Stonehenge: England’s Megalithic Mystery
(Author: Morris M.)
If you were to ask people to name the most-famous structure in Britain, what do you think they’d
reply with?
The Tower of London, perhaps; or Buckingham Palace?
Or do you think they’d pick somewhere else; somewhere like - say - a small, prehistoric
stone circle out on the Salisbury Plain?
We’re talking, of course, about Stonehenge.
The greatest of neolithic Britain’s monuments, Stonehenge is so old that it predates even
the Pyramids.
Built in the dim and distant past by a people without writing, it is as powerful today as
it was back then.
A monument fairly thrumming with mystery.
But what was it for?
Who built it and why?
And how did they transport those heavy stones all that way?
In this video, we’re investigating the story of northern Europe’s grandest neolithic
site… and its vital place in the history of modern Britain.
The Dawn of Time
At some point in the centuries before the Roman invasion of Britain, an ancient pagan
group known as the Druids gathered on Salisbury Plain.
There, as the sun of the summer solstice shone down on them, they consecrated Stonehenge,
the newly-built pagan temple the Celts had made for…
(SOUND EFFECT: RECORD SCRATCH).
At least, that’s the intro you might be expecting, if your primary knowledge of Stonehenge
comes via pop culture.
In reality, Stonehenge has nothing to do with Druids, or Celts, or pre-Roman Britain’s
pagans.
And no, to shoot another persistent theory down, that’s not because it was actually
constructed from a pile of rubble in the late-19th or mid-20th Centuries.
While it might be exciting to imagine Britain’s most-famous monument is either a place of
Druidic worship or a clever fake, the actual story is far more fascinating.
To tell it properly, we’re going to have to travel back in time over 9,000 years.
At some point between 8,500 BC and 7,000 BC, humans arrived on the Salisbury Plain.
We know this because there are manmade pits in the Stonehenge area that date from this
era.
At least three of them once had wooden totem posts installed in them.
Interestingly, there was nothing like this in the rest of northern Europe.
For some reason, humans living so long ago that the time scale is almost incomprehensible
were drawn to this vast chalk plain, where they established a sacred site for reasons
we can never know.
OK, let’s wind the clock forward now some 4,000 years.
A span of time nearly equivalent to that separating you from the pyramids swept by with nothing
on the plain but those totem poles.
Then, suddenly, around 3,500 BC, the area transformed.
As the British Neolithic era got its groove on, new work was undertaken where those wooden
totems had once stood.
Long barrows - big old earthen monuments - appeared.
The place we now call Robin Hood’s Ball was dug; a set of two circular ditches within
which feasts or religious rites may have taken place.
We can’t say for certain what motivated Neolithic Britons to undertake this construction
spree.
It’s been theorized that the plain seemed inherently mystical to them.
That, on an island covered with trees, this open land was as awe-inspiring as dense, primeval
forest would be to us.
But we can say that these early earthenworks are likely the reason that Stonehenge exists
at all.
Because neolithic Britons weren’t going to stop at mere ditches and long barrows.
In no time at all, their descendants would transform the Salisbury plain forever.
The Work of Giants
When he wrote his 12th Century history of Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth included his
theory of Stonehenge’s construction.
Six hundred years earlier, he wrote, a group of Brits had been massacred on Salisbury plain
by the Saxons.
To symbolize this misdeed, King Arthur’s uncle, Aureoles Ambrosias, asked Merlin to
bring a suitable monument there by magic.
So Merlin whisked a stone circle belonging to giants away from Ireland, and deposited
it near Salisbury.
And that was how Stonehenge came to be.
Great as old Geoff’s tale is, it does the original builders a disservice.
Stonehenge wasn’t built in a day.
Or even a century.
No, it was the work of millennia.
Around 3,000 BC, a neolithic group with connections to Wales suddenly dug a ditch and built a
bank where, until now, there had only been barrows and totem poles.
Into this bank, they placed 56 pieces of bluestone, creating Stonehenge's earliest form.
It’s actually thanks to this bluestone that we know the builders had Welsh connections.
The stone came from the Preseli Mountains, a collection of small hills with an inflated
sense of self-importance some 200km away.
While there’s a theory that these rocks were dumped in Salisbury by retreating glaciers,
it seems far more likely that they were brought here by humans.
“But wait!”
We hear you cry, “how do a bunch of dudes who haven’t even gotten it together to invent
the wheel drag 4 ton rocks all the way from Wales?”
The thing is, provided a few beasts of burden, it wouldn’t actually have been that difficult.
Especially when you consider some of the trip may have been made by floating the stones
on boats downriver.
And accepting these guys were connected to a huge Neolithic group in Wales makes a lot
of other stuff suddenly make sense.
Take the cremations.
We know that people’s cremated remains were buried around the 56 slabs of bluestone.
Genetic tests in 2018 showed that many of these long dead dudes hailed from Wales.
Like the bluestones, they may well have arrived by boat.
1.6km from our proto-Stonehenge, on the banks of the River Avon, sat a smaller version called
Bluestonehenge.
Today, it’s thought that corpses were burned there before their burial.
Were you to randomly step out a time machine at this point, you probably wouldn’t even
recognize Stonehenge.
The bluestones didn’t have tops - or lintels - lying across them like you’re used to
seeing.
This was stone circle 101.
The sort of thing any bunch of semi-motivated neolithic hicks could knock up.
It would take another 500 years for the Stonehenge of legend to appear.
Around 2,500 BC, the site’s caretakers abruptly got the building bug again.
The huge pillars of stone you associate with Stonehenge were dragged 32km down from Avebury,
each weighing around 25 tons.
At the bluestone circle, they were pounded smooth with hammers, then carved until their
tops made dovetail joints.
Finally, they were hauled upright using rope, and the heavy stone lintels - those horizontal
bits the rest on top - moved into place.
It was a massive operation.
Huge.
We know this because a workers’ village was discovered in the mid-2000s just 3km away,
with space for almost 1,000 dwellings.
It was likely the largest construction site Neolithic Britain had ever seen.
Possibly northern Europe.
Finally, around 2,740 BC, a 3km ceremonial avenue was added, connecting the newly built
henge to the River Avon, parts of its route aligned to the summer solstice sunrise.
But neolithic Britain’s greatest architectural triumph would also be its last.
In just a few short centuries, the ancient people that had built Stonehenge were destined
to completely vanish.
Here Come the Beakers
Around 2,750 BC, something happened on the Iberian peninsula that would change Europe
forever.
The first humans were buried with pottery drinking vessels known as Bell-Beaker cups.
It may not sound much, but these cups marked the emergence of one of neolithic Europe’s
great cultures: the Beaker Folk.
No, sadly this wasn’t a race of people who looked exactly like Beaker from The Muppets.
For a long time, scientists argued over whether they were even a race at all.
In the centuries after Bell-Beaker cups appeared in Iberia, they swept across Europe, leading
many to conclude the pottery was a sign of technology transfer rather than immigration.
But, in 2018, genetic testing revealed a more complex story.
While not all Beaker Folk were related, there was a huge Beaker monoculture that emerged
in Central Europe.
Originally from the Eurasian Steppe, these Beaker Folk were fair-haired, blue-eyed, and
pale-skinned.
And it wouldn’t be long before they completely overran ancient Britain.
Not that this was the first time a bunch of outsiders had taken over the island.
Those mesolithic guys we opened our story with, the ones who stuck wooden totems into
pits near modern Stonehenge 9,000 years ago?
Well, those guys - the original Britons - had themselves been completely replaced around
4,000 BC by a bunch of Aegean farmers.
It was these Aegeans who’d brought the Neolithic era to Britain, and got it together to build
Stonehenge.
Now they in turn were destined to be replaced.
As far back as 2,200 BC you have signs of Beaker Culture on the Salisbury plain.
This was when the wealthy Amesbury Archer was buried near Stonehenge, his grave replete
with Bell-Beaker cups.
Within a few centuries, his fellow Beakers had pushed Neolithic Britons to the brink
of extinction.
Not long after, Stonehenge’s golden age finally ended.
Four centuries after the Amesbury Archer was buried, two circles of ring pits were dug
around Stonehenge.
It’s likely they were intended to hold yet more standing stones.
But those stones were never laid.
For whatever reason, construction work on Stonehenge ended with the Beaker takeover
of Britain.
Still, it’s clear the site retained at least some of its original importance.
As late as 700 BC, the Iron Age Celts were building a fort overlooking Stonehenge.
So, yes, Druids probably really did hang out around these ancient stones.
We know, too, that the Romans showed an interest in Stonehenge, because they left a crap-ton
of their pottery lying about.
After that, though, things get hazy.
By the Medieval period, most knowledge of Stonehenge had been lost.
It was just a weird place sitting on the southern landscape, a bit of history that no-one could
quite remember.
But this obscurity wasn’t destined to last.
The Medieval period was just when Britons were starting to become interested in their
own past.
It wouldn’t be long before Stonehenge found itself at the epicenter of English life again.
The Medieval Henge
There’s a weird misconception that Stonehenge was “lost” until the modern era, like
you could just misplace a gigantic stone circle.
But go looking at Medieval sources, and you’ll see that people have been fascinated by it
for hundreds of years.
In 1129, Henry of Huntingdon named Stonehenge the second of England’s four great wonders,
writing that:
“stones of remarkable size are raised up like gates, in such a way that gates seem
to be placed on top of gates.
And no one can work out how the stones were so skilfully lifted up to such a height or
why they were erected there.”
Well, almost no-one could work that out.
This was the same period when Geoffrey of Monmouth was deciding that the answer was
“Merlin did it”; a theory people would seriously believe for hundreds of years.
Wacky old Geoff aside, it’s clear that Medieval writers were just as befuddled by Stonehenge
as we are, albeit in a different way.
While back then there were arguments about whether it was built by druids or giants;
today we debate if Stonehenge was a burial site, an ancient observatory, or a place for
healing the sick.
That’s not to say everything is guesswork.
There’s lots of evidence that hints in certain directions, and plenty of seriously clever
people have some seriously clever theories.
But with stuff like whether the bluestones were placed there as a form of ancestor worship;
or whether they were political gifts to bind two large Neolithic tribes, we can’t really
say.
In the end, all we can do is look at the evidence and hope that, a thousand years from now,
our conclusions don’t look as silly as blaming everything on wizards.
As the Medieval period slowly gave way to the early modern period, fascination with
Stonehenge only grew.
In the 1570s, Flemish artist Lucas de Heere painted the earliest, most-accurate image
of the henge for his guidebook to Britain - looking eerily similar to how it does today.
(HEY EDITORS: HERE’S A LINK TO THAT IMAGE: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/stonehenge-corte-beschryvinghe-van-engheland-schotland-ende-irland)
Not fifty years later, George Villiers, the 1st Duke of Buckingham, went and dug up the
center of Stonehenge, convinced there was treasure buried there.
There, uh, wasn’t.
But Villiers expedition was unusual in that it was purely about personal gain.
Most other visitors wanted to understand the stones, not loot them.
Take Inigo Jones.
The great architect visited in the mid-17th Century, observed the symmetry of the design,
and came away convinced it was a Roman temple.
In 1655, his posthumous tract on the subject even declared that the name “Stonehenge”
was a vulgar piece of barbarianism and Stonehenge was really evidence of Rome’s architectural
might.
But not everyone was down with Jones’s ideas.
Others spent the best years of their lives trying to prove it was really the vikings
who were responsible.
One theory, though, would prove more durable than most.
At the very end of the 17th Century, the great antiquarian John Aubrey made his way to Stonehenge
and conducted the first proper survey of the site in history.
It was Aubrey who found the 56 holes those Welsh bluestones once stood in.
Aubrey who realized Jones was talking out his be-pantalooned backside about the Romans.
No, it was clear to an expert like Aubrey that whoever built Stonehenge had pre-dated
the Romans, likely by hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, the only known peoples to fit the bill in those days were the Celts.
So Aubrey just came right out and declared Stonehenge was the work of the Druids.
And that’s why, over 300 years later, there are still people convinced that Stonehenge
was all about paganism.
The King of Stonehenge
So now we come to what is undoubtedly the weirdest sentence in our video.
The fact that Stonehenge is a tourist attraction today may come down entirely to a set of curtains.
On September 21, 1915, Cecil Chubb’s wife asked him to go an auction at the Palace Theatre
in Salisbury to buy a set of matching curtains.
A working class boy who’d studied hard and wound up becoming a wealthy barrister, Chubb
was a well-known figure around Wiltshire.
Yet even he probably couldn’t have realized how notorious he was about to become.
That day, Chubb attended the auction as his wife had told him to.
But, rather than focus on the curtain sets, he found his mind captivated by Lot 15.
There, before his very eyes, the firm Messrs Knight, Franck and Rutley was putting Stonehenge
under the hammer.
As he’d later tell the story, Chubb became convinced that a wealthy American millionaire
would buy Stonehenge, have it dismantled and shipped to the US, just as would happen to
London Bridge decades later.
So convincing was his fear, that Chubb decided to hell with the curtains, and put all his
available cash into bidding on the monument.
By the time the hammer fell on Lot 15, Cecil Chubb was £6,600 poorer, but the legal owner
of Britain Stonehenge.
We’d love to have seen the expression on his wife’s face when Chubb returned home
not with a set of velvet curtains, but the title to a prehistoric site.
Sadly, that priceless moment has been forever lost to history.
That Chubb was able to buy Stonehenge sounds crazy to our modern ears.
But his wildcard bid didn’t come out of the blue.
By 1915, Stonehenge had been in private hands for the best part of a thousand years.
At some point in the Middle Ages, a Benedictine Abbey was built nearby Stonehenge, which used
the land around it for husbanding animals.
When Henry VIII decided he wanted a divorce so badly that he was willing to smash up England’s
links with the Catholic Church to get it, Stonehenge was confiscated from the abbey
and given to a private owner.
Yep, it seems weird to us too that a 4,000 year old ruin could become someone’s property,
but there you have it.
Anyway, by the 1820s, the henge had passed into the hands of the aristocratic Antrobus
family, a bunch of toffs who loved private property rights and hated preserving ancient
monuments.
In the century that they owned it, Stonehenge fell into disrepair, culminating in one of
the upright stones simply falling over in 1900, taking its top lintel down with it.
The damage to the site led to public outcry for the government to step in and use the
Ancient Monuments Protection Act to, y’know, protect this ancient monument.
Unfortunately, the act required the permission of the landowner, and Sir Edmund Antrobus
considered the idea of the British government preserving British monuments for the British
people as outrageous as a pair of bacon underpants.
Instead, a fence went up around the site in 1901, and people who couldn’t pay were kept
far, far away.
But fate was about to take Stonehenge out the hands of the Antrobus family forever.
In summer of 1914, the assassination of an archduke in Sarajevo led the whole of Europe
to go marching to war.
That October, the current Sir Edward Antrobus was killed on the Western front.
Because he died childless, there was no-one to take over the family lands.
So his more-distant relatives decided to just sell the lot, including Stonehenge.
Fast forward almost a year, and the auction of the Antrobus lands ended with Cecil Chubb
walking out Salisbury Palace Theatre with the deeds to Stonehenge.
But if Chubb thought the tale was gonna end there, he had another thing coming.
The People’s Henge
On June 13, 1917, death came droning out the skies over London.
In broad daylight, 20 German planes descended over the city, dropping bombs onto shops,
homes, businesses.
The explosions that tore through the British capital that day killed 162 civilians, including
18 children at a school.
It was the first modern Blitz the city experienced.
A foretaste of the carnage Hitler would unleash over two decades later.
And there was no way the British could leave such a brazen attack unanswered.
Within hours of the London bombing, orders went out to build an airfield for developing
and training long-range British bomber squadrons.
The site they chose for this experimental airfield?
You guessed it: Stonehenge.
Weird, right?
But hey, all is fair in love and war, and this was currently the biggest war Britain
had ever seen.
That same year, a giant airfield sprang into existence just a few hundred meters from Stonehenge.
There are images from the time, showing aircraft hangers sat where now there’s nothing but
fields.
Composite postcards depicting biplanes zooming over the stones themselves.
It’s easy to imagine an alternate history where some accident leads to a plane smashing
into the rocks, permanently damaging them.
Or maybe one where the military simply requisitions Cecil Chubb’s land and keeps it forever
off limits.
Luckily, though, this reality turned out different.
By late 1918, the war was winding down, and it was clear that Germany was not going to
be the winner.
With planned air raids on Berlin canceled, the Stonehenge aerodrome began slowly shutting
up shop.
It was at this point that Cecil Chubb finally made his move.
On October 26, 1918, Chubb gifted Stonehenge to the nation, making it forever public property.
Not that this was an entirely selfless gesture.
For his generosity, Chubb was given a knighthood.
That same year, the Ministry of Works took over the site.
Over the next 12 months - and again in the 1950s - they undertook extensive restoration,
lifting fallen lintels back up, shoring up some stones with concrete.
If you’ve stumbled across the internet hoax claiming Stonehenge was secretly built in
the 20th Century, this is probably where the pictures came from.
The Ministry really did haul several fallen stones back upright, including the biggest
ones of all.
But while there’s always a healthy argument to be had about when restoration is appropriate,
to claim Stonehenge was “built” in the 20th Century is a stretch too far even for
Mister Fantastic.
Fast forward to today, and Stonehenge is likely the most famous site in the whole of Britain.
Hell, it’s probably one of the most famous sites in the world - up there with the Pyramids
and Taj Mahal.
Yet Stonehenge still has something those other places will never have: an air of mystery.
We will never know why mesolithic hunter-gatherers first decided to start digging pits on the
Salisbury plain.
Why they suddenly got it into their heads to set up wooden totems on the site.
We’ll likely never know, too, why the Aegean farmers who replaced them started building
bigger structures in that same area, culminating in Stonehenge itself.
These were cultures without writing.
Cultures who left behind no memory.
The ancient Egyptians at least had hieroglyphics we can try to find and decode.
The builders of Stonehenge left no record of any kind.
Nothing but the henge itself, as awe-inspiring today as it was four and a half thousand years
ago.
The people who made it may be long gone, but Stonehenge itself will continue to stand into
the far-distant future - outlasting our skyscrapers, our countries, maybe even the human race itself.
We may not know why it was built, but we can still appreciate Stonehenge: the greatest
Neolithic monument of
them all.