Stonehenge, where the demons dwell

Where the banshees live and they do live well

Stonehenge, where a man is a man

And the children dance to the pipes of pan

Stonehenge

'Tis a magic place where the moon doth rise

With a dragon's face

Stonehenge, where the virgins lie

And the prayer of devils fill the midnight sky.

- Spinal Tap

Stonehenge is a megalithic ruin of a stone circle and a national treasure which has the power to stir even the hardest of hearts. It has inspired poets and artists¹ over the centuries and is now visited by approximately 750,000 tourists per year. It is located two miles (three km) west of the town of Amesbury, about 8 miles (13 km) northwest of Salisbury in Wiltshire, England.

Stonehenge as we see it today actually dates from the early 20th Century when it was substantially rebuilt and some of the stones set in concrete. It was not always held in such high regard as it is now, during the First World War it was considered for demolition. Those who ran a nearby airfield wanted the stones removed because they thought Stonehenge might pose a danger to low-flying planes. Luckily for us, the application was never sanctioned.

Despite years of research and study the reason behind the construction of Stonehenge remains an enigma. The mysteries surrounding the stone circles are many and varied. Huge (some weight 45 tons) and not-so-huge lumps of rock have inspired people to make pilgrimages around the time of the summer and winter solstices for centuries. The monument has become just as famous for the protests and demands that the public be allowed free access to it, countered by the enforced protection of the stones to stop people from chipping off the odd memento².

King Henry VIII used to own Stonehenge; later owners included the nuns of Amesbury Abbey; and the last private owner Sir Cecil Chubb bought Stonehenge in 1915 for £6,600 and gifted it to the nation in 1918, with a condition that the entrance fee would never be more than one shilling (5p).

What Is Stonehenge Made Of?

If megalith-building is your thing, then somewhere there has to be a place that yields the perfect rock for it. The Presceli Mountains of North Pembrokeshire, Wales, provide a prime candidate. According to complicated geology books, it's a metamorphic igneous rock consisting of plagioclase feldspar and augite. Some are (spotted) dolerite and others are rhyolite - both found on Carn Menyn. Dolerite, also known as diabase, (of which the bluestones are one type), is an intrusive igneous rock which typically includes olivine³, augite⁴ and plagioclase feldspar, while hornblende, ilmenite, apatite and biotite are their commonest accessory ingredients. Plagioclase feldspars are mixtures of sodium and calcium aluminum silicates, commonly gray/dark coloured, and range between two endmembers: the sodic feldspar endmember albite and the calcic feldspar endmember anorthite. More important, it's exceptionally hard (harder than granite) but forms very regular cleavage planes, which means that it comes out of the ground pretty much as pre-formed pillars. It also looks very fine: blue-grey, glossy and sparkling.

Who Built Stonehenge?

Over four thousand years ago, a Bronze Age tribe remembered as the Beaker People (so named after the decorated beakers that are found as grave goods) dug eighty-odd columns out of the mountain, each one weighing about four tons. It's supposed that they used a combination of river-barging and dragging overland using rollers to move these 'Bluestones' the two hundred plus miles to Salisbury Plain, where they erected them in a double ring to form the second phase of Stonehenge. What can we say about the builders of Stonehenge? We can deduce that they were part of a sophisticated society that had enough excess labour and food to contemplate a very large work-intensive construction such as Stonehenge.

How Did They Build It?

HH Thomas of the Geological Survey of Great Britain first demonstrated the Pembrokeshire origins of these stones in the early 1920s, which was sceptically received, mainly because of incredulity about a primitive civilisation's ability to move such loads over long distances. To this day, some claim that Merlin's magic was involved, which is roughly as plausible as the still-espoused theory that the bluestones were ice-age erratics – this despite the fact that Gloucestershire and Wiltshire are devoid of any other evidence of glacial action. The icesheet theory was disproved in 1994 using chlorine-36 dating. That theory propounds that the stones were carried by ice 40,000 years ago, and were lying around ready for use when the first stone ring was built. However the chlorine-36 dating shows that the stone was first exposed to air only 14,000 years ago, too late for any icesheet to have carried it to Wiltshire.

The transportation feat was human then, and it was very remarkable, the stones were far too heavy for tree-trunk rollers to work; it had to be done by dragging along greased 'tramlines' made from planks. Of greater interest still is how the Beaker People came to know that the stones were there in West Wales. The perfect lithology for the builders' purposes explain the logistical undertaking, but the political culture of Bronze Age Britain is not usually thought to be sophisticated enough to spread ideas over such distances. The techniques used built on skills acquired by the builders of West Kennet Long-Barrow in 3200BC.

The Beaker People, sadly for them, never quite finished their defining project. Perhaps the Wessex folk, architects of the third phase (see below), arrived and saw them off. The final manifestation of the temple is dominated by the gargantuan sarsens of the interlopers, though they also redeployed about half of the original complement of bluestones as part of the lesser circles and the horseshoe formation. They also, intriguingly, buried bluestone shards in a system of outlying pits.

The great sarsens were deftly dressed, and righting them and raising their lintels remains an awe-inspiring engineering accomplishment for its time. Few would consider these titans to be particularly attractive, though. In terms of grace and form, it's the bluestones of the second age that lend Stonehenge much of its beauty.

The Three Phases of Stonehenge

Many people, on seeing Stonehenge for the first time, are staggered by the immensity and age of the monument. They immediately imagine that it was constructed in one fell swoop. The reality is that it developed its present form over a series of constructions covering well over a thousand years.

There are two main types of stones in Stonehenge: the bluestones and the sarsens. It is the sarsens which people see and remember. The bluestones are smaller and not so memorable, but they were the only stones used at Stonehenge for the first thousand years.

Phase 1 - 3100 BC

The first phase consisted of the circular ditch and inner bank, set in a wooded landscape. Red deer antler picks and ox bone scrapers found discarded in the earthwork were the tools used. Current dating methods on these have narrowed its probable date of construction to between 3100 and 2920 BC.

Circular bank and ditch (with the ditch outside the bank, unlike other henges where the ditch is normally inside the bank).
There is an entrance into the ring in the northeast, the direction of the summer rising sun, consisting of a break in the bank
and a causeway across the ditch.

There are two 'portal stones' (doorway stones) standing one on each side of the entranceway.

Some sort of standing stone construction to the northeast of the entrance.

Two small mounds just within the circle, one to the North and one to the South, each with a standing stone on top. These are known as the North Barrow and the South Barrow.

A ring of holes called the Aubrey holes just inside the bank (interrupted by the two mounds). It is thought that these holes were in some way used to predict lunar eclipses, as these early phases are certainly lunar orientated.

Two standing stones in the same circle as the Aubrey holes, known as the Station stones. These appear to be in the southeast and the northwest.

Phase 2 - one thousand years later - 2100 BC

The path leading away from the circle to the northeast has a straight bank on either side, and outside that a straight ditch. This is now known as 'the Avenue'.

Two concentric horseshoes of standing stones stand in the centre of the circle, with the opening of the horseshoe facing northwest. These are much smaller than the present big stones.

The construction in the Avenue is gone, but there are now a few more standing stones around the entrance.

The Aubrey holes have been filled in.

Phase 3 - five centuries later - 1550 BC

The bluestones were dug up and rearranged and this time even bigger stones were brought in from the Marlborough Downs, 20 miles (32 kms). These giant sandstones or Sarsen stones, as they are now called were hammered to size using balls of stone known as 'mauls'.

The heel stone, a tall standing stone, now stands in the middle of the avenue.

In the centre of the circle is a horseshoe, the opening facing northeast, of ten enormous standing stones capped with five horizontal stones to make five 'trilithons' (groups of three stones).

Outside this is a circle of thirty large standing stones capped with the same number of horizontal stones to make a complete circle.

Outside this is a circle of holes known as the Z holes.

Outside this again is a circle of holes known as the Y holes.

One of the portal stones fell over later and was assumed by some to be a sacrificial altar stone, so it got the misnomer 'slaughter stone'.

The Importance of the Summer Solstice

The longest day of the year is 21 or 22 June north of the equator. It is called the summer solstice (meaning 'sun stands still'), and the other solstice is in winter (21 or 22 December) - the shortest day of the year. Because the earth orbits the sun in an almost circular path, half of the year the earth's north pole points away from the sun and the rest of the time towards it. When the north pole points towards the sun, the sun's rays strike the northern part of the world more directly and then it is summer. The distance of the earth from the sun only differs by about 3% during the year and has little effect on temperature. It is the angle at which sunlight strikes the Earth that is most important in defining the seasons. When the sun is overhead, the energy reaching a given area is concentrated. When it is low in the sky, this same amount of energy is filtered over a larger area. Each day, the sun rises in a slightly different position on the eastern horizon. On the day of the summer solstice, the sun rises at its furthest possible position North, and the stones of Stonehenge have been aligned with this direction. Such alignments were the norm for megaliths - most of the thousands of megaliths throughout the British Isles are aligned with one or other of the solstices.

The latitude of Stonehenge is unique in that the extreme sunrises and sunsets of summer and winter are at right angles. The four 'station stones' form a rectangle. At any other latitude in the Northern Hemisphere the markers of these events would form a skewed parallelogram. For this reason many of the astronomical alignments can be reversed. Where the mid-summer sunrise could be assumed as the purpose of the sightline, it could equally be the mid-winter sunset, both viewed in opposite directions through the arch of the Great Trilithon. Despite the gathering of modern-day Druids⁵ at the mid-Summer solstice, it is more likely that the builders of the final stage of this great monument gathered to watch the setting of the mid-winter sun and the coming and promise of the new year.

There is something about this almost mystical alignment which draws people to celebrate the solstice at Stonehenge, for reasons quite personal to them. To be close to one's ancestors can give a sense of comfort; to commune with nature gives a respite from today's high-tech modern world; meeting like-minded people can make one's heart leap and feed the soul; then there are those who just want to brag that they've been there, it's a guaranteed party piece. You don't have to be a hippy, a druid, a drop-out or a tree-hugger to enjoy Stonehenge. You don't even have to wear flowers in your hair. Just make sure you leave your mobile phone at home (an incoming phone call/text message would disturb the atmosphere, and there's no guarantee your phone would work).

Alignments

While Stonehenge is undoubtedly aligned with the summer and winter solstices, various other alignments have been claimed by investigators over the years. For example, particular combinations of the standing stones line up with the moon or the planets on certain dates. However, this may be coincidence.

If you stick four standing stones into the ground at random, then you have created six different alignments, where two of the stones are lined up in a particular direction. If you add a fifth stone, you have ten alignments, and with a sixth stone, there are 16. By the time you have 20 stones, there are 190 different alignments, which means basically that everything on the horizon is lined up with some pair of stones. So it is very easy to suppose that an alignment of stones in Stonehenge with an astronomical event such as the rising of the sun at the equinox is done by design whereas in fact it may be completely accidental.

So What *Is* Stonehenge?

Was It A Calendar?

The first person to recognise the alignment of Stonehenge on the solstices was Lincolnshire-born antiquarian The Reverend Dr William Stukeley (1687 - 1765). Stonehenge has played an intricate part in the science of Archaeoastronomy. The stones of Stonehenge are aligned with particular significance to the solstice and equinox points, so, does that make it a calendar?

A simpler and more utilitarian astronomic calendar could have been constructed much more easily. The scale of the thing suggests that it must have had some religious significance to the people who built it. The pharaohs could have been given simple headstones, but because of their religious importance, people laboured for years to make them massive burial tombs. It seems that whoever built Stonehenge must have been motivated by something more than just wanting to know what day it was.

In some people's opinion the winter solstice was the more important (and powerful) one as it marked the end of the cycle of decrease and was the beginning of the rebirth cycle and a symbol of hope. So Stonehenge could possibly be related to wintertime and not summertime.

If the original builders had a priesthood caste and if they were using Stonehenge to predict eclipses this would help the priests maintain their authority. The book Stonehenge Decoded by Gerald S. Hawkins postulates how the alignments could have been used for just such a purpose.

Is It An Ancient Crop Circle Marker?

Agriglyphs, or as they are more commonly known, crop circles, have been around since the 17^th Century. Or at least, that is the first time one was recorded, in 1678, on a woodcut pamphlet called The Mowing-Devil. People of the day were superstitious and the punishment for crimes such as heresy (not believing in God) was public execution. So it was understandable that if people believed in God, they would also believe in the devil.

Many crop circles appear in Wiltshire, it's a veritable hot-spot for the mysterious phenomenom. If you're lucky and have a light-aircraft at your disposal for transport, you can get a good view of them. Many farmers are averse to letting tourists trample what's left of their crops, so it's doubtful you would obtain permission to get up-close-and-personal with one.

Then There's The More Wacky Thoughts

They are prehistoric Lego^tm blocks, as can be determined by the interlocking pieces. Because of their weight - and the lack of a practical form of hernia surgery at the time - they were unsuccessful, only one set was made and the idea was trashed for thousands of years...until technology was able to produce them on the small scale we see in today's Lego^tm blocks.

- A h2g2 Researcher.

Stonehenge is associated with Arthurian legend. Geoffrey of Monmouth said that Merlin directed its removal from Ireland, where it had been constructed on Mount Killaraus by giants who brought the stones from Africa. After it had been rebuilt near Amesbury, Geoffrey further narrated how first Uther Pendragon, then Constantine III, were buried inside the ring of stones.

Sacred Spirals

Stonehenge is the centre of a spiral energy flow, or so we are told by those who believe in the ancient art of dowsing. There are many speculations as to the meanings of the spirals, but the one that is most relevant is the symbolic meaning signifying the entrance into another realm of consciousness. Spirals have long been associated with energy patterns found by geomancers around the earth. Some have dowsed around the stones at Avebury and Stonehenge and have found spiraling energy at each stone marker. Other sacred places such as at Sedona in Arizona, have been sought after because of the vortexes or spiraling energy that is said to take the pilgrim or visitor into altered states of consciousness.

In 1977, Paul Devereux and John Steel, authors of Earthmind, founded the Dragon Project to better understand the earth and her emanations. Using Geiger counters, ultrasound and other instruments to measure the magnetic frequencies at different places on the earth (specifically sacred sites) they found that the instruments registered higher in frequencies at the sacred sites than at other locations at nearby sites. They have speculated that the granite around the areas is able to 'hold' the frequencies, which have been enhanced through ritual and prayer. They also found that granite has the capacity to attract and emit radioactive fields.

Such findings are not accepted, however, by conventional scientists. In fact, a representative sample of physics students, when asked, had never even heard of the term 'radioactive fields', although research into this topic was hindered by frequent requests for more beer.

The Millennium Stone

On 8 April, 2000 a group of volunteers for a lottery funded project tried to show how Stonehenge could have been built, 4,500 years ago. Using only methods available at that period in history they planned to take an 8 feet tall, 3-ton Bluestone from the Presceli mountains (Mynydd Preseli) around the Welsh coast and eventually to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire⁶. The scheme failed after just 17 miles when the stone sank in 50 feet of water off the Pembrokeshire coast. It was recovered by divers and is now part of an exhibit at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales in Camarthenshire. The project did underscore the immense task it was to transport the stones to build that monument, whatever its purpose, and even if they had used all the equipment available today it would still have been incredibly difficult. We can only imagine the dedication and determination of those ancient builders and admire them for those qualities.

Book Reference: "Threshold Places" by Constance S. Rodriguez PhD, LCSW.

More Questions Than Answers

Having read this far you are probably no wiser about why Stonehenge was built - but one fact stands out, it's been there a long time and will still be there for future generations to ponder over and wonder about. Maybe we will never find out for sure - but ongoing mysteries attract more interest than solved puzzles, that's just human nature.

Visiting Stonehenge

Stonehenge became a World Heritage Site in 1986, putting it on par with the Great Pyramid of Khufu (the only remaining original Wonder of the World) and the Great Wall of China. You need to be a member of the National Trust to get inside the surrounding fence, the closest you can get to the stones is about 30 feet away (the fence distances have been moved over the years). The NT does small tours, usually guided by an archaeologist, at unearthly hours of the morning. You can listen to the educated chat, or you can wander off a bit and absorb the atmosphere. Contact the National Trust for current details.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is the Government Department responsible for the care and protection of Stonehenge. DCMS is also the Department responsible for World Heritage Sites in the UK. English Heritage is responsible for Stonehenge itself and operates the current visitor centre. There are plans to build a world-class visitor centre. The Stonehenge Project will rescue this iconic World Heritage Site from the destructiveness of the 21st Century and give it the dignified setting it deserves. It will be built outside the World Heritage Site and there will be improved access through the Stonehenge World Heritage Site landscape. Roads will be removed or tunnelled and ploughed fields returned to open grassland.

English Heritage is working in partnership with a number of major organisations, primarily the National Trust, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Transport and the Highways Agency. The visitor centre and access project will cost around £67.5m. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport is the sponsoring Government department and is providing some of the funding, committing around £13m. The Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded a Stage 1 pass for a grant of £25m. The remaining cost will be met by English Heritage, the National Trust and from a major fundraising campaign.

The Department for Transport and the Highways Agency are progressing plans for the road improvements around Stonehenge. Motorists will benefit from a flyover at Countess Roundabout, improvements to the Longbarrow crossroads and a bypass around the village of Winterbourne Stoke. When the A303 tunnel is complete, the A344 alongside the Stones will be closed and the present car park and facilities removed, leaving only an underground operations base and visitor toilets. Find out the latest news here: Save Stonehenge.

The public enjoyed visiting the ancient monument of Stonehenge on Boxing Day 2005 and New Year's Day 2006, as English Heritage has responded to demand and decided to open the site over the Christmas period for the first time in over a decade.

It is not possible to make advance bookings to visit Stonehenge.

Check opening times at the English Heritage website.

Specialist tour guides can be arranged by contacting the following:

Wessex Tourist Guides

Contact: Elizabeth Keatinge. Tel: (01980) 623463

Carole Druce. Tel: (01980) 620596

How Much Does It Cost?

• Adult: £5.50
• Children: £2.80
• Concession: £4.10
• English Heritage Members: Free
• Family ticket (2 adults + 3 children): £13.80
• National Trust Members: Free