Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge

Death seems intimately bound with the henges. A child, its head split by an axe, was buried very near the centre of Woodhenge. There are burials at Avebury (including the dwarf crippled woman in the ditch), just as there are at Stonehenge. The existence of those graves, let alone the obvious celestial alignments, argue against the fashionable theory that the earth goddess was the primary deity and that she ruled over a peaceful, matriarchal society unsullied by violent male gods. There is far too much evidence of violence and death associated with the monuments for that happy theory to be true. The monuments are not cemeteries, though it does appear that for part of its history Stonehenge was used as a depository for cremated ashes, but the burials that occurred within the henges do seem to have been ritualistic: perhaps foundation sacrifices, or other deaths (like that of the archer at Stonehenge) which coincided with some crisis in the temple's history. There is a suggestion that the dead were laid out within the monuments, there to be flensed by natural processes, and that the bones were then taken and buried elsewhere. In mediaeval Europe it was believed that the closer you were buried to the saint's relics, which were usually kept on a church's altar, the quicker you would reach heaven on Judgement Day (the theory depended on being caught up in the ascending saint's slipstream); something similar may have applied to the great henges that, as at Stonehenge, stand amidst clusters of burial mounds. This congruence of temple and graves strengthens the idea that the circular henges were seen as a connection between this world and the other world where the dead went, a world that was almost certainly conceived as being in the sky for, long before there were any henges, graves were aligned on the sun, moon or prominent stars. The best example of this is the magnificent neolithic grave at Newgrange in Ireland where a passage was driven through the mound to carry the rays of the rising midwinter sun into the burial chamber. This stunning monument, which has been splendidly restored, was built at least two hundred years before the first simple bank and ditch were made at Stonehenge, suggesting that the relationship between the dead and the sky was well established in the fourth millennium BC.

Yet Stonehenge's history goes back to the eighth millennium BC. There was no circle then, and no stones, just a row of vast pinewood posts, perhaps like totem poles, erected in a forest clearing (positions of three of the four posts are today marked by white circles painted on the car-park, but in future, if we ever get round to presenting Stonehenge as it should be, they may be more appropriately commemorated). We know almost nothing about the posts, except that they seem too big to have been part of a building, and nothing whatever about the impulse that raised them, nor why that particular spot was chosen. Nor do we know how long they stood. Five thousand years later, in about 3000 BC, the henge that we know was begun. At first it was just a circular ditch with a high bank inside it and a lower bank outside, and just within the higher bank was a ring of holes named after their discoverer, the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey. The Aubrey Holes are another of Stonehenge's mysteries. There is controversy over whether the holes held any posts, but if they did all sign of them has long gone and, even more mysteriously, it appears that the fifty-six holes were filled in very soon after they were dug. Some of the holes contain the remains of cremation burials, but not all, and we really have very little idea of their purpose. We can blame those Aubrey Holes for the popular theory that Stonehenge was an 'eclipse predictor'; it is true that you can foretell the years of the eclipses by a complicated shuttling of markers about the fifty-six holes, but it seems an unlikely hypothesis. If it worked, why were the holes abandoned? And why was the system not copied at other henges?

Quite soon after the circle was made, the first timber posts appeared in its centre and at the north-eastern entrance which points towards the rising midsummer sun. This timber henge, similar to the ones at nearby Durrington Walls or the newly discovered timber shrine which stood at Stanton Drew, lasted for several hundred years, though some scholars believe that some time towards the middle or end of the third millennium BC the temple fell into disuse. Then, maybe two hundred years later, it was revived. The Station Stones, and a few other stones at the main entrance, were put up first. Almost certainly the Heel Stone (the sun stone) was among those first boulders erected and it still stands, though leaning at an angle. It is not much remarked by visitors, yet it was probably the keystone to the whole temple. For a short time the temple was a simple arrangement of a few standing stones, no more remarkable than scores of other such shrines, and then something exceptional happened. Bluestones (so called because of their very faint blueish-green tint) were fetched from distant west Wales and erected in a double circle and it seems very probable that some of those stones carried lintels.

The bluestones are another mystery. There are no suitable boulders on Salisbury Plain, which is why all the stones of the monument had to be fetched across long distances, but why from the Preseli Mountains in Pembrokeshire? The hills near Avebury, twenty miles to the north, had an almost inexhaustible supply of boulders, yet Stonehenge's builders carried the bluestones 135 miles (actually much farther, for they were forced by topography

to a circuitous route to their site). It was a stunning feat,

though some theorists have attempted to dismiss it by claiming that the bluestones were deposited on Salisbury Plain by glacial action during an ice age. It is a convenient theory, but to be true it would surely demand that we should find other such bluestone 'erratics' elsewhere on the plain or in its vicinity, and we never have. The simpler explanation, however amazing, is that the builders wanted just those stones and so fetched them.

The journey would have been almost impossible to achieve on land, for the route from the Preseli Mountains to Salisbury Plain contains too many steep valleys which would need to be crossed, so there is general agreement among archaeologists that the stones were primarily transported by water. There is agreement, too, that the stones (weighing from two to seven tons) were carried on wooden dug-out canoes that would be joined together by a wooden platform on which the stone would be lashed. Two routes are suggested: either south about Lands End and then eastwards along the south coast to Christchurch Harbour from where the stones could be floated up the Hampshire Avon ('Mai's river') to a spot close to Stonehenge. The alternative, which I prefer, is a shorter sea voyage up the Bristol Channel, then up the Somerset Avon ('River Sul'), across a low watershed, then by river again. Anyone who has sailed the English Channel, and specifically the waters between Cornwall and Hampshire, will know of the many dangers that exist on that coast, especially in the form of massive 'tide-gates' where the fast tidal currents are compressed, often into venomous rips, by jutting headlands such as Start Point or Portland Bill. A voyage around the south-west of Britain would encounter those formidable obstacles, while a journey up the Bristol Channel would be assisted by a strong tide and prevailing winds. There is no evidence that neolithic Britons possessed sails, but we know the technology was in the Mediterranean around 4000 BC so it seems likely that the idea would spread as far as Britain in the next two millennia. A journey up the Bristol Channel, assisted by sails and taking advantage of the spring tides, could have been effected quite swiftly and without any of the massive dangers presented by the longer route south about the Cornish peninsula.