Читать книгу Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History - Hugh Williams - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThe huge and ancient stone monument known as Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, is one of Britain’s oldest monuments. Its origins are uncertain. It is surrounded by myth and legend. It belongs to the beginning of Britain.
Stonehenge is an island of antiquity stranded in a twenty-first century melting pot.
If you drive east to west across southern England you may well pass Stonehenge. It stands just a few hundred yards back from the A303, one of the country’s busiest main roads taking traffic to and from the West Country. Travelling westwards you are more than likely to have time to get a good view of it because it is here that the fast dual carriageway funnels into a two-lane road and the traffic queues can be enormous. Stonehenge is an island of antiquity stranded in a twenty-first century melting pot. At this point the journey west crosses a bridge of nearly 5,000 years of history as the achievements of the most ancient rites of man stare stonily towards his most recent and most frenetic.
Stonehenge was built in different phases over many hundreds of years. To begin with, in about 3100 BC, it was a circular ditch with an internal bank and fifty-six holes around its perimeter. A few hundred years later two circles of bluestone were erected. Bluestone is not native to Wiltshire but comes from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire in West Wales. After that the bluestones were dug up and rearranged and the familiar sarsen stones brought to the site. These form Stonehenge’s most famous image of the pillars with lintels across the top. The sarsen stones came from Avebury, about 18 miles to the north. In the last phase, about 2200 BC, the bluestones were put back again to form a circle and a horseshoe inside the sarsen pillars. All these different arrangements took place over hundreds of years and leave many questions unanswered. What was Stonehenge for? Who built it? How did the bluestones get from Wales to Wiltshire? Throughout the history of Britain people have tried to answer these questions, adapting their answers to suit the age in which they live.
In the twelfth century Henry of Huntingdon wrote a history of the English people from the Roman invasion to the reign of Henry II. He described Stonehenge as one of the four wonders of Britain but declared that no one knew why it had been built, or by whom. His contemporary, Geoffrey of Monmouth, came up with a rather more colourful account. Stonehenge, he said, was constructed as a memorial to nobles who had been slain in battle by the Saxon chieftain, Hengist. He dates the origin of the monument to the time of Aurelius Ambrosius, who emerged from the chaos following the Romans’ retreat to lead Britain in its war against the Saxons. According to legend, Ambrosius was the uncle of King Arthur and having decided to build the monument sought advice from the magician Merlin. Merlin told him of a stone circle in Ireland called the giants’ dance. Ambrosius sent his men to fetch it and, with Merlin’s help, they brought it back to Wiltshire. A sacred ceremony was held at Stonehenge where Ambrosius was crowned as king of his people: myth and ritual were even then part of its story.
In the seventeenth century, James I, always interested in scholarship, asked his Surveyor-General, Inigo Jones, to carry out an investigation into the reasons why Stonehenge was built. Inigo Jones was a great architect but a somewhat naive archaeologist. His love of classical antiquity influenced the design of the magnificent buildings he built for his king in London, but they got him off on the wrong foot as far as Stonehenge was concerned. He came to the conclusion that it was a Roman temple to the god Coelus. Once again the influences of the age, rather than historical accuracy, had been used to determine the origins of this ancient monument.
Later in the seventeenth century, another study of Stonehenge began to get a bit closer to the truth. John Aubrey was an antiquarian, biographer and gossip whose book, Brief Lives, is a highly entertaining account of many of the most distinguished people of the time. He was interested in objects as much as people and recorded his observations of Stonehenge in a book about British monuments. In particular he noticed the depressions or holes around the perimeter of the original ditch, which have since been called the ‘Aubrey Holes’ in his honour. He surmised correctly that Stonehenge belonged to an early British civilisation, but in trying to locate its origins more exactly he came up with the idea that it was a Druid temple. This thought fuelled the imagination of the eighteenth century. The concept of a mysterious ruin set in a quiet landscape, its eerie history of ceremony and sacrifice blending with the force of nature played perfectly into the romantic ideas of the time. Stonehenge obligingly fell in with fashion.
It was only in the twentieth century that Stonehenge started seriously to reveal at least a few of its secrets. Up until the end of the First World War it was privately owned. Back in the seventeenth century, when he had first seen it, James I had tried to acquire it but had been unsuccessful. In 1918 it belonged to a successful local livestock farmer and racehorse owner, Cecil Chubb, who had bought it on a whim for £6,600 three years earlier. He gave it to the nation and the Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, made him a baronet as a token of thanks. After that, the monument began to be subjected to serious examination over an extended period of time. It became the responsibility of the Ministry of Works which, worried that the property it had inherited might be unsafe because of falling stones, asked an archaeologist, William Hawley, to carry out an extensive excavation. He would be the first person to take a prolonged look at Stonehenge for many years. He replaced stones that had fallen down and secured others that were in danger of toppling over. He found human remains which indicated that the monument might have been used as a site for funerals. Most importantly, he was the first person to realise that Stonehenge was not just one monument, but the result of different activity by different groups of people over many hundreds of years. In the 1950s and early 1960s, as further research revealed how Stonehenge probably looked when it was first built, other stones were put back in their original positions. The monument we see today is therefore to a certain extent a work of restoration. Previous ages had allowed it to suffer at the mercy of time and weather, leaving it to exist as a ruin in almost any form. It is only the meticulous knowledge of our own time that has let us see it as the early people who built it in the first place might have done.
With the work of restoration distinguished scientists, as well as archaeologists and historians, have turned their attention to Stonehenge. A theory developed that the monument was placed where it was as a temple to the sun and that the individual pillars and stones could predict eclipses of the sun and the moon. Computer science was used to try to substantiate this theory and other monuments were analysed to see whether they had similar characteristics. It established that there was every reason to believe that Stonehenge and other ancient places in Britain had astronomical connections and could have been used to interpret and predict the movement of the heavens. More extravagant theories have grown up alongside these purely scientific conclusions. Some people believe that ley lines connect places such as Stonehenge with other sites in Britain, emitting psychic or mystical energy. Their magical powers are part of an old religion that in a free and tolerant world can now be reborn to celebrate its rituals in the temples from which it was driven long ago. The earliest emblem of Britain’s past still has a place in the life of the country today.
None of this of course provides final answers to the questions that still surround Stonehenge. It seems incredible, for instance, that the early inhabitants of Britain transported heavy bluestones – some of them weighing as much as 4 or 5 tons each – from Wales to Wiltshire. In 2001, a group of enthusiastic volunteers tried to see whether such a feat might be possible and, with £100,000 of lottery money behind them, constructed a replica of a Bronze Age raft with a piece of bluestone as cargo. It ended up at the bottom of the sea. A more prosaic explanation could be that the movements of glaciers carried the stones from the Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain, but that will not prevent the invention of other notions about the origins of Stonehenge. In March 2008 archaeologists returned to the site to begin important new excavations. Their work was organised and funded by the BBC for a television programme and they were hoping to prove that ancient man transported the bluestones from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain because of their healing properties. The archaeologists broke through to a layer which once held smaller bluestones and unearthed fragments of pottery and artefacts. Stonehenge, they said, could have been a ‘Neolithic Lourdes’. Britain’s most ancient monument once again captured the spirit of the age as television went in search of its secrets.
At Stonehenge, ancient and modern will always coalesce. It belongs to a time when the evidence of history is nothing more than a silent landscape and a few fragmentary relics beneath our feet. We know very little about it or the people who built it, but its deep, forgotten past is where our history begins.
