Hugh Thomson

New light on the building of Stonehenge

There may have been no conceived plan for Stonehenge, leading Mike Pitts to rethink how its crowded stage was constructed

Coloured engraving of a view of Stonehenge published in the Atlas Van Loon, 1668. [Alamy]

When it comes to Stonehenge, we are like children continually asking why and never getting a conclusive answer. There are plenty of theories as to its purpose, ranging from the ludicrous to the dull, but perhaps we would be better off concentrating, as in this excellent book, more on how our ancestors got the stones up in the first place.

Attention has always centred on the original bluestones which made up the first circle at Stonehenge, because they were brought, remarkably, all the way from Wales. These are the smaller – but still two-ton – megaliths, carved from the Preseli quarries in Pembrokeshire. It used to be thought they must have been transported by water, around the considerable circuit of the south-west coast and then up the River Avon. Archaeological consensus has now shifted towards them having been brought 220 miles overland, however difficult – in fact possibly, and perversely in keeping with our national temperament, precisely because it was so difficult and therefore the achievement would be the greater.

As superb recent investigations by Mike Parker Pearson have shown, these stones did not come direct from the quarry but were first put up as an original bluestone circle in Wales at a site called Waun Mawr – so were transferred, for reasons which remain resolutely mysterious, lock, stock and barrel to Salisbury Plain, although at least it can be presumed with something of their power of provenance intact. Merlin’s stones indeed, as later antiquarians often dubbed them.

Prehistoric brains were as large as ours and just as capable of complex thought

But spectacular an achievement as that was, Mike Pitts rightly concentrates on the larger grey sarsens that arrived later at Stonehenge and formed the familiar horseshoe of trilithons and surrounding capped circle. These came from far closer to hand – the Marlborough Downs, just 17 miles away – yet clocked in at something like ten times the weight, at 20 tons each.

The engineering work necessary to move these giants already boggles the imagination.

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