What is Stonehenge? It is the question that occurs to most visitors and little at the site provides any answer other than the one propounded by R.J.C. Atkinson in his impressive book Stonehenge. “There is one short, simple and perfectly correct answer: we do not know, and we shall probably never know.” Which is rather dispiriting, for without some idea of their use and purpose, the stones are diminished. We can appreciate the immense labor involved in the transport and erection of the monument, we can marvel that such a thing was built at all, but without a glimpse into the minds of the builders, it is somewhat meaningless.
It is, plainly, a place of worship, but worship of what? The usual answer is that the temple of Stonehenge is aligned on the rising of the midsummer sun, and that belief has led to much nonsensical misuse of the monument. The revived Order of Druids likes to worship there each midsummer, even though Stonehenge had nothing whatever to do with the Druids, who flourished long after the monument had decayed and who, in any case, probably preferred their rites to take place in dark, forested shrines. Undoubtedly there is an alignment on the midsummer sunrise, but it is not the only alignment at Stonehenge. John North, in his challenging book Stonehenge, Neolithic Man and the Cosmos, makes an overwhelming case for the alignment on the midwinter sunset, and it so happens that at Stonehenge the midsummer sun rises above the northeastern horizon almost diametrically opposite the place on the southwestern skyline where the midwinter sun sets (in 2000 BC the difference between the two alignments was less than half a degree), so any monument aligned on the one will, fortuitously, mark the other and, as both events are plainly important in the annual cycle of the seasons, we can suspect that both were marked by appropriate rites.
Professor North also suggests that celestial events were not observed from the inside of the monument looking out, but rather from the outside looking in. No doubt both means of viewing were possible; anyone wanting the best view of the midsummer sunrise would wish to be in the center of the monument, but at midwinter sunset the observer would want to stand outside the shrine and look through its center. That main axis, the line stretching from the avenue through the monument, seems to be the major astronomical feature which marks the summer rising and the winter setting of the sun. The four Station Stones, of which two remain, were aligned on major lunar events, but they form a rectangle and its two shorter sides are parallel with the monument’s main solar axis.
Which raises the question of why such an elaborate monument was necessary. After all, if marking the observed extremes of the sun and moon were all that was required, then it could have been done with just four or five stones. But the same is true of more recent religions. God, we are assured, can be worshipped as efficaciously about a kitchen table as in a church, but that is not a compelling argument for the demolition of Salisbury Cathedral. And cathedrals do have something to tell us about Stonehenge. If, four thousand years from now, archaeologists were to discover the remains of a cathedral they might deduce all kinds of things from the ruins of the building, but their first, and most obvious, conclusion would be that it faces the rising sun from which they would assume, reasonably enough, that Christianity worshipped a sun god. In truth the east-west alignment of most Christian churches has nothing to do with the sun. Nevertheless a theory would be propounded that Christianity was a solar religion (while the incidence of crucifixes would surely persuade our future archaeologists that Christians conducted horrific human sacrifices), and what might never be suspected are the vast range of other activities – weddings, coronations, funerals, masses, worship services, concerts – that went on within the building. So it is with Stonehenge. We can see the solar and lunar alignments clearly enough (and must hope that, unlike our notional future archaeologists, we are not entirely wrong about them), but we cannot see the other activities that happened at the stones.
Stonehenge, then, must have been a cultic center used for a range of spiritual activities, but which was, nevertheless, aligned on significant solar events, which events must have been important to whatever religion was practiced. But Stonehenge did not spring out of nowhere. The monument that we see is merely the last stage of a very long process that took hundreds of years, and remnants of that process are scattered throughout Britain. Most henges are circular enclosures formed by banks and ditches. That is a simple enough concept, suggesting the reservation of a sacred space, but it was complicated by the addition of wooden posts within the circles that were almost certainly used for the observation of celestial phenomena. Over time those circles of wooden posts became ever more common until, all across Britain, there were numerous timber henges: veritable forests of posts that were clustered in concentric rings within their earthen banks. There was one such timber temple at Stonehenge itself, another just to the north at what is now known as Woodhenge, at least two more at nearby Durrington Walls and a fourth, Coneybury Henge (the “Death Place”), just a mile to the southeast of Stonehenge.
Later still some of the wooden posts were replaced by stones, and those stone circles are what we see today. They range from the north of Scotland to the west of Wales and to the south of England. Some are double circles, some have avenues approaching them, others have “coves” like those at Avebury; no two are alike, yet two of them, separated by a mere twenty miles, though utterly dissimilar to each other, stand out for their complexity: Avebury and Stonehenge. It is no surprise, then, to learn that these monuments are the culmination of the tradition of temple building in southern Britain (in the north and west new temples were to be made for another thousand years), and that tradition is simple enough to understand. Neolithic man largely built his temples as circles, and used them to observe celestial events that were closely related to his religious beliefs. The difference between, say, the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire and Stonehenge in Wiltshire is obvious, one is simple and the other is exquisitely engineered and awe-inspiring, yet at heart they are both the same thing.
Why were they built as circles? The easy answer is to say that they came at the end of a long tradition of circle building, though that begs the question. Sometimes neolithic man preferred to erect rows of stone, such as those at Carnac in France or the smaller rows on Dartmoor. He sometimes built mysterious earthworks that trailed for miles across the countryside (the Stonehenge Cursus, just to the north of the monument, is an example of this), yet overwhelmingly he decided on a circular shrine, and the commonest suggestion is that the circle reflected the heavens, the horizon or the nature of existence. Yet it seems unlikely that so powerful a tradition rests solely on metaphor; it is surely more probable that the metaphor reinforced a practicality, which could have been that the earliest worshippers of the “henge” religions wanted to observe celestial phenomena that occurred all across the sky. John North suggests that they began with the long barrows, those strange mounded graves that can still be seen throughout Britain, and that the barrows’ builders used the spine of the mound as an artificial horizon across which they sighted stars, planets, the sun and the moon. Timber poles fixed their sightings. But a barrow is really only useful for such observations from either side of its long axis, while a circular bank, a henge, can be conveniently used for every quadrant of the sky and the interior of the henge provides a useful place for positioning sighting poles, so the tradition of circular temples began. When the builders erected Avebury and Stonehenge, then, they were working within a tradition, only they were taking that tradition to new heights of achievement. They undoubtedly wished to impress. God may be adequately worshipped from a kitchen table, but a person entering a cathedral is more likely to be filled with awe and wonder, for the builders did something marvelous that transcends the quotidian; just so with Stonehenge and Avebury. They are temples designed to echo the awesome mystery of the unknown. Neolithic man could effectively mark the position of the midwinter sunset with two short timber posts, but the posts would not have the same effect as approaching Stonehenge along its processional way and seeing the looming blackness of the linteled
boulders on the horizon. Then would come that heart-chilling moment when the land was smothered in the long shadow cast by the stones, and in the center of that shadow was a last ray of the sun lancing down toward the Heel Stone. That shadow, and that livid shaft of light, was what the builders of Stonehenge achieved.
But just as a cathedral (the word comes from the Latin for a “throne”) is not made solely for the occasional enthronement of a bishop, nor was Stonehenge constructed just for the supreme moments of the solar year. It must have had many rites, many of them descended with the thousand-year tradition of henge building. We do not know what those rites were, but we can guess, for humankind’s demands of the gods do not change much. There would be rituals for death (funerals), for sex (weddings), for giving thanks (harvest festivals), for petitioning (prayer meetings), for rites of passage (baptism, first communion or confirmation), for celebrating secular power (coronations or great state occasions), as well as the regular services which still punctuate the ritual year. Doubtless some of these activities were more prominent then than now, healing rituals, for instance, or those ceremonies related to the agricultural year. The best discussion I have found of what may have lain behind those rituals is in Aubrey Burl’s book Prehistoric Avebury, for that monument was also built to encompass all the religious needs of a community. Stonehenge performed the same function, but, unlike Avebury, it also accentuates the midwinter sunset, and that suggests the temple was preoccupied with death: the death of the old year and the hopes of revival with the new year.
Death seems intimately bound with the henges. A child, its head split by an axe, was buried very near the center of Woodhenge. There are burials at Avebury (including the dwarf crippled woman in the ditch), just as there are at Stonehenge. The existence of those graves, let alone the obvious celestial alignments, argue against the fashionable theory that the earth goddess was the primary deity and that she ruled over a peaceful, matriarchal society unsullied by violent male gods. There is far too much evidence of violence and death associated with the monuments for that happy theory to be true. The monuments are not cemeteries, though it does appear that for part of its history Stonehenge was used as a depository for cremated ashes, but the burials that occurred within the henges do seem to have been ritualistic: perhaps foundation sacrifices, or other deaths (like that of the archer at Stonehenge) which coincided with some crisis in the temple’s history. There is a suggestion that the dead were laid out within the monuments, there to be flensed by natural processes, and that the bones were then taken and buried elsewhere. In medieval Europe it was believed that the closer you were buried to the saint’s relics, which were usually kept on a church’s altar, the quicker you would reach heaven on Judgment Day (the theory depended on being caught up in the ascending saint’s slipstream); something similar may have applied to the great henges that, as at Stonehenge, stand amidst clusters of burial mounds. This congruence of temple and graves strengthens the idea that the circular henges were seen as a connection between this world and the other world where the dead went, a world that was almost certainly conceived as being in the sky for, long before there were any henges, graves were aligned on the sun, moon or prominent stars. The best example of this is the magnificent neolithic grave at Newgrange in Ireland where a passage was driven through the mound to carry the rays of the rising midwinter sun into the burial chamber. This stunning monument, which has been splendidly restored, was built at least two hundred years before the first simple bank and ditch were made at Stonehenge, suggesting that the relationship between the dead and the sky was well established in the fourth millennium BC.
Yet Stonehenge’s history goes back to the eighth millennium BC. There was no circle then, and no stones, just a row of vast pinewood posts, perhaps like totem poles, erected in a forest clearing (positions of three of the four posts are today marked by white circles painted on the car park, but in future, if we ever get round to presenting Stonehenge as it should be, they may be more appropriately commemorated). We know almost nothing about the posts, except that they seem too big to have been part of a building, and nothing whatever about the impulse that raised them, nor why that particular spot was chosen. Nor do we know how long they stood. Five thousand years later, in about 3000 BC, the henge that we know was begun. At first it was just a circular ditch with a high bank inside it and a lower bank outside, and just within the higher bank was a ring of holes named after their discoverer, the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey. The Aubrey Holes are another of Stonehenge’s mysteries. There is controversy over whether the holes held any posts, but if they did all sign of them has long gone and, even more mysteriously, it appears that the fifty-six holes were filled in very soon after they were dug. Some of the holes contain the remains of cremation burials, but not all, and we really have very little idea of their purpose. We can blame those Aubrey Holes for the popular theory that Stonehenge was an “eclipse predictor”; it is true that you can foretell the years of the eclipses by a complicated shuttling of markers about the fifty-six holes, but it seems an unlikely hypothesis. If it worked, why were the holes abandoned? And why was the system not copied at other henges?
Quite soon after the circle was made, the first timber posts appeared in its center and at the north-eastern entrance which points toward the rising midsummer sun. This timber henge, similar to the ones at nearby Durrington Walls or the newly discovered timber shrine which stood at Stanton Drew, lasted for several hundred years, though some scholars believe that some time toward the middle or end of the third millennium BC the temple fell into disuse. Then, maybe two hundred years later, it was revived. The Station Stones, and a few other stones at the main entrance, were put up first. Almost certainly the Heel Stone (the sun stone) was among those first boulders erected and it still stands, though leaning at an angle. It is not much remarked by visitors, yet it was probably the keystone to the whole temple. For a short time the temple was a simple arrangement of a few standing stones, no more remarkable than scores of other such shrines, and then something exceptional happened. Bluestones (so called because of their very faint bluish-green tint) were fetched from distant west Wales and erected in a double circle and it seems very probable that some of those stones carried lintels.
The bluestones are another mystery. There are no suitable boulders on Salisbury Plain, which is why all the stones of the monument had to be fetched across long distances, but why from the Preseli Mountains in Pembrokeshire? The hills near Avebury, twenty miles to the north, had an almost inexhaustible supply of boulders, yet Stonehenge’s builders carried the bluestones 135 miles (actually much farther, for they were forced by topography to a circuitous route to their site). It was a stunning feat, though some theorists have attempted to dismiss it by claiming that the bluestones were deposited on Salisbury Plain by glacial action during an ice age. It is a convenient theory, but to be true it would surely demand that we should find other such bluestone “erratics” elsewhere on the plain or in its vicinity, and we never have. The simpler explanation, however amazing, is that the builders wanted just those stones and so fetched them.
The journey would have been almost impossible to achieve on land, for the route from the Preseli Mountains to Salisbury Plain contains too many steep valleys which would need to be crossed, so there is general agreement among archaeologists that the stones were primarily transported by water. There is agreement, too, that the stones (weighing from two to seven tons) were carried on wooden dug-out canoes that would be joined together by a wooden platform on which the stone would be lashed. Two routes are suggested: either south about Lands End and then eastward along the south coast to Christchurch Harbour from where the stones could be floated up the Hampshire Avon (“Mai’s river”) to a spot close to Stonehenge. The alternative, which I prefer, is a shorter sea voyage up the Bristol Channel, then up the Somerset Avon (“River Sul”), across a low watershed, then by river again. Anyone who has sailed the English Channel, and specifically the waters between Cornwal
l and Hampshire, will know of the many dangers that exist on that coast, especially in the form of massive “tide-gates” where the fast tidal currents are compressed, often into venomous rips, by jutting headlands such as Start Point or Portland Bill. A voyage around the southwest of Britain would encounter those formidable obstacles, while a journey up the Bristol Channel would be assisted by a strong tide and prevailing winds. There is no evidence that neolithic Britons possessed sails, but we know the technology was in the Mediterranean around 4000 BC so it seems likely that the idea would spread as far as Britain in the next two millennia. A journey up the Bristol Channel, assisted by sails and taking advantage of the spring tides, could have been effected quite swiftly and without any of the massive dangers presented by the longer route south about the Cornish peninsula.