TRAVELS WITH THE WNP

In Search of Heroes, Part IV: Secrets of the Ancient Stones
By Delle Jacobs

A few days ago, my son and I were reminiscing about our trip to England with a friend last year, and he said, "The thing that got me about England was that everywhere you look, you saw something that wasn't just old, it was thousands of years old."

It did seem like that. We found Roman ruins in Bath, and among them Celtic artifacts dating even farther back in time. At Haddon Hall, which is merely medieval, we found a stone altar left behind by the Romans. Chester was filled with Roman ruins, and even in London we found an ancient Roman wall. But the ancient stone megaliths make even the Romans and Celts seem recent. Check out this site for some wonderful walking tours of the stone circles and megaliths of Britain: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/celynog/index.htm

Although I had set one of my earlier books, Loki's Daughters, in a stone circle modeled after Swinside Circle in the Lake District, http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/celynog/lake_district.htm, I wasn't really looking for heroes on that part of the journey. My heroine was the Keeper of the Stones, but she lived in a time long past the days of the creators of the stone circles, and her people knew almost nothing about their circle. They only knew it kept the days for them if they continued to move the stones around the circle every day. The day I visited Stonehenge, I was going even farther back in time, looking for the people who had come before, trying to grasp what the stones meant to them.

Everybody goes to Stonehenge, it seems. I met people from all over the world, heard a whirlwind of languages, experienced the same silent moments when the wind seemed to blow our breath away. Strangers took each other's pictures before the stones, trying to somehow capture that connection with the ancient past. I exchanged cameras with a young man from Lebanon. I hope his picture turned out well because mine really caught my excitement as I stood there on the wind-blown Salisbury Plain, on ground ancient men must have found so sacred that they labored intensively for hundreds of years to raise giant stones in a magnificent pattern.

Many years ago, I read the book Stonehenge Decoded by Gerald S. Hawkins. His second book on the subject is Beyond Stonehenge, and I recommend both. Like so many people, I had associated the place with the Celtic Druids, probably because that's what the first antiquarians thought. Even Julius Caesar made that connection when he first invaded Britain. But by then, Stonehenge was already about 2,000 years old. It had been built and abandoned long before the Celts arrived. Many of the stones were brought all the way from Wales on rafts, and all of them had to be moved across the plain to the site because the native stone, chalk, is not suitable for such a monument. Here, you see my son standing between the two types of stones. His hand rests on the blue stone from Wales, which feels strikingly cooler to the touch from the stone behind him, which was used for sarsen stones in a later building episode.

Standing on the plain with the wind blowing my hair quite wildly, I saw what I couldn't find in all the books I had read - how really immense the structure is and how precisely it had been made. A man wearing a day-glow vest was dwarfed as he climbed a 20-foot ladder that did not reach the top of the sarsen stones. Knobs were carved on the tops of the upright stones, and the stones that were meant to lie atop are dished out to fit the knobs. Many of the cross-piece stones are no longer in place, but the knobs where the horizontal stones should have fit are still visible.

I cannot help but agree, this place is much more than a place for animal sacrifice or ancient Druidic rites. It is a working machine that foretold the future, when moons would rise, the exact time and place the mid-summer sun would break the horizon. It brought order to the universe. It does not work quite as is should now, for despite the immense knowledge those ancient people had accumulated in order to build such a complex structure, the universe has shifted in ways they could not have predicted in the 4,000 years since construction. Perhaps it was abandoned because its imperfections had already begun to show. Things no longer aligned so perfectly after a thousand years or so. What do you do then? Build another one?

There was something missing at Stonehenge I had expected to find. Like the others who visited the famous site, all I could do was stare in awe. And yet something was missing at Stonehenge. Of course we all understood we couldn't enter the circle so that it is protected, but something of its mystic pull seemed unfulfilled.

We went on to Woodhenge, located very close by. Few people did this. None of the ancient timbers have survived. But archaeologists can tell by the soil differences where ancient timbers have decayed, and this site has been re-constructed using concrete "stumps". It would have made a better tourist site if they had tried to re-erect wooden poles, but it is easier to comprehend as it is. Yet "comprehend" is the wrong word. The posts form six rings over a large area, and they seem to just disappear into a "forest" of posts rather than forming a recognizable pattern. If we'd had more time, we would have tried to understand it better. But we are like too many tourists with too much to see, yet a desire to see and understand it all, right now, and hurry before we miss the next thing we must visit.

We drove on to Avebury, regretfully passing up the West Kennet Long Barrow, which I promised myself I will visit another time. Avebury, though, caught us in its enchanting web the minute we first spied it. A tiny medieval/Tudor relic of a village nestles on the edge of the site and intrudes into the three giant, overlapping stone circles. Sheep graze on the grounds, but they appear unpuzzled by the eccentric habits of the people wandering their field. I've heard it said that you're nobody until you've been ignored by a cat. It seems to apply to sheep too.

Avebury is astoundingly different from Stonehenge. Its purpose seems to be entirely different, too. Click here for a site that gives an excellent comparison between Stonehenge and Avebury.

The stones to build the Avebury circle came from nearby Avebury Hills. These are really strange stones. None of the obviously engineered look of Stonehenge here. Each stone is unique and seems to have its own character, its own personality. Some are immense compared to the ones shown here, and others quite a bit smaller, yet they are all within the same circles. One is pentagon shaped, flattened front and rear, and set on one side, but others remind me of distorted mushrooms or grotesque dwarves or orcs that might have stepped out of The Lord of the Rings. When you see these stones erected at odd angles and realize some of them remain as they were set thousands of years ago despite frenzied efforts in medieval times to destroy the circles, you can't help but wonder...Why set a huge stone on its most precarious corner if it were meant only to mark a point in a circle? Everything about the stones has something to say. As we walked along the paths and touched the stones, we could not help but feel a part of a certain mystic circle full of gods gathered in a communion that passed the barriers of time and encompassed us.

Right or wrong, all three of us independently came to the notion that each stone must have been chosen for what it was rather than simply hauled there because it was a stone. We could imagine ancient stone cutters feeling that a particular stone "spoke" to them, perhaps believing the stone itself was one of the gods. But like stone cutters in all times, perhaps they used their chisels and tools to enhance the image, bringing out what they saw as the intrinsic soul of the stone.

Does this sound bizarre? Look at some of the stones for yourself.

Funny thing - after hundreds of years studying these circles, now researchers are beginning to see some of the stones have actually been carved to look more like faces and other objects. Look back at those photos again. There seems to be a spiral right in the middle of one, and likely it didn't get there naturally. And are those protrusions meant to be horns? There is another stone which researchers now conclude has a carved face with horns. Who knows what the other stones might have looked like four millennia ago, when they were fresh and new, with no corners or noses broken off? How frightening must they have been to the medieval Christians if they had remnants of faces? Is it any wonder, if this was so, that Christians thought themselves in the midst of demons and so zealously tore down the stones and cut them up into building blocks?

I think we may never know the truth of these places. But it is no wonder to me that all three of us took home long-lasting memories of the day we walked among the gods.

 

To read last month's Travel article, click here

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