How to Build Stonehenge

'A gripping archaeological detective story' The Sunday Times

Mike Pitts

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780500777176
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Icon of the New Stone Age, sculptural and engineering marvel, symbol of national pride: there is nothing quite like Stonehenge. These great sarsen and bluestone slabs, arranged with simple, graphic genius, attract visitors from across the world. The monument stands silent in the face of the questions its unlikely existence raises: who built it? Why? How? There has been endless speculation about why Stonehenge was built, inspiring theories ranging from the academically credible to the improbable, but far less investigation into how. In the millennia since its creation, pieces of Stonehenge have been knocked over by heavy machinery, found their way to Florida (and back again), and been exposed to radioactive sodium, but the seemingly impossible endeavour of raising the stones with Neolithic technology has remained inexplicable until now. In the past decade ground-breaking discoveries, made possible by cutting-edge scientific techniques, have traced the precise provenance of the bluestones in Wales, but can we plot their journeys to the Salisbury Plain? And how might teams of labourers lacking machinery or even pack animals have dragged them 150 miles to the site? How did they carve joints into the sarsen boulders, among the hardest stones in the world, and then raise them into place? Mike Pitts draws on a lifetimes study to answer these questions, revealing how Stonehenge stood not in austere isolation, as we see it today, but as part of a wider world, the focus of a megalithic cosmology of belief, ritual and creativity.

CHAPTER 1

THE STONES

If I could choose, I would visit Stonehenge on a May afternoon when the blossom is out and sun-drenched showers roll across the great wilderness of Salisbury Plain. And I would do so in 1805, with William Cunnington.

He had a trick. A local businessman who effectively invented the archaeology of Stonehenge, digging among the stones and in ancient burial mounds, Cunnington (1754–1810) would take guests in a horse-drawn chaise. Before Stonehenge was in sight, he’d stop the carriage and pull up the wooden shutters, obscuring the views. Barrister and poet Richard Fenton (1747–1821) much enjoyed the experience: ‘Thus in darkness and durance,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘we travelled rapidly for a few miles, till our captain, with a most majestic tone, issued the word of command, “Stop, down with the blinds;” when, lo! we found ourselves within the area of the gigantic peristyle of Stonehenge… the effect is wonderful.’

The days of driving into the centre of Stonehenge are long gone, but in one respect the journey two centuries ago has a modern counterpart: the old road we walk on from the visitor centre to the stones today is the road along which Cunnington drove his chaise. This and the busy A303 to the south were created as toll roads in the 1760s, by private trusts known as turnpikes; their milestones still mark the routes. They had a profound effect on how we all see, and imagine, Stonehenge.

Before these roads, people reached the monument by walking or riding over a carpet of downland turf broken by a network of short, braided tracks. Mostly they would come from Salisbury to the south – like the Swiss Herman Folkerzheimer in 1562, the first named Stonehenge tourist, who stayed with the Bishop – and get sight of the stones as they crested a nearby hill. This is a spectacular view, perhaps the best. We can still enjoy it, walking up a quiet wooded valley depicted in V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical novel, The Enigma of Arrival.¹ At the end of a winding, grassy way the ground rises, and as we reach the top of the ridge, with Bronze Age burial mounds on either side, Stonehenge comes suddenly into sight, silhouetted against distant hills. With much of the farmland reverting to grass, but for the A303 in the valley below in the short distance between us and the stones, I imagine the panorama is not completely unlike that experienced by Folkerzheimer some 450 years ago.

The Stonehenge monument as it is today; pits are either excavated and refilled or unexcavated and identified in surface surveys.

Today, however, most of us approach Stonehenge differently: like William Cunnington, we see it first from a road as we drive past, and more leisurely as we walk or bus from the visitor centre. The turnpikes we follow were created to exploit a growing demand from traffic between Bath and Bristol and beyond in the west, and London and the home counties in the east. They weren’t built to take people to Stonehenge, but almost incidentally they made it accessible to anyone unfortunate enough not to know a local bishop or lord who could show them the way (see pl. IV).

Stonehenge was now on the map. A new market was created for guidebooks, and the stage was set for conjuring a particular way of seeing and imagining the ancient ruin that still shapes our thinking. For many people the first sighting of the stones came on the journey from London, the view we see today looking west from the A303 at the point where the road crests a hill and its two carriageways merge into one. The great English artists Turner and Constable both sketched a view of Stonehenge from the top of this hill early in the 19th century. But it was more distant than the hill to the south, and the prospect, said old hands, inferior. In 1876, Salisbury Museum curator and local guide Edward Stevens (1828–1878) deplored it. ‘We scarcely see Stonehenge from the best point of view in going to it by the road from Amesbury,’ he told the Wiltshire Archaeological Society who had just taken exactly that route, conveyed by a caravan of charabancs. ‘It is seen to far greater advantage if we approach it by way of the Down’ – from the south (see pl. V).

You might think that I am suggesting alternative ways for you to visit Stonehenge. Certainly there are opportunities to approach from some special and surprisingly unfrequented directions, and I would encourage you to explore such options. But that is not why I have told this story, of the origins of modern tourism in 18th-century roads. Rather it is to highlight, and explain, that we have today a particular way of seeing Stonehenge and its surroundings, and that this dates back less than three centuries. We pass from east to west and back, in a narrow corridor that both compresses and goes against the grain of the landscape. Importantly, I think, the perspective this gives us is also diametrically opposed to the way the people who built Stonehenge experienced it, and expected it to be seen.

How do I know that? Well of course I can’t be dogmatic, but there are several suggestions that support the idea, in the monument itself and in its setting. We’ll come to the stones later, but here I want to consider the location through the simple device of standing at Stonehenge, and looking out. For this will help us determine, in this opening chapter in which we are doing no more than scrutinizing the site (just as Herman Folkerzheimer did two years before Shakespeare was born, for it has, it feels, changed little since then), how we will start our journey. What can we see?²

Our immediate impression is of open space. Sheep-cropped grassland surrounds us, gently rolling to near horizons marked to north and east by interrupted banks of trees, and to south and west by continuing pasture punctuated by shrubs dotted along chalk tracks, and tree clumps marking ancient burial mounds (there are a lot of these barrows, not least under the trees on the ridge to the east).

Looking again we see that the views are not equal. While the ground sweeps away to north and south, at first falling from the gentle spur on which Stonehenge stands and then climbing again, to the west the slope rises just enough to almost immediately close in, obscuring anything beyond. It’s more open to the east, and beyond the ridge of trees across the small valley we can see occasional distant hills. But the overall sense is of a landscape that beckons to north and south, and constrains to east and west. That sense grows the more familiar you become with the downland, walking its slopes and hidden valleys, watching sheep flock and disperse, noticing a tree come into view here and a barrow slip out of sight there. And the feeling is reinforced when you study maps, contours rising to northeast offering unrestricted views, and to southwest creating a succession of ridges that on the ground draw the eye on.

Let us then reverse our position, and approach Stonehenge from the north – the alternative route from the south being blocked by the road. There is an earthwork reaching northeast from Stonehenge, easy to see: a pair of narrow, sheep-tracked parallel hollows some 20 m (65 ft) apart, the ground between seeming flatter and more level than the tussocky grass beyond.

The Avenue, as we call it, heads straight down the slope for 550 m (1,800 ft) with the air of a marked route to or from the stones, that we can now follow (nothing like it is known in any other direction). At the bottom we are in a small bowl, so remote that in summer it almost has a feel of the indoors, the ceiling a skylark’s song. With road traffic silenced, we might imagine ourselves in the company of William Stukeley (1687–1765), Stonehenge’s greatest observer and antiquary. He published a grand illustrated book about the place in 1740, and spent much time here in preceding years. In our hearts, it is his Stonehenge we would like to experience: endless, unfenced grassland, no tourists, turnpikes or modern ploughing, and ancient earthworks and stones better preserved than they would be for any future recorder.³

Stukeley was the first to notice – and name – the Avenue. He saw much else, not least another long earthwork a little further to the north. Two not quite parallel ditches, separated by 100–150 m (325–500 ft) along their length of nearly 3 km (1.7 miles), seem to mark out an east–west way that crosses the valley between two low ridges – or, as some archaeologists see it, creates a barrier to movement between north and south. Stukeley called it the Cursus, imagining it to be a racecourse for Roman charioteers. Recent excavation shows it was created some 5,500 years ago, centuries before the first identifiable Stonehenge. We now know it to be one of several cursuses across Britain – archaeologists adopted Stukeley’s name for them – and the third largest. We can only guess their purpose, though they look ceremonial, and the presence of the Stonehenge Cursus – and a second, smaller one further north again, which Stukeley did not see – are among indications that the area held special meaning from an early stage.

Stonehenge from the east surrounded by ancient burial mounds, drawn by William Stukeley in the 1720s before maintained roads. At that time the site was reached across open downland and braided tracks.

As we start back up the hill – anticipating ‘The grand and only access to this work… which makes the building appear really majestic to such as approach it in front,’ as architect John Wood (1704–54) wrote 20 years before the turnpike roads were opened – something unexpected strikes us immediately: Stonehenge has disappeared. The two parallel ditches of the Avenue, however, barely visible here, lead us out and up until quite suddenly we see stones. And not just any stones.

As the monument peers over the horizon, it flaunts its most distinctive feature, the part that more than anything says ‘Stonehenge’: lintels, great horizontal slabs, roughly squared, the grey rock now coloured in subtle lichen greens. There are two bunched together to the left and one to the right, the latter looking more rounded. If we hold still at just the right point, they seem to sink into the ground where it meets the sky.

In the space between is the top of a single vertical megalith, its sharply drawn flat end punctuated in the centre by a bulging plum pudding. The megalith once had a matching partner, and between them they supported a lintel, held in place by the protrusions which fitted into hollows on the lintel’s underside, each making a sort of ball and socket joint: in Stonehenge jargon these are traditionally referred to as mortise and tenon (or ‘Mortece and Tenant’ as antiquary William Lambarde (1536–1601) wrote in the 1570s, ‘as Carpenters call them’, in what may be the first Stonehenge use of both the phrase and a woodworking analogy). When newly erected, the three stones – the largest of five free-standing trilithons – might together have weighed 85 tons. Were they still upright and we were to step back a little, all we would see would be that great lintel, like a table or bed, or an altar, perhaps, a threshold, apparently alone on the ground; an invitation, a boastful hint of the wonder that was to come.

Today that marvel, or at least its broken but still potent ruin, soon springs into view. As we proceed, the three surviving high lintels, now seen to be balanced on pairs of great squared pillars to either side, seem held apart by a slightly lower run of three, thinner lintels that form a straight line across the front. Below this, supportive massed uprights merge into a wall that continues to either side with occasional gaps, and what was once a solid horizontal ring is picked up with two lintels to the left, one to the right. Dot, dot, dash, dot: an F in Morse code. Fence? Fort? A bold front? From this distance there is no sense of a ring or an interior, just a wall. It feels more intimidating than welcoming.

As we climb the slope, nearer stones rise against those behind. One in the centre grows fatter and taller than the others, from which it is separated by 60 m (200 ft), until it dominates the view, and we can see it is also differently shaped. Its irregular sides taper towards a rounded top, like a formless cloaked figure. It is one of a handful of isolated stones that over generations have acquired names, invented to suit the times. In the 18th century the antiquary William Stukeley called it the bowing stone, the place where people bowed as they arrived. The term remained in use until the late 19th century, but was soon mostly overtaken by a new one, the Friar’s Heel – along with a tale told of the Devil throwing it at a fleeing monk whose foot left an imprint (no longer to be seen). In 1901 an astronomer made much of the way the midsummer sun rises over this megalith, which, with an eye on the ancient Greek sun god Helios, he referred to as the Hele stone – a name that was revived in the 1960s, when astronomy descended again on Stonehenge. Today it is simply the Heelstone.

Only when we walk round this beast of a megalith do we see its character. Relatively flat from the front, behind it swells and crumples in a contorted mass, sometimes smooth, often penetrated by rounded hollows, and marked by a fissure above head height that rises and falls around an angle, giving it the mournful menace of a deep-sea eel. From behind, too, it leans, towards the stone circle from the sides and sideways from the back – its complex shape, which seems to grow as it descends into the turf, is difficult to visualize.

With an estimated weight of 40 tons and some 4.5 m (15 ft) high, it’s the largest stone at Stonehenge, and one of very few that is not dressed to shape. The Heelstone is its own monument. And if the grass is cut short and you look carefully, you can just make out the shallow depression of a narrow ditch, now filled, that circled it as if to emphasize its peculiarity and its gravity. I’m not like those fancy, carved stones, it says. I may support nothing. But once I mattered.

The Avenue ditches either side here are clearer, having been excavated by archaeologists in the 20th century and only partly refilled. They lead in just 20 paces to another ditch. This one is different. Wider and deeper, partly so, again, because it has been excavated and its empty form carefully preserved by archaeologists, it maps out before us a perfect circle almost 110 m (360 ft) across. We stand at the only large gap in the circuit, at 12 m (40 ft) across narrower than the 22 m (72 ft) that separate the Avenue ditches, which stop at its presence. The break encourages us to continue towards the stones. As soon as we enter the arena, halfway between the Heelstone behind us and the circle in front, we come to a second large, isolated megalith. It lies flat on the ground, 6.5 m (21 ft) long.

This is the Slaughter Stone. It means what it says. A visitor to Stonehenge in 1871, passing by on their way from London to Land’s End, found space to comment only on this stone, on which, ‘no doubt, many hundreds of human beings have been put to death, amid the savage rites which once were wont to be celebrated in this desolate spot’ (travel in England, they added, avoided ‘four hours of solid misery’ crossing the Channel, and the consequent bad meals, cold feet and the ‘vague feeling’ of being swindled). To Stukeley it was simply a great flat stone, but in 1799 barrister Edward King (1735–1807), fresh from reading accounts by Captain Cook of human sacrifice in Tahiti and well versed in the Old Testament and Homer, imagined lintels as flaming Druid altars, and the flat stone at the entrance to be the place of killing – the slaughtering stone.

It is our first dressed – roughly carved – stone. It lies in the grass like a pat of butter dropped into a bowl of flour, the ground lightly mounded around as if it had once been buried in a shallow grave, and is now exposed surrounded by spoil (see pl. VI). Only one face and a little of its straight, parallel sides are revealed, but in good light it’s easy to see how these have been more or less smoothed and flattened. Several deeper hollows from the original boulder remain, stained red with blood (or less fancifully by algae combined with iron-rich minerals leached out of the stone by pooled water). Its flat, and presumably top end when erect, points towards the circle, which still has more the air of a broken wall than a ring.

In the distance ahead of us four great serried uprights support three snug-fitting lintels, and to either side further, less regular megaliths seem to bulge and lean, isolated lintels to left and right and glimpses of unidentifiable stones of varied size through the gaps. Now we can make out patterns in the trails of lichen, and imagine shapes and faces in the particular angles and hollows of each stone. More immediate, however, is the surrounding ditch. We can discern a bank either side of it, the low topography emphasized by the mown turf. To our left the inner, larger bank merges into the mound around the flat stone. We turn and follow this earthwork.

Almost immediately, if we have our eyes on the ground, we notice a dinner-plate sized concrete disc in the grass. And then another. They continue every 5 m (16 ft), a ring of markers beneath each of which is a pit, known as an Aubrey Hole. John Aubrey (1626–97), a great, gossipy antiquary who first visited Stonehenge in 1634 when he was only eight, was the first to sketch a plan of the monument, and the pits were named in his honour when they were discovered and excavated in the 1920s.

After 40 paces and 9 discs, we reach a small lump of a stone leaning into the bank. Like the Heelstone and the Slaughter Stone, this too has a name. It’s a Station Stone – there are two surviving (of an original four), the second still out of sight beyond the circle on the other side of the monument. The one in front of us is the larger, weighing 4 tons and, like the Heelstone, apparently entirely in its natural state. It looks as if it may once have been standing, and has fallen outwards into the bank, its lichen-splattered curves temporarily shielding plant growth fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other titles of interest
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Stones
• 2 Raw Materials: Bluestone
• 3 Raw Materials: Sarsen
• 4 Logistics
• Plates Section One
• 5 Construction: Bluehenge
• 6 Construction: Stonehenge
• Plates Section Two
• 7 Afterlife
• Appendix: A Brief History of Stonehenge
• How to See Stonehenge
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Sources of Illustrations
• Index
• Copyright