We all know that da ‘henge was built by druids hundreds of years before the dawn of history (for reasons unknown) but it’s now been established the crowning piece was from Scotland not Wales as once thought.
Built 5,124 years ago (according to wikipedia) I find it fascinating that they (you know, them) now believe the standing stones were from England, some smaller stuff was from Wales and the one stone parked on top of them all was from about 400 miles away in Scotland.
The navigation involved to get the stones and to know where they actually were when they chose them blows my mind. And the communication involved to get them and put them together over the years is fascinating.
Does it reflect their spheres of influence?
Where you going?
Scotland.
Oooh, bring me back a piece of rock.
Where the demons dwell?
Thats it, just off the A303.
Where the banshees live
(has anyone told Siouxsie?)
The M6 was a lot quieter then, if you had a wide load.
I always wondered what sort of toll they would have to pay on the Severn Bridge…
It was a troll on, or under, bridges in them days.
“The navigation involved to get the stones and to know where they actually were when they chose them blows my mind.”
If I’d been involved I think I’d have gone for something more like Shrubberyhenge.
“The navigation involved to get the stones and to know where they actually were when they chose them blows my mind.”
Wasn’t that Ian Stewart’s job?
Can I raise a practical question at this point?
When it comes to Stonehnege, I think we can all relate to Ylvis’s thoughts on the matter.
They are a very witty duo from Norway.
Specially the kitchen part
@clive
I read this earlier and marvelled at it too (Whilst trying to ignore Tapisms…)
How on earth did they get it from Scotland to Wiltshire?
And how and why did they navigate there and more importantly how did they get back? In the dark ages they had quasi maps that listed town after town from one place to another place that’s all they had then to leapfrog their way along so what did they have in 3000bc?
And how did they know there were rocks in Scotland? It’s really interesting. They sent some of their most intelligent people all the way to Scotland … to bring back the stone must have taken a couple of years.
I actually kinda know the answer to that, chatting to my Indigenous Australian friends.
It is a little like landmark navigating – turn left at the Wolf rock (for example) and go straight until you reach the tree that looks like a cloud. My friend’s people navigated the desert around here, and went to WA and back using that kind of process.
@freddy-steady
An ancestor of Michelle Mone?
@jaygee
Bit slow this morning, you’ve lost me…
You’re actually quite right @freddy-steady – not one of my better ones
FWIW, she’s a greedy, on-the-make chancer from Glasgae who is famed for pitching for large scale government projects she is plainly not qualified to undertake (awarded a £200,000,000 contract to supply PPE by Boris and the boys during COVID. The stuff the company owned by her and her aptly named husband, Doug Barrowman, produced was unusable)
Haven’t read the article, but could it not have been a glacial deposit and then found locally by the henge builders? I believe these sort of out-of-place rocks are called ‘erratics’.
That was a definite theory until the Scottish stone was identified. Don’t know if it’s now debunked?
Thing about the glacial theory (only just thought this) … did someone ever say … now we need some rocks to go round the outside so pop over to the glacial field and pick up some Welsh ones … oh and we need a special one for the top make that a nice Scottish piece (don’t bother with all that English shite lying around).
The thing with eccentrics, certainly in the US, is that they look very different to local stones., so it may have attracted attention. Does it look different to the other ones? I’m trying to apply Occam’s Razor here.
You can only see the top of it – the thing is under about 12 tonnes of fallen comrades.
Nah, the aliens dropped it off on their way back from the Pyramids, innit?
It’s well known that Merlin magicked the Giants Dance from Ireland where it was originally sited, which became Stonehenge.
Zorg to intergalactic HQ “We’ve just hyperspaced at twice the speed of light and we’re hovering over the LZ now boss … what shall we do?”
Intergallactic HQ to Zorg “No idea … how about putting a rock on top of another rock”
Zorg to Intergallactic HQ “wilco”
Not only from Scotland, it’s from right up the top of Scotland! In this article it seems to suggest moving it was well within the limits of Neolithic technology, but my question is ‘why?’.
‘Look…bear with me here…I think there are some really nice rocks in Scotland, which would look just right there. Hang the expense, let’s go for it’. ‘Yeah, brilliant idea…off you go’.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/14/stonehenge-megalith-came-from-scotland-not-wales-jaw-dropping-study-finds?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
400 years from now, English Heritage is a distant folk memory and the A303 is a curious strip of overgrown weeds running roughly WSW to ENE across the country. The island’s population has topped out, post-apocalypse, in the low hundred thousands.
For lack of anything better to do on a dull Tuesday afternoon, a few members of the Hawkwinde Culte – followers of an ancient musical tribe that lived wild in abandoned places called ‘skwatts’ – will use their levitools to manouvre a few large rocks that they found lying around close to their tent city on the central English plain.
Placing the big stone on top of the smaller stones to form a door-like opening, they will, much to their astonishment, generate a timespace portal through which they can clearly see woad-smeared folk banging drums, quaffing cider, singing gutteral nonsense songs and dancing around a camp fire.
Intergalactic fly-tipping cowboy builders?
Green Men on flying saucer: “We’ve got all these leftovers in the hold from The Pyramids and those other jobs. I told you they wouldn’t go for those Welsh stones and the big Scottish one. We’ll have to dump ’em somewhere down in Wiltshire one night, while nobody’s looking, and hop it back to Alpha Centauri”.
Fuddled natives next morning: “Bloody hell! What are we gonna do with this mysterious pile of rocks what ‘ave suddenly appeared overnight?”
Chief Druid: “Well. We could use them to build ourselves a solar observatory, I s’pose..”
You know how Brits who went to Spain in the 1960s brought back straw donkeys?
Perhaps prehistoric people from Salisbury went to the Orkneys for their holibobs, and wanted a momento. Was Club 18-30 around then?
I think 30 was old age then.
“Oh Edric! Not another great big Stone!”
“Dunno what comes over me, Frida. I just get a bit carried away sometimes. Still, I think that Druid down the road might take it off our hands. He seems to like big stones.”
“Hi honey, I’m home”
Lock up your daughters, Edgar Broughton is hitting the comeback trail
I remember going to visit Stonehenge in about 1972 when I was 10.
It was pretty good: there was no fence around it at that time. You just paid the entrance money and then you could go right up to the stones and touch them and everything. Seems amazing now….
I’m not going to bother looking it up, but from my memories of BBC4 programmes about Stonehenge and that era, there was an interconnected culture around Britain at that time, with significant centres in the North of Scotland and Orkney. The analysis of remains in Stonehenge show that people from all around Britain travelled there for ceremonies, and this would mainly have been round the coast as the land was heavily forested then. There are even burials of people from the Alps and the Mediterranean. And lapis lazuli has been found there – at the time it would have to have been traded, probably through many hands, from what is now Afghanistan.
The origin of this stone is only the latest change in thinking about the site. A few years ago, for example, it was suggested that the main ceremony was the Winter Solstice, not the Summer one, as the people would have wanted the sun to come back from its low point.
“The right side of history” is often used as a phrase to cut off political discussion, but the “history” of even this site, which is about 4,500 years old is still not settled.
Caithness and Orkney are thought of as the remote north of Britain these days. But in the past they would have been pretty good stop off points for people traveling from Scandinavia to Ireland, Wales or the west of England.
I’m from Caithness, which of course means “Land of the Catt People”, who were believed to be a Pictish tribe (though archaeologists are unsure whether they were the original version or the one on Let’s Dance.)
The Afterword is 4,500 years old? Bloody hell; I’ve been here from the start – no wonder I feel ancient!
Never mind the why, how about the how?
The bulk of the distance was likely by sea but getting it to the seaside and then from must have been a genuinely remarkable feat. O’er hill and down dale even by the most accessible route.
And again, how? Rollers? Horse power?
Fucking hell. You have to hope it was worth it. ‘There. We’ve done it! Let us now pray to our Pagan Gods!’
‘Any change in our fortunes that we can identify?’
‘Well… no’
“But it hasn’t got any worse.”
“Yet.”
They probably used a camper van like @fentonsteve
Don’t be silly. It wouldn’t have been a camper van.
It would obviously have been a foot operated articulated low loader. Like Fred Flintstone’s car out of The Flintstones.
Maybe Ryan Air had more generous baggage allowances back then.