Stone me -so THAT’S its secret

STONEHENGE by Francis Pryor (Head of Zeus £16.99)

SOMEWHERE approaching 50 years ago, the Berkmann family were driving in the old jalopy down to Cornwall for a week’s holiday.

Suddenly, to the right, we saw some enormous stones sitting on a round, raised platform, like an enormous Jenga set no one had bothered to clear up. Could we stop and take a look?

We could. And so we wandered around Stonehenge for half an hour, wondering how long these stones had lain here, how they could have been moved and why on earth anyone would want to move them in the first place.

How many impressionable young minds have been turned towards the ancient sciences of archaeology and geology by the mysteries of Stonehenge? Rather a few, I would suggest, and the fact that you can no longer walk among the stones, but have to stare at them from a distance, possibly only enhances their absolute strangeness. Somehow, these vast pieces of rock have survived, almost intact, for 4,500 years.

But it’s only in the past 50 years or so that archaeologists have started to work out what they were for. As Francis Pryor explains, ‘archaeology is essentially a practical approach to the past. Its great strength lies in the way places in the landscape — mounds, stones and rocks — can be explained by new ideas’.

This beautifully produced short book brings us up to date with the latest in Stonehenge thinking.

First, it wasn’t a one-off: though unique in its complexity, it was always a part of a broader tradition of British timber and stone monuments.

Second, the stones appeared years and years after the site had been identified as ‘special’. Much has been made of the Avenue, the northeastern approach to the site that is precisely aligned with the midsummer solstice: that’s where the sun rises on June 21.

Coincidence or extraordinary cleverness on the part of Mesolithic man? Coincidence wins: it’s a gully that was formed by a glacier at the end of the last Ice Age. But chances are that Mesolithic man spotted the coincidence and, therefore, decided the site was significant. The stones arrived several hundred years later.

The defining insight, however, came from a Madagascan archaeologist, Ramilisonina. ‘In Madagascar, people built in stone for ancestors because stone, like the ancestors, is eternal,’ he said. ‘Buildings of the living are made of wood because it, like human lives, is transient. Stonehenge was clearly a place for the ancestors.’

This theory was borne out by the discovery of a site a few miles to the north-east, made primarily out of wood, for the living. Stonehenge, it is now believed, was the final stop in a funeral procession. The dead would eventually be buried in the countryside around it.

It’s a simple theory, but it works. The site to the north-east was briefly a huge village, one of the largest in Europe, at exactly the same time as Stonehenge was being built. So that’s where the workforce must have lived.

By 2100BC, the ritual landscape had become the largest cemetery of burial mounds in all of Britain. And by 1500 BC, it was ‘approaching the end of its long life as a popular shrine’. So for 3,500 years, it has just been a pile of old stones.

Constable and Turner painted Stonehenge, and Sir Christopher Wren carved his name on one of the rocks. As Francis Pryor says, with winning honesty: ‘It is probably fair to say that Stonehenge has fared worse at the hands of archaeologists than any other major site.’

This splendid book is nearly as good as wandering among the stones themselves. (Nearly, but not quite.)