge is surrounded by scores of prominent round barrows where the chieftains and their queens were interred, for the first time in Britain, with valuable weapons and elaborate ornaments.
Phase IIIB followed in c.1550 BC, when the Y and Z holes were dug in concentric circles outside the settings of sarsens, and the bluestones were re-erected in an oval arrangement within the horseshoe. For some reason the bluestones were moved again quite soon – Phase IIIC is also dated c.1550 BC – this time to the present setting of an oval between the Trilithon Horseshoe and the Sarsen Circle, plus a second horseshoe nestling within the large one.
Phase IV
In this phase, dated c.1100 BC, the Avenue, already 1,000 years old, was extended by two straight stretches for a further 2km, which brought it down to meet the River Avon. The project, however, was abandoned before the ditches were completed and this newer section can no longer be seen, except from the air as a crop mark. Associated with this phase is a style of pottery ascribed by archaeologists to the ‘Deverel-Rimbury’ people, intensive farmers who introduced the ox-drawn plough. Their arrival coincided with a great change in customs and beliefs. The old gods, perhaps, had proved false. They and their temple were abandoned, this time forever.
The origin of the Stonehenge bluestones is highly evocative. Twenty-nine of the blocks are dolerite, a beautiful intrusive rock with highly unusual white or pink spots of albite-
oligoclase felspar. Four more are rhyolite, a compact, light blue-grey volcanic rock, often conspicuously banded.
As long ago as 1858, Sir Andrew Ramsay noted the bluestones’ similarity to the Lower Silurian igneous rocks of north Pembrokeshire. Then, in 1923, Herbert Thomas, a petrographer with the Geological Survey, astounded the Society of Antiquaries with his proof of the actual source of the bluestones. He found outcrops of both the dolerite and the rhyolite, ‘identical in the minutest detail’ with his Stonehenge samples, on the Mynydd Preseli (Prescelly Mountains) of north Pembrokeshire. The occurrence of the outcrops of these highly individual rocks so close together is extremely suggestive of some special religious value or healing property having been attached to these particular stones and no others. The eastern Mynydd Preseli are themselves very rich in megalithic monuments – the remains of seven stone circles may still be found there today. Conceivably, the bluestones were originally erected on Mynydd Preseli and transported, some 4,500 years ago, as an already venerated stone circle, to Stonehenge.
How Were the Bluestones Moved?
Herbert Thomas favoured a totally overland journey of about 290km but, by not specifying its course, he did not have the difficult task of defending his route in detail!
Widely preferred today is the following land and water route of about 360km: (1) overland for about 15km from the outcrops to the navigable point of the Eastern Cleddau; (2) about 40km down the Eastern Cleddau; (3) about 185km up the Bristol Channel from Milford Haven to Avonmouth; (4) about 50km up the Somerset Avon; (5) about 20km overland from Trowbridge to Heytesbury; (6) about 25km down the river Wylye; (7) about 20km up the Wiltshire Avon; and (8) about 3km along the Stonehenge Avenue.
The late Professor Alexander Thom, although an engineer, spent much of his life trying to demonstrate that stone circles and rows were built to study solar and lunar astronomy. So well did megalithic man know the movements of the heavens, claimed Thom, that he could predict which full or new moon would give rise to an eclipse of the moon or of the sun. Observations were made when objects rose or set and these points on the horizon were marked, according to the astronomical theory, either by stone alignments or by distant
foresights, such as mounds or notches on the skyline.
Thom surveyed Stonehenge and found no distant markers, concluding that here was an astronomical temple more for ceremony than for accurate observation.
Although many prominent archaeologists in the 1960s and 1970s challenged it, this theory has, broadly speaking, stood the test of time. The latest research has shown that Stonehenge began as a lunar temple, but was later modified for worship of the sun. The four Station Stones, arranged during Phase II in a huge rectangle, indicate, with their long sides, the moon setting in its extreme north position. At the same time the rectangle’s short sides indicate the midsummer sunrise. Only at, or close to, the latitude of Stonehenge will a rectangle fulfil this dual function. The original entrance from Phase I of the henge aligned with the most northerly rising of the moon, the ‘major standstill’. Fifty-three stake holes in six arcs have been found across the entrance to the henge. They were used during the century of observation which was required to define the bearing of 41º. This preoccupation with the moon is probably connected with rituals of death. But quite soon the astronomer-priests changed their entrance to a bearing
9º further south, thus aligning the henge with the midsummer sunrise. As the priest performed his solstice rites at dawn in the exact centre of the temple he would see the sun rise exactly between the Heel Stone and its companion.
Mystery surrounds this 5,000 year old monument in the centre of the World Heritage Site. Visit this prehistoric South West site and decide for yourself whether Stonehenge was a place of sun worship, a healing sanctuary, a sacred burial site, or something different altogether!
An awe-inspiring family visit, Stonehenge is a powerful reminder of the once-great peoples of the late Stone and Bronze Ages. Erected between 3,000 BC and 1,600 BC, a number of the stones were carried hundreds of miles over land and sea, while antlers and bones were used to dig the pits that hold the stones. Modern techniques in archaeology, and the series of recent digs, have helped to shape new theories about the stones, but their ultimate purpose remains a fascinating and enduring mystery.
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Updated Last: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 8:33 AM
English Heritage | National Trust | Mid Summer's Day
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/nav.16465
Avebury and Stonehenge, the two most important prehistoric temples in Britain, are sited just 28km apart. Why should this be? Although it may not be immediately apparent, they occupy a central position as far as ancient tracks are concerned. Many ridgeways converge on Salisbury Plain, following dry ridges free of natural dense woodland from Cornwall, the south coast, Kent, East Anglia, the Midlands, the North of England, and Wales. Their importance to prehistoric man is confirmed by evidence of long-distance trade along these routes. The most vital ridgeway of all was the Harroway (Hoar, or Hard, Way) along the Cretaceous chalk ridge of the North Downs from Dover to Stonehenge. This was the main route for all of Britain’s immigrants from Europe – the Dover Straits was still a land-bridge until about 8000 BC. The focus of ridgeways is perhaps why neolithic man chose the chalk downs of Wiltshire for the temple at Stonehenge, for the massive henge at Avebury, and for Silbury Hill, the largest prehistoric mound in Europe, looming 40m above the Bath road near Avebury. Bronze Age people built large numbers of barrows around these early sacred sites, as if in homage to the shrines of their predecessors.
Henges are lonely and inspiring pagan temples that never occur outside the British Isles. Nearly 100 henges survive, scattered as far apart as Cornwall and the Orkney Isles. But, above all, it is in Wessex that henges are found, the four largest – Avebury, Durrington Walls, Marden and Mount Pleasant – as well as the most famous, Stonehenge.
A henge is a circular or oval area defined by a bank and a ditch and approached by one or two entrances. The bank is usually outside the ditch, so that the bank forms the boundary to a sacred area, separated physically and spiritually from the everyday world. Stonehenge itself is a curiosity on two counts: its bank is inside the ditch and within the henge stands the most elaborate set of prehistoric stones in Europe.
What Can be Seen Today?
The outer boundary of Stonehenge consists of a ditch, and a low bank that originally stood about 2m high. The boundary is interrupted by the broad entrance of the Avenue on the north-east side, and by several narrower entrances. Within the Avenue, near the road, stands the Heel Stone, and at the entrance to the site is the Slaughter Stone, now fallen, which formed part of a ceremonial doorway. Discs of white cement mark some of the 56 Aubrey Holes, arranged in a ring just inside the bank, and on this ring are two Station Stones, and two ditched enclosures that once contained similar stones.
The outer circle of standing stones is known as the Sarsen Circle. This consisted of a ring of 30 uprights crowned by a continuous ring of 30 lintels. Within this ring is the incomplete Bluestone Circle, originally consisting of about 60 stones. The Sarsen Trilithons inside these circles originally numbered five and formed a horseshoe shape, and within this stood the Bluestone Horseshoe, originally of 19 stones that increased in height toward the centre. At the very heart is the Altar Stone, now buried in the ground beneath fallen stones.
Visitors always want to know when Stonehenge was built, but only recently have we been able to give the right answer. John Aubrey, in the 17th century, ascribed it to the ‘ancient Britons’ who lived here before the Roman invasion of AD 43; others attributed it to the Danes who followed the Romans; William Stukeley, in the 18th century, got carried away by his false Druidic fantasies and so started a misconception still current today. The first to establish the correct period was Professor William Gowland who, in 1901, excavated the base of a leaning stone so carefully that he was able to conclude that Stonehenge had been constructed ‘during the period of transition from stone to bronze’.
When Stonehenge passed into public ownership in 1918, the Society of Antiquaries supported a long campaign of excavations by Colonel William Hawley from 1919 to 1926. In many ways this was a disaster, because Hawley’s patient but unthinking digging, only described in the briefest of published summaries, has damaged the evidence forever. The involvement of Professor Richard Atkinson from the late 1940s began with an attempt to recover the information lost by Hawley’s endeavours and ended in triumph in 1963, with the whole sequence of construction clearly understood. Far from being built at one time, drastic remodelling of the monument had continued over some 1,700 years, straddling very broadly the ‘transition from stone to bronze’. Atkinson divided the sequence into four main phases (see plans on p.5).
Phase I
In this phase, corresponding to about 2800 BC, a rather modest henge about 91m across was dug, with a standard north-east entrance. For a Wessex henge, however, it already had unusual features: the bank inside the ditch, instead of the other way around, and a circle of 56 Aubrey Holes, small, steep-sided, round pits dug just inside the bank. This date falls in the middle of the British neolithic period and the characteristic finds here are fragments of pottery known to specialists as ‘Grooved Ware’ from their style of decoration. During Phase I the Heel Stone, which weighs about 35 tonnes, and its companion were erected like a gun-sight just beyond the entrance to the henge.
Phase I may have ended with a time of abandonment: snails called ‘Zonitidae’ became abundant, indicating that ungrazed grassland took over the site. In the surrounding plain, tracts of formerly agricultural land became a wilderness. Perhaps the henge continued to be used in a state of partial dereliction merely as an enclosed cemetery. Hawley found about 30 cremation burials from the later neolithic period, cut into the chalk filling of the Aubrey Holes.
Phase II
In c.2100 BC there were developments by the ‘Beaker’ people, so called from the characteristic shape of their pottery. Their arrival marks the earliest phase of the Wessex Bronze Age. A new north-easterly alignment was emphasised by the Avenue, a broad embankment extending 510m outside the ditch and still visible today. The entrance to the henge had to be widened by throwing down part of the bank to make it symmetrical with this slightly different axis. The four Station Stones were placed in a huge rectangle which has an undoubted astronomical significance (see pp.5 and 13). At the same time, the mysterious bluestones were introduced as two modest circles in the centre of the henge, each with an entrance looking straight along the Avenue.
Phase III
It was Phase III that made Stonehenge such a remarkable monument. Professor Atkinson discerned three separate episodes of remodelling. The first, known as IIIA and dated c.2000 BC, was the most spectacular and is the part that everybody remembers – the giant Trilithon Horseshoe and the Sarsen Circle around it. The sarsens – natural sandstone blocks found on the Marlborough Downs to the north of Stonehenge – were worked to a precise shape with stone hammers. The geometry of the continuous lintel is truly amazing: it is accurately circular and precisely level despite the sloping site. Each component is cut to form a circular arc, linked to its neighbour by a vertical tongue-and-groove joint and held on its upright by a mortice-and-tenon joint. This daring and unique monument corresponds to far-reaching changes in society. The Bronze Age was not simply a time of advancing technology: society underwent profound changes, particularly with the strong development of a hierarchy. Status became supremely important and this is reflected in the magnificent style of the Stonehenge burials.
Stonehenge is surrounded by scores of prominent round barrows where the chieftains and their queens were interred, for the first time in Britain, with valuable weapons and elaborate ornaments.
Phase IIIB followed in c.1550 BC, when the Y and Z holes were dug in concentric circles outside the settings of sarsens, and the bluestones were re-erected in an oval arrangement within the horseshoe. For some reason the bluestones were moved again quite soon – Phase IIIC is also dated c.1550 BC – this time to the present setting of an oval between the Trilithon Horseshoe and the Sarsen Circle, plus a second horseshoe nestling within the large one.
Phase IV
In this phase, dated c.1100 BC, the Avenue, already 1,000 years old, was extended by two straight stretches for a further 2km, which brought it down to meet the River Avon. The project, however, was abandoned before the ditches were completed and this newer section can no longer be seen, except from the air as a crop mark. Associated with this phase is a style of pottery ascribed by archaeologists to the ‘Deverel-Rimbury’ people, intensive farmers who introduced the ox-drawn plough. Their arrival coincided with a great change in customs and beliefs. The old gods, perhaps, had proved false. They and their temple were abandoned, this time forever.
The origin of the Stonehenge bluestones is highly evocative. Twenty-nine of the blocks are dolerite, a beautiful intrusive rock with highly unusual white or pink spots of albite-
oligoclase felspar. Four more are rhyolite, a compact, light blue-grey volcanic rock, often conspicuously banded.
As long ago as 1858, Sir Andrew Ramsay noted the bluestones’ similarity to the Lower Silurian igneous rocks of north Pembrokeshire. Then, in 1923, Herbert Thomas, a petrographer with the Geological Survey, astounded the Society of Antiquaries with his proof of the actual source of the bluestones. He found outcrops of both the dolerite and the rhyolite, ‘identical in the minutest detail’ with his Stonehenge samples, on the Mynydd Preseli (Prescelly Mountains) of north Pembrokeshire. The occurrence of the outcrops of these highly individual rocks so close together is extremely suggestive of some special religious value or healing property having been attached to these particular stones and no others. The eastern Mynydd Preseli are themselves very rich in megalithic monuments – the remains of seven stone circles may still be found there today. Conceivably, the bluestones were originally erected on Mynydd Preseli and transported, some 4,500 years ago, as an already venerated stone circle, to Stonehenge.
How Were the Bluestones Moved?
Herbert Thomas favoured a totally overland journey of about 290km but, by not specifying its course, he did not have the difficult task of defending his route in detail!
Widely preferred today is the following land and water route of about 360km: (1) overland for about 15km from the outcrops to the navigable point of the Eastern Cleddau; (2) about 40km down the Eastern Cleddau; (3) about 185km up the Bristol Channel from Milford Haven to Avonmouth; (4) about 50km up the Somerset Avon; (5) about 20km overland from Trowbridge to Heytesbury; (6) about 25km down the river Wylye; (7) about 20km up the Wiltshire Avon; and (8) about 3km along the Stonehenge Avenue.
The late Professor Alexander Thom, although an engineer, spent much of his life trying to demonstrate that stone circles and rows were built to study solar and lunar astronomy. So well did megalithic man know the movements of the heavens, claimed Thom, that he could predict which full or new moon would give rise to an eclipse of the moon or of the sun. Observations were made when objects rose or set and these points on the horizon were marked, according to the astronomical theory, either by stone alignments or by distant
foresights, such as mounds or notches on the skyline.
Thom surveyed Stonehenge and found no distant markers, concluding that here was an astronomical temple more for ceremony than for accurate observation.
Although many prominent archaeologists in the 1960s and 1970s challenged it, this theory has, broadly speaking, stood the test of time. The latest research has shown that Stonehenge began as a lunar temple, but was later modified for worship of the sun. The four Station Stones, arranged during Phase II in a huge rectangle, indicate, with their long sides, the moon setting in its extreme north position. At the same time the rectangle’s short sides indicate the midsummer sunrise. Only at, or close to, the latitude of Stonehenge will a rectangle fulfil this dual function. The original entrance from Phase I of the henge aligned with the most northerly rising of the moon, the ‘major standstill’. Fifty-three stake holes in six arcs have been found across the entrance to the henge. They were used during the century of observation which was required to define the bearing of 41º. This preoccupation with the moon is probably connected with rituals of death. But quite soon the astronomer-priests changed their entrance to a bearing
9º further south, thus aligning the henge with the midsummer sunrise. As the priest performed his solstice rites at dawn in the exact centre of the temple he would see the sun rise exactly between the Heel Stone and its companion.
Mystery surrounds this 5,000 year old monument in the centre of the World Heritage Site. Visit this prehistoric South West site and decide for yourself whether Stonehenge was a place of sun worship, a healing sanctuary, a sacred burial site, or something different altogether!
An awe-inspiring family visit, Stonehenge is a powerful reminder of the once-great peoples of the late Stone and Bronze Ages. Erected between 3,000 BC and 1,600 BC, a number of the stones were carried hundreds of miles over land and sea, while antlers and bones were used to dig the pits that hold the stones. Modern techniques in archaeology, and the series of recent digs, have helped to shape new theories about the stones, but their ultimate purpose remains a fascinating and enduring mystery.
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stonehenge-English Heritage sw_stonehenge_01 K030970 inside circle K040314 aerial 2 stonehenge_06.jpg sw_stonehenge_04 sw_stonehenge_09 EH055_Gary_Newman_1 sw_stonehenge_17 sw_stonehenge_03 K050081 sw_stonehenge_11 K021102 east sw_stonehenge_08 sw_stonehenge_09 sw_stonehenge_14 sw_stonehenge_12
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