Unyielding Stonehenge

 Unyielding Stonehenge

 

After a few times goggling at Stonehenge from traffic jams on the main road to the South West, the A303, it was a relief to turn the tables. One early morning in July I could stand among the Stones and goggle gleefully at the already forming jam on the road (schools were just out.  It was a wonderful, smug feeling.

 

That was one, directed response to being amongst the Stones. Otherwise I found the experience confusing – perhaps with good reason. From a distance (say, the A303) the Stones are monumental and mysterious. There well-known silhouettes are part of Britain’s identity.

 

However: when you get near, and into, other great monuments – castles, cathedrals, temples, palaces – usually the awe is joined by some (at least) understanding of the places’ function, of the people who built and used them (and perhaps still do).

 

You connect things up, over time and culture. These were the people who made this, this was their purpose, that was (and maybe is) their culture, this is how they and it connect to us.

 

Stonehenge is silent about all this. When you stand inches away from all the impossible largeness, you can’t really interrogate it. It baffles you.

 

There the Stones undoubtedly are a huge standing fact of nearly five thousand years. But apart from the visual and physical there’s nothing to grasp onto, apart from speculation.

 

In the Visitor’s Centre, there’s a wall containing various quotations from distinguished visitors from recent centuries. Some project imaginings onto the stones. Others, like me, find a blank.

 

God knows what their use was! Samuel Pepys 1668

 

To all these questions beginning “Why?” there is but one short, simple and perfectly correct answer: We do not know and shall probably never know. Richard Atkinson, archaeologist 1956

 

July 2022