Back at Stonehenge after 60 years and trip to America... a chip off the old rock
A PIECE of Stonehenge taken to Florida after being removed 60 years ago during restoration work has finally been returned to cast light on the monument’s puzzling history.
Robert Phillips was director of an engineering firm that extracted a 4ft section from one of the standing stones in 1958.
When he emigrated to Florida, Mr Phillips took it with him. But decades later, on the eve of his 90th birthday, he decided to return it to the country of his birth.
The rock section was one of three ‘cores’ drilled from a sarsen stone that had collapsed and was cracking. The giant upright was part of a trilithon, a group of two standing stones with a third across the top.
It is hoped the stone core may help solve the riddle of where the sarsen stones came from. Unlike the smaller bluestones at the site, which were quarried at the Preseli mountains in Wales, the origin of the sarsens is unknown.
Engineers used a special drill to extract the cores. Metal rods were then inserted to hold the disintegrating stone together, and the holes were blocked up with fragments of sarsen. Mr Phillips, pictured below, kept the rod in a Perspex tube in his office at Van Moppes, his firm in Basingstoke, Hampshire. He is in poor health and could not return the stone himself, so yesterday his sons, Robin, a solicitor from Bath, and Lewis, from Canterbury, who works in finance, went to Stonehenge to give the well-travelled core to English Heritage. Lewis Phillips, 63, said: ‘I recall as a teenager visiting my dad in his office and there was this Perspex tube containing the drilled bits of stone and a picture of the drilling works in progress. ‘So in 1976 when he left the firm and nobody else seemed to be interested in this piece of stone, he took it with him as he travelled across America, displayed in various homes my parents were in. He didn’t want this getting lost or chucked away. He was keen it should come back.’
Robin Phillips, 57, said: ‘It’s much travelled – probably the furthest any bit of Stonehenge has gone. I remember going to Stonehenge with my dad as a little kid, and he pointed out to me the work they did. In the Fifties it would have just been waste material. It’s possible the other two cores just got thrown away.’
Professor David Nash, of the University of Brighton, is investigating the chemical composition of the sarsens to pinpoint their source. He said: ‘Conventional wisdom suggests they all came from the Marlborough Downs but initial results suggest the sarsens may have come from more than one location.’