Wisdomkeepers of Stonehenge

by Graham Phillips

  A further building phase at these stone circle complexes occurred around two centuries later—about 2000 BCE—with the addition of nearby artificial hills. Three-quarters of a mile south of the main circle at Avebury, for example, pretty much midway between the ends of the stone avenues, stands Silbury Hill. At about 130 feet high and covering some 5 acres, it is the largest artificial mound in the British Isles. Archaeologists have estimated that it would have taken around four million hours of work to build from over 0.5 million tons of material, mainly solid chalk hacked from the surrounding land. Astonishingly although it has been both thoroughly excavated and exhaustively scanned with geophysics equipment, there is no indication that any chambers or burials exist within.20 In the county of Flintshire, North Wales, 145 miles to the northwest of Avebury, stands Gop Cairn, the second largest of these megalithic artificial hills. It is a 40-foot-high mound, over 300 feet wide, standing about half a mile northwest of the village of Trelawnyd, where it is believed a megalithic stone circle complex once existed before being obliterated when the village was built during the Middle Ages. Just as with Silbury Hill, archaeologists have found the hillock to have no internal structures such as burial chambers. A further 400 miles to the north, on the Orkney Isles, a similar construction was built around the same time. Called the Salt Knowe (Scottish for “knoll”), this 130-foot-wide, 20-foot-high artificial mound stands some 450 feet southwest of the Ring of Brodgar.21 As with Silbury Hill and Gop Cairn, extensive archaeological research has revealed that absolutely nothing resides inside it: no chambers, no monoliths, not so much as a single human bone. These and dozens of similar, single artificial mounds were added to the megalithic stone circle complexes throughout Britain all around the same time. They were clearly not tombs or temples, neither do they contain ceremonial chambers; they can only be described as fake hills that would have taken vast resources to construct. Why they were created is yet another intriguing megalithic mystery.

  These, then, were the major phases of construction of the megalithic monuments of the British Isles, from the building of the first stone circle in the Orkneys around 3100 BCE until the creation of the mysterious artificial hills around a thousand years later. Once the stone circle obsession had become established throughout many parts of Britain by around 2600 BCE, four further periodic stages of development—large henge monuments, the addition of avenues, the addition of paired stone circles, and artificial hills—each occurred simultaneously in communities that appear to have lived completely independently of one another, right across the length and breadth of the country, at two-hundred-year intervals. There was a degree of trading and no doubt travel between these areas, but there is no archaeological evidence that these ancient Britons were united into any kind of overall kingdom or had any type of central authority. They were divided into dozens, if not hundreds, of separate tribal entities, each a law unto themselves (see chapter 1). Yet somehow, and for some unknown reason, they were nearly all involving themselves in precisely the same monument-building projects, requiring immense amounts of time, enormous manpower, and vast resources. But at one location in particular where these episodic developments occurred, the local inhabitants seem to have been determined to outdo everyone else—and that was at Stonehenge.

  Fig. 6.3. The Avebury megalithic complex.

  7

  Rivalry among the Megalithic Complexes

  THE GIANT STONE CIRCLES, often surrounded by henge earthworks and accompanied by outlying monoliths, artificial hills, and avenues leading to smaller rings, are collectively referred to as megalithic complexes. They were built in specific stages that occurred simultaneously throughout many parts of Britain:

  Circa 2600 BCE: The building of the grand, larger-scale stone circles, usually enclosed by massive henge constructions

  Circa 2400 BCE: The attachment of long avenues of standing stones and parallel linear embankments

  Circa 2200 BCE: The creation of smaller satellite stone circles, sometimes at the end of existing avenues, sometimes involving extensions to or the addition of further avenues

  Circa 2000 BCE: The building of enormous artificial hills near the grand stone circles

  In Ireland, however, the Megalithic culture seems to have been abandoned during this period, until it was readopted around 2000 BCE (see chapter 6).

  Avebury may have been the largest such complex, but it was not the most elaborate. That distinction belongs to Stonehenge. It is not its diameter, or the size of its stones, that so distinguishes it among this new generation of stone circles, but its extraordinary design. Stonehenge seems to have started life during the very first phase of stone circle building, around 3000 BCE. It is thought to have originally consisted of fifty-six stones, averaging about 6 feet high, set in a ring some 280 feet in diameter (see chapter 1). As such, it had more monoliths than any of the early stone circles and by far the greatest circumference apart from the Twelve Apostles in Scotland, which was about the same size (see chapter 5). It is also unique, in that the stones from which it was created—the bluestones—came from so far away: from Pembrokeshire in South Wales, where there is evidence that they had previously formed an already existing stone circle in the Carn Menyn district of the Preseli Hills. As stone circle building seems to have ceased throughout Wales for some centuries after it briefly became established around 3000 BCE, it’s possible that there was migration into southern England, where the Welsh merged with the population of settlements such as Durrington Walls and, astonishingly, brought one of their own stone circles with them (see chapter 5).

  At Stonehenge, in 2008, excavations led by archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, Ph.D., of the University of Sheffield dated the pits, the so-called Aubrey Holes (see chapter 1), thought to have contained the first ring of bluestones, to around 3000 BCE. The erection of the much larger sarsen stones, quarried from the Marlborough Downs, 20 miles north of Stonehenge, occurred around four hundred years later, the same time that other henge circles, such as Avebury, Stanton Drew, and the Ring of Brodgar, were being built. However, this new circle at Stonehenge was very different from any of its competitors. Called the Sarsen Circle, it was composed of thirty standing stones, each some 13 feet high and weighing around 25 tons, spaced just over 3 feet apart, with a further thirty 6-ton blocks placed on top of them to create a continuous ring of rectangular arches 108 feet in diameter.

  Despite how Hollywood often depicts ancient stone circles with lintel stones joining the monoliths to form such arches, no other stone circle in the British Isles is known to have had anything like them. There were lintel megaliths incorporated into various burial structures, such as long barrows, dolmens, and passage tombs, but they are not found linking the monoliths of any stone circle other than at Stonehenge. It certainly wasn’t a lack of resources in other locations that left Stonehenge unique in this respect. The work needed to create much larger monuments such as Avebury would have required vastly more people toiling significantly longer than was needed to create the famous Sarsen Circle, no matter how impressive it appears. We have already noted that the specific diameter of any particular stone circle, its size, and number of monoliths do not appear to have been regarded as essential aspects of whatever primary function the stone circles were meant to serve (see chapter 6). The same reasoning must also apply to the arches of Stonehenge. As the arrangement was evidently never copied elsewhere, the addition of lintel stones could in no way have been considered a necessary feature for stone circles generally, in order for them to serve the mysterious purpose for which they were built.

  Although circles of standing stones were ultimately erected all over the British Isles, we do find a few minor regional adaptations: for example, the recumbent stone circles of northern Scotland. Around 2700 BCE, the stone-circle-building tradition was adopted on the mainland of the far north of Scotland, mirroring the expansion of the Megalithic culture elsewhere in Britain at this time as it spread out from its earlier enclaves in the Orkneys, northwestern Britain, and southwest
ern England. The only difference with the stone circles in this part of Scotland is that they are typified by the incorporation of a large monolith lying horizontally between two of the ring’s standing stones: the “recumbent stone,” from which the monuments get their name.1 As many of these horizontal monoliths are found on the southwest side of the recumbent circles, the direction of the midwinter sunset, they may have served a similar purpose to king stones elsewhere (although some scholars have suggested the possibility of lunar alignments).

  In the far southwest of Britain, another slight variation is found. In Cornwall, some stone circles have a standing stone set inside the ring, such as at Boscawen-Un (old Cornish for “elder farm field”) near the village of St. Buryan, where it seems to have been deliberately positioned at an angle pointing northeast, the direction of the midsummer sunrise. Once again, this might be a local variant of the outlying king stones, while in Devon, some stone circles, such as Down Tor Circle on Dartmoor, have single-stone rows, rather than double-stone avenues, leading up to the rings. This is also found on the Isle of Lewis, where the main Callanish Stone Circle had no fewer than three single-stone rows added to complement its existing avenue. Perhaps Stonehenge’s Sarsen Circle was a similar local embellishment on a much grander scale,2 so grand, in fact, that it was never repeated. The precision workmanship required to shape stones to the exact dimensions needed to create such a monument may simply have been considered too much of an unnecessary extravagance to be replicated by anyone else.

  But it was not only the lintels that so distinguished Stonehenge; its surrounding henge is also unusual in that the embankment lies inside the ditch. At other megalithic henge monuments the embankment was built outside the ditch, which is a perplexing arrangement. During the later Bronze and Iron Ages, when regional feuding seems to have occurred in Britain—possibly due to colder, less fertile conditions and a consequent decline in food production—large fortifications were created around settlements. Commonly referred to as hillforts, as many were built on the summit of hills, they consisted of circular ditches and embankments on top of which timber stockades were erected. The hill-fort ditches were dug outside the embankments, meaning that attackers would need to descend into a deep, wide trench before climbing a steep embankment to reach the primary fortifications. Very often the ditch would fill with water to create a moat, or at the very least to become a muddy quagmire, bogging down the enemy. The whole thing was constructed to slow and tire adversaries so they could be more easily picked off by spears, arrows, and other projectiles hurled from atop the defensive stockade.3 If the ditch had been built inside the embankment, the ramparts would not only be considerably less effective, they would be self-defeating, hampering defenders within the fort. Intriguingly, this bizarre inside-out arrangement was exactly how nearly all the megalithic henge earthworks were constructed, with the ditch on the inside of the embankment. Whatever function they served, it was clearly not defensive. However, Stonehenge is an exception. There the embankment, about 6 feet high and 20 feet wide, was built inside the ditch of approximately the same dimensions, as would be expected for defensive reasons.

  Intriguingly the henge at Stonehenge seems to have existed even before the first stone circle was built: the bones of deer and oxen excavated from the bottom of the ditch have been radiocarbon dated to around 3100 BCE, about a century earlier than the bluestone circle.4 It is uncertain whether the stones of the original ring were left standing when the Sarsen Circle was erected, but most archaeologists think that they were removed and initially dragged away. The henge is about 360 feet in diameter and stands just outside the first stone circle, which measured some 280 feet in diameter. The Sarsen Circle, with a diameter of only 108 feet, stands well inside the encircling ditch and embankment, implying that the henge was already there when the new circle was erected—otherwise it would have been built closer to the sarsen stones. And if the dating is right, the first bluestone circle was built inside this already existing feature.

  The area around Stonehenge was a well-populated region by 3100 BCE, and its people had already built some impressive earthworks, such as the 400-foot-wide, 2-mile-long Cursus, less than 0.5 mile to the north, which dates from around 3500 BCE (see chapter 5). Like the Cursus, might the Stonehenge ditch and embankment have been created for some ceremonial purpose before the stone-circle-building tradition was adopted in southern England? There are a few isolated examples of Neolithic henge earthworks that appear to have lacked stone circles or any accompanying monoliths. For example, in Cumbria there stands the romantically named King Arthur’s Round Table, just outside the village of Eamont Bridge, an approximately 300-foot-diameter circular embankment, 35 feet wide and 6 feet high, with an internal ditch 45 feet wide and 5 feet deep. And in the county of Derbyshire, near the town of Buxton in north-central England, there is a monument called the Bull Ring (although it never was one). It is a roughly 200-footdiameter circular embankment, originally about 7 feet high by 30 feet wide, with an inner ditch around the same depth and width. The former has never been conclusively dated, but the Bull Ring seems to date from around the time that Avebury and the other henge monuments were being built. These, and a handful of other henges without stones, may represent the abandonment of a site before completion, but some scholars argue that such earthworks are rare but complete monuments in their own right.5 One way or the other, unlike these earthworks, at Stonehenge the ditch is on the outside of the embankment. Not only does it appear to date from five hundred years before the other henge monuments were created—even before the very first stone circles were built—it also is consistent with a defensive structure and unlike a true henge. On balance of evidence, therefore, it would seem that the ditch and embankment at Stonehenge were originally built to protect some kind of existing shrine or settlement, the evidence for which has been eradicated by the extensive remodeling of the site over many centuries. Although the Sarsen Circle was indeed one of the imposing new stone circles created around 2600 BCE, it may share more in common with the few grand stone circles where a henge was not constructed, such as Long Meg and Her Daughters in Cumbria (see chapter 6). It is more likely to have been happenstance that the first circle at Stonehenge was built inside preexisting defensive ramparts that superficially resembled a henge. Ironically it would seem that, despite its name, Stonehenge is not actually a henge monument at all.

  Because radiocarbon dating is not a precise art, we can only say that the grand stone circles were erected around 2600 BCE. In what order they were built is a matter of guesswork. Which came first: Stonehenge, Avebury, Stanton Drew, the Ring of Brodgar, or one of the others? Some researchers believe it was Stonehenge. The builders of the other monuments, it is proposed, may have been unable to replicate Stonehenge’s imposing arches, but the surrounding ditch and embankment arrangement was copied. This notion, however, seems most unlikely. Those who built the henge monuments went to extraordinary lengths to create them. If they were following the lead of Stonehenge, why build them the wrong way around? Those who built the grand stone circles around 2600 BCE clearly did not duplicate Stonehenge’s apparently defensive ramparts. Its surrounding ditch and embankment may have been older, but it must have served a different purpose to henge earthworks such as Avebury and cannot as such be regarded as evidence for Stonehenge’s being the first of what were to become the splendid megalithic complexes. Others have suggested that Stenness, dated at about 3100 BCE, was the first stone circle to be surrounded by a true henge. Although there is little visible evidence of it today, excavations indicate that at one time the monument did have an encircling bank and ditch. If this was contemporary with the monoliths—seemingly the oldest stone circle of all (see chapter 4)—then it would indeed be the first henge stone circle in the British Isles. However, due to weathering and movement of the soil over time impairing radiocarbon tests, it is difficult to tell when the Stenness earthwork was actually created. It may have been added much later, around 2600 BCE, in an attempt to turn the Ston
es of Stenness into a henge monument before the Ring of Brodgar was built nearby (see chapter 6). As things stand at present, all that can be said with any degree of certainty is that the large stone circles, most with henges, all began to appear around the same time. Where the idea started is far from clear.

  Fig. 7.1. Stonehenge and its surrounding monuments.

  Returning to Stonehenge, as its Sarsen Circle was built at the same time as the true henge monuments and the other grand stone circles, it does fit into the overall picture of the synchronous development of megalithic complexes as a whole. This also applies to its later accompaniments, such as an avenue built around 2400 BCE, the same period as the first avenues were created at Avebury and elsewhere. The original avenue at Stonehenge consisted of a pair of parallel banks, originally about 6 feet high and 20 feet wide, set about 70 feet apart, with a ditch outside them, which ran straight for about 1,500 feet. Geophysics surveys conducted in the 1980s indicated that uniformly spaced standing stones ran along these embankments: about fifty in each row. As the avenue runs directly in line with the Heel Stone (see chapter 1), as viewed from the center of the circle, in a northeasterly direction, it has been suggested that it may have marked a processional way aligned to the midsummer sunrise. Around two hundred years later the earthen avenue was extended at an angle for three-quarters of a mile to the east, before bending around to follow a relatively straight course for a farther three-quarters of a mile in a southeasterly direction.6 Due to severe erosion, it is not known whether this extension included standing stones like the original avenue. As at so many other megalithic complexes, a further stone circle was erected at the end of the lengthened avenue at this time.