The unsolved mysteries of spooky Stonehenge
Published Thursday October 23rd, 2008
There's something spooky about Stonehenge. Even on a bright sunny day, you can get a creepy feeling prowling around this eerie assembly of standing stones on England's Salisbury Plain. I know I did when I was there. Maybe, with Halloween just around the corner, this is the right time to talk about it.
According to Carmel Nicholson, the eloquent and erudite Globus tour director who steered us around England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, two tantalizing mysteries have intrigued Stonehenge scholars for years.
"Why did those pre-historic builders set up such a specific arrangement of tall-standing stones? And how on earth were they able to do it?"
Was it designed as a burial site? A religious temple? An astronomical observatory lined up with the sun and the moon? A healing spot? Or the sinister site of human sacrifices? All those theories abound.
Experts have determined that the construction took place in several distinct time phases, the first dating back to 3,100 BC. The second came around 2,150 BC, when four-tonne Bluestones from Wales were transported some 384 kilometres to the site. The third stage came in 2000 BC when Sarcen stones, some weighing as much as 50 tonnes, were brought about 40 kms from what is now Wiltshire.
But in those days, before written history, before the time of Christ, how were people able to move those huge rocks such distances and erect them so skillfully? The best theory is that they were moved on land by teams of men using rollers and sledges, and they were rafted by water. Modern scholars estimate the total construction would have taken 30-million man-hours of labour.
The stones are set in a distinctive circular pattern, some still with lintels on top. There are differing opinions about whether one recumbent stone, nicknamed "The Slaughter Stone," was actually used as an altar for human sacrifice, or whether it simply toppled over from a standing position.
This is now one of England's National Heritage Sites and visitors come from all over the world to marvel and to wonder. On my previous visit some 20 years ago, you could go right up and touch the stones. But nowadays, in order to preserve them, you can only walk around the stones outside a roped-off area.
They've added some tourist-smart gimmicks as well, from a reception area with food and gift shops, to the handing out of portable walkie-talkies in various languages, so you can dial up commentaries on specific stages of your walk around the rocks. It's certainly a reminder that there were societies of people on earth long before we came along, and some of their ideas might have been as weird as those some of us espouse today.
Stonehenge isn't far from Salisbury's Early English Gothic 13th Century cathedral, boasting Britain's tallest spire (123 metres) and championing a different form of religious worship. It also houses one of four surviving originals of the Magna Carta, the 1215 charter of modern democracy.
There seemed to be something different about Stonehenge on this particularly sunny day as we stood on Salisbury Plain. Carmel Nicholson noticed it too:
"The birds," she said. "Look at all those black birds roosting on top of the stones. I've never seen anything like that before. It's almost as though it's some sort of a sign they know something we don't know."
And as we watched, in a sudden movement, the birds all took off in a black cloud, circled around those mysterious standing stones and swooped down again to perch at another position. That was the week the U.S. economy started to slide into recession.
I'm not a superstitious person, although people of Irish descent have their tales of Druids and Banshees and bad-news Forerunners. And Halloween's coming up.
Just be careful.
Fred Hazel is a retired editor-in-chief of this newspaper. His column appears on Thursday.
Disabled
Search Articles
More CE Network Sites & Partners:
