Wisdomkeepers of Stonehenge

by Graham Phillips

  Just like the earlier stone circles, those built in the areas of Britain where the Megalithic culture flourished between around 3000 and 2600 BCE varied considerably concerning the number of stones, from about ten to as many as ninety, as do their diameters, from less than 30 to over 150 feet. So too did the size of the monoliths, from less than 3 feet to over 10 feet high. The size of the stones and the diameter of the circles may represent the extent of the local population, but the considerable variation in the number of stones is intriguing. Once more, the outlying stones varied too, sometimes aligning to the sunset or sunrise at both midwinter and midsummer, and some circles have no evidence of a king stone at all, while others have two or more such outliers. It would seem that for whatever reason the stone circle obsession caught on, it was evidently not considered necessary to precisely copy the design.

  The lifestyle of those who created these stone circles during this second Megalithic phase continued largely unaltered from earlier Neolithic times. Dwellings remained unchanged. The elaborate stone buildings of the Orkney Isles were not copied elsewhere, probably because of the availability of trees, which were not as scarce as they had on these northern islands. Homes at settlements such as Durrington Walls (see chapter 5) were basically single-roomed, circular, wickerwork constructions fashioned from tree branches with dried-mud walls and thatched roofs. Dwellings in more forested areas were rectangular log structures divided into two or more chambers with roofs overlaid with turf, not dissimilar to the simple cabins of the early European pioneers in the American West. None of these have left traces to be seen today, but they have been identified by archaeologists using geophysics equipment to detect signs of ancient postholes in the ground and dated by identifying and radiocarbon dating decomposed timber remains in the soil.8

  Archeological finds do not directly record evidence of weaving, as fabrics would long since have rotted away; however, their use can be discerned from the discovery of implements used in their manufacture, such as bone spindles, whorls, needles, and stone weights for twining thread. Also, remarkably, imprints of fabrics have actually been found on pottery, where clothing or matting pushed against the clay before it was fired. From such evidence, it is known that the Neolithic people of the period in question had woven straw mats, plant fiber carpeting and probably wall hangings, and woolen blankets and clothing. Most garments, however, were almost certainly made from animal hide sewn together with sinew.9 From various Stone Age tools discovered at Neolithic settlements of the time, we can also tell that they made baskets, ropes, and nets. And most adornments consisted of simple necklaces or bracelets of bone, teeth, and shells. Interestingly, only a handful of figurines, carved from bone or stone or made from clay, have been found from the Neolithic period in the British Isles. Even these were crude representations of animals difficult to identify. It would seem that if the early Megalithic people did venerate a sun god or a mother goddess, they apparently saw no need to represent them in the form of anthropomorphic statuettes, although they may have carved such effigies from wood. The only seemingly ritual carvings known to have been made were the mysterious petrospheres, of which over four hundred have been discovered at sites all over the British Isles (see chapter 4).

  For those who wish to see how the people of the era actually lived, five Neolithic houses, complete with replica pottery, tools, simple wooden furnishings, and various artifacts, have been reconstructed outside the visitor center at Stonehenge. They are of the wickerwork frame type, with the interior walls whitewashed with ground chalk, thought to have been designed not only to make the dwellings brighter but also to reflect warmth from the fire. The outside walls are also whitewashed to reflect the heat of sunlight in the summertime. On certain occasions reenactors actually dress up in Neolithic styles and perform ancient daily activities in and around the dwellings.

  For some four centuries the Megalithic culture seems to have continued pretty much unchanged, merely building more of the same stone circles in the three areas we have examined. The most northerly point the culture stretched in southern England was over 250 miles south of the stone-circle-building area in Cumbria. There is no evidence of its appearing anywhere between these two locations during the period between 3000 and 2600 BCE, and no further stone circles seem to have been built in Wales or Ireland during this time. In the North, English Cumbria adjoins what is now the Scottish district of Dumfries and Galloway, but no such political boundary existed at the time, making these combined parts of northwestern England and southwestern Scotland a single Megalithic region. The other area where stone circle building continued was on the Hebrides and the nearby Isle of Arran. The northern coast of Dumfries and Galloway is only about 30 miles from the Isle of Arran, so perhaps all these northern areas should also be regarded as a single Megalithic region. This still leaves us with two geographically isolated locations where the same culture seems to have continued unabated for four centuries.10 What happened next, however, is really strange: an identical, simultaneous revolution in megalithic construction suddenly occurred in these widely separated locations and also on the Orkney Isles off the far north of Scotland. (It may have been noted that I have not been referring to Ireland regarding the creation of the megalithic complexes. That is because the stone-circle-building tradition seems to have been abandoned in Ireland for about a thousand years, until it was readopted around 2000 BCE. See chapter 10.)

  The third phase of Megalithic culture in the British Isles was the sudden building of dozens of huge henge stone circles that began around 2600 BC (see chapter 1). The word “henge” refers to a circular ditch and embankment that surrounded these new stone circles. Intriguingly the ditch was invariably built inside the embankment, the opposite way around for the earthwork to have been created for defensive purposes, so why they were built still remains a mystery. Based on the number and size of the various Neolithic sites identified, archaeologists estimate that by 2600 BCE the population of Britain was somewhere around two hundred thousand people (about the modern population of Salt Lake City spread throughout an area the size of the entire state of Utah). By far the most densely inhabited area was what is now the county of Wiltshire, which may have been home to as many as thirty thousand people.11

  Fig. 6.1. Isolated regions of stone circle building between 3000 and 2600 BCE.

  And it was in Wiltshire that the first of these new creations was built: at Avebury, 17 miles north of Stonehenge. With a diameter of over 1,000 feet, the Avebury Stone Circle is the largest such monument in the entire British Isles. By far the biggest stone circles built before this time were the first Stonehenge and the Twelve Apostles, with diameters only a quarter this size (odd that Avebury is far less famous than the much smaller Stonehenge). The Avebury circle originally consisted of about a hundred stones made from sarsen rock, the same type of hard sandstone from which the later Stonehenge was built (see chapter 1), of which twenty-nine remain, ranging from 9 to 20 feet high, the largest weighing as much as 40 tons. Due to intensive farming and the village that grew up in and around the stone circle, it is now impossible to tell if it had an outlying king stone. The entire circle was encompassed by a truly enormous henge earthwork: a ditch about 30 feet deep and 60 feet wide, surrounded by an embankment some 20 feet high and 40 feet thick. Its outer diameter is about 1,400 feet and encloses an area of almost 30 acres; that’s a circumference of over half a mile. The henge’s construction would have been an immense undertaking. Using nothing more than antler picks and stone axes, the builders had to cut through over 3 million cubic feet of solid bedrock—almost 200,000 tons of the stuff—to create the ditch and then pile up the rubble to form the embankment, originally some 100 feet from top to bottom. It has been estimated that to construct the henge as well as to cut and shape the megaliths where they were quarried, 2 miles away on the Marlborough Downs, and then drag them to and erect them at Avebury would have taken as many as 1.5 million work-hours. The creation of the Avebury monument must have been of extraordinary importanc
e.12

  The latest radiocarbon dates obtained from organic material found beneath the stones and in the embankment at Avebury have arrived at a central date of around 2600 BCE, which is the same dating as that of another huge henge monument built 700 miles to the north on the Orkney Isles. Around a mile to the northwest of the Stones of Stenness is the Ring of Brodgar. This stone circle is about 340 feet in diameter and was originally composed of sixty stones, of which twenty-seven remain, ranging in height from 7 to 15 feet. They have the same slab-like appearance as the Stenness stones and were probably quarried in the same place, near Finstown, about 3 miles to the east.13 The Ring of Brodgar is set within a 400-foot-diameter circular ditch, about 10 feet deep and 30 feet wide, the outer embankment now having eroded away due to its setting, exposed to the relentless Atlantic weather. Around 450 feet to the east of the circle is a 6-foot-tall outlying monolith known as the Comet Stone. It is actually a few degrees south of true east, as seen from the center of the ring, so it does not seem to align with the equinox sunrise. (The stone’s name has no connection to an ancient cometary alignment; it was only coined in 1920 to commemorate the appearance of Halley’s Comet. It was previously called the Oil Stone, seemingly due to a local tradition to smear it with wax for good luck.)

  Far away to the south, in the county of Dorset a mile from the village of Wimborne St. Giles, is the site of another such monument. There the ruins of a solitary medieval church stand right in the middle of a 330-foot-diameter megalithic henge. Aptly known as Church Henge, the enclosing ditch and its outer embankment are both approximately 30 feet wide. Although now considerably eroded, they are thought to have originally been over 10 feet high and deep. Not much smaller than the henge of the Ring of Brodgar, it is thought to have encompassed a stone circle consisting of around fifty monoliths. Sadly, none of the stones any longer survives, as they were broken up and used to build the church in the twelfth century.

  Not all of these newer and much larger stone circles built around 2600 BCE were surrounded by these enigmatic henge earthworks. In Cumbria, for instance, is one of the largest stone circles in the British Isles. Quaintly known as Long Meg and Her Daughters, it originally consisted of around seventy monoliths, of which fifty-nine remain, set in a circle approximately 340 feet in diameter. Some 20 feet to the southwest of the circle is another 12-foot-tall standing stone aligned to the midwinter sunset as seen from the center of the ring.

  About the same time as these new giant stone circles were being erected, the practice of building the usual, smaller stone circles was spreading to other parts of Britain where they had not been built before. A typical example is the Nine Ladies stone circle in the county of Derbyshire. Standing on a hill in Stanton Moor, it remains remarkably complete: nine stones about 3 feet high, in a ring just over 30 feet in diameter, with a similarly sized king stone 130 feet to the southwest in the direction of the midwinter sunset. In many of these areas the big henge monuments were also erected at virtually the same time as circles such as Avebury, Brodgar, and Church Henge. Around 35 miles west of Stonehenge, in the county of Somerset, for example, the Stanton Drew Stone Circle stands just outside a village of that name. At 370 feet in diameter, it is the second largest stone circle in the British Isles after Avebury, the Ring of Brodgar, at 340 feet, being the third. Surprisingly for such a large ring, it only seems to have had around thirty stones, of which twenty-seven survive. Heavily weathered and measuring between 6 and 10 feet high, many of them are now fallen.14 The ring is enclosed by a circular 23-foot-wide ditch, over 440 feet in diameter. No outer bank is now visible, but it is thought to have eroded over the years, as the site lies within the periodic floodplain of the Chew Valley. Around 1,000 feet north-northeast of the circle lies a fallen stone called Hautville’s Quoit, all that remains of a 13-foot-tall monolith that originally stood a little to the south of where it is now, where it may have marked the midsummer sunrise before being dragged to its current location by farmers in the eighteenth century. And in central England, 2 miles south of the village of Monyash in the county of Derbyshire, is Arbor Low. A henge about 290 feet in diameter, its outer embankment, 30 feet wide and 7 feet high, and inner ditch, 7 feet deep and 30 feet wide, surround the fallen remains of a stone circle that originally consisted of about fifty monoliths between 8 and 10 feet high. A large broken stone that now lies in the middle of the circle may have been an outlying king stone that was moved there some time in the later Megalithic era.15

  The fourth phase of megalithic monument building occurred around 2400 BCE, with the addition of avenues to the larger stone circles, usually the henge monuments. These were parallel rows of stones or embankments that led to the stone circles. Just as with the henge stone circles, the creation of these avenues seems to have occurred simultaneously far and wide throughout Britain. To give just a few examples: at Avebury, an 80-foot-wide avenue of parallel monoliths was added to the southeast of the circle. Referred to as the West Kennet Avenue, it originally consisted of about a hundred pairs of stones spaced at intervals of about 50 feet, which followed a relatively straight course for about 1.5 miles to the nearby River Kennet. Today, twenty-seven of the stones, between 4 and 13 feet high, remain standing for the first half mile of the avenue, the remainder having been removed when the village of West Kennet and its surrounding roads were built since the eighteenth century.16 At the same time the faraway Callanish Stone Circle on the Isle of Lewis, 500 miles to the north, had a more modest 20-foot-wide, 270-foot-long avenue added to the north-northeast of the ring. It is thought to have consisted of about fifty stones up to 11 feet high, of which nineteen survive. And in Cornwall, 130 miles to the southwest of Avebury, geophysics surveys have revealed that a 140-footdiameter stone circle called the Hurlers, which originally consisted of twenty-eight monoliths, of which fourteen survive, had a 100-footlong avenue of stones erected, also to the north-northeast of the ring. At some of the larger stone circles, these stone avenues were erected on newly constructed embankments, such as one, 130 feet long and 30 feet wide, leading to the northeast of Stanton Drew. Two parallel ditches lie outside the banks, on top of which stood the rows of monoliths averaging between 4 and 6 feet high. As there were gaps in the henge structures where the avenues met the circles, it is thought that these stone rows may have acted as processional walkways for people entering the main monuments on special occasions. However, not all experts agree: few of the avenues actually align with the sunrise or sunset at occasions such as the solstices and equinoxes, as we might imagine if they were ceremonial walkways; they also seem to have been unnecessarily wide for such a purpose.

  Fig. 6.2. Some of the many megalithic complexes built between 2600 and 2000 BCE.

  The fifth phase of megalithic construction around the large stone circles, somewhere about 2200 BCE, involved the building of further rings or other arrangements of monoliths at the ends of the avenues, and sometimes the addition of a second avenue. At Avebury, for instance, the West Kennet Avenue was extended in a curve some 800 feet to the east to reach Overton Hill, where it ended at a newly built stone circle, approximately 130 feet in diameter and consisting of about forty stones, known as the Sanctuary. The stones have long since vanished, but today concrete blocks mark where archaeologists have determined their positions to have been. During this phase of building, a second avenue of stones was created to the southwest side of the main Avebury circle. Called the Beckhampton Avenue, only one of its monoliths still survives, as they were broken up for buildings in the village of Beckhampton over the last three centuries.17 In the year 2000 excavations and geophysical surveys conducted by the University of Southampton revealed evidence of parallel rows of holes that once contained standing stones in a similar pattern to the West Kennet Avenue. It is thought to have followed a curved route for about a mile to end in an arrangement of four huge megaliths that were recorded in the eighteenth century as the Longstone Cove.18 Only one of the Longstone Cove monoliths survives. Going by the name Adam, it weighs an estimated 62
tons. (Nearby there is also a stone called Eve, the only surviving stone from the Beckhampton Avenue.)

  Another example is Stanton Drew, where almost exactly the same modifications occurred. An approximately 100-foot-diameter stone circle, probably consisting of twelve 6-foot-tall monoliths, of which eight survive, was added just off center of the end of the avenue built two centuries earlier. The avenue itself was then extended about another 200 feet to the banks of the River Chew; nineteen of these avenue monoliths still survive, the largest being just over 11 feet tall. As at Avebury, a second stone avenue was added at this time, to the south-southwest side of the main circle. It was about 500 feet long and built to the same specifications as the first avenue, leading to a third stone circle some 140 feet in diameter, which is thought to have consisted of twelve stones, of which eleven survive, the tallest being about 6 feet high.19 In many cases the new complexes consist of extra stone circles close by, often within 300 feet of the originals, without being joined by avenues, such as Church Henge in Derbyshire, the Hurlers in Cornwall, and at Machrie Moor on the Isle of Arran, although these were added later, periodically, over a period of many centuries (see chapter 12).