How to Build Stonehenge
Mike Pitts (Thames & Hudson, £20)
THIS excellent book opens with a blow-byblow account of approaching the monument along the Cursus from the east. This was the avenue named by William Stukely, the antiquarian who wrote the first detailed account of the monument in 1740. Cresting the rise, we see the great lintels, fitted so exactly to the uprights on mortise and tenon joints. Then the Heel Stone distinguishes itself in the foreground, a 40-ton, undressed stone, the largest at Stonehenge. As we enter the arena, marked by a circular ditch 360ft in diameter, we encounter the Slaughter Stone lying in the grass and so on, until we reach the centre. In 1805, William Cunnington took visitors into Stonehenge in a shuttered coach, then raised the blinds for them to imbibe the wonder. Like them, we are inside, looking out.
Every generation makes its own Stonehenge. Inigo Jones thought it was built by the Romans, before Stukely identified it as a prehistoric Celtic temple, raised by Druids. The Victorians, cleaving to an image of ancient Britons and woad-painted savages, often assumed the builders had outside help. Post-war, when men from the ministry were wreaking havoc on British towns, scientists from The Atomic Energy Research Establishment, armed with a capsule of radioactive sodium, helped local builders to attack the stones in the name of restoration, inflicting more damage than perhaps anyone in 1,000 years.
Mike Pitts’s own, persuasive, story also suits the tenor of our times, respectfully drawing on the achievements of tribal people, in Sumatra and northern India, who moved giant stones about. The author’s Neolithic builders and transporters are skilled, festive, hardworking people, brimming with enthusiasm and logistical know-how, as ready to enjoy themselves as any modern archaeologist.
Instead of asking what Stonehenge means, he only asks how was it built. The stones can’t answer back, so everyone is free to interpret their purpose according to their lights. There is a great deal known now that surprised me, not only about their origins, pinpointed to within yards in Wales and the Marlborough Downs. It’s like a game of reverse chess.
Although Mr Pitts dismisses the rope-and-lever theory for erecting the megaliths, observing that after the first one goes up, there’s no room in the circle for a gang hauling on long ropes, his own explanation is fascinating and persuasive. It seems that Stonehenge had been preceded by one or more Woodhenges, which blazed a carpentry trail that the builders followed with their mortise and tenon joints. Prehistoric people had history.
Stonehenge was not produced in a single burst. Focusing on its preparation and construction, Mr Pitts gives us a Stonehenge that lasted longer and changed more than we might expect, and took, perhaps, less time to build than we imagine. The massive trilithons, weighing up to 50 tons apiece, had less far to travel than the smaller bluestones brought centuries earlier from Wales, but they are dressed and shaped with dexterity, carefully designed to maintain their perspective when seen from the ground.
Jason Goodwin