Stonehenge

The history behind it

So I had a Note that, for me, kind of blew up (I usually only see these numbers on someone like Matt Taibbi or Bari Weiss). I’ll admit that it was an angry Note that I wrote after reading about two vandals who desecrated Stonehenge.

Here’s the Note.

Now I read and tried to reply to every comment and I’d say 95% of people agreed with the sentiment of my Note. The others though……. They were a mixture of:

• “ooo don’t you think that’s too harsh?” No I don’t. Not in the slightest. Here’s my reasoning, take it or leave it. Today’s activists use easily washable cornstarch paint, tomorrows idiot crazies, seeing that their messaging isn’t working use something worse, like acid. It’s better to punish them severely today rather than risk real damage to our priceless historical artefacts tomorrow. As a side note, lets see these idiots do a stunt like this to the Sphinx or The Great Mosque at Mecca and see what happens.

• “It was only orange coloured cornstarch” This one infuriated me the most. I DO NOT CARE IF IT WAS ONLY CORNSTARCH. Please see my above bullet point as to why I don’t care it was only cornstarch.

Now before I go any further I would like to point out that yes, I would like to see us using less oil but not in the way these idiots do. We need to phase the use out ONLY when we have a viable alternative. Do these psychopaths not understand what would happen if we stopped using oil tomorrow? Does dear Greta understand how many people would die? It’s in the number that would give Bill Gates a hard on he hasn’t had since that Island he frequented.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/just-stop-oil-what-happens-six-billion-might-die//#:~:text=But%20what%20would%20happen%20if,so%20oil%2C%20gas%20and%20coal.

Is that on the horizon? Nope. I maintain that we, in the West need to build more nuclear power plants to provide clean energy to people, lowering bills and limiting our dependence on countries that would do us harm or even try to blackmail us. Is that too much to ask?

Also stop pissing off people by sitting in the middle of roads. Imagine if your wife was in labour having an emergency or your Mum was suffering from a blood clot! These people will kill someone one day and they will say it’s an acceptable loss.

Now onto the main part of this piece. Stonehenge!! (I shall take information from various websites but generally go over the main points of Stonehenge.)

Stonehenge is a prehistoric megalithic structure on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. It consists of an outer ring of vertical sarsen standing stones, each around 13 feet (4.0 m) high, seven feet (2.1 m) wide, and weighing around 25 tons, topped by connecting horizontal lintel stones. Inside is a ring of smaller bluestones. Inside these are free-standing trilithons, two bulkier vertical sarsens joined by one lintel. The whole monument, now ruinous, is aligned towards the sunrise on the summer solstice and sunset on the winter solstice.

Archaeologists believe that Stonehenge was constructed in several phases from around 3100 BC to 1600 BC, with the circle of large sarsen stones placed between 2600 BC and 2400 BC. The surrounding circular earth bank and ditch, which constitute the earliest phase of the monument, have been dated to about 3100 BC. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the bluestones were given their current positions between 2400 and 2200 BC, although they may have been at the site as early as 3000 BC.

One of the most famous landmarks in the United Kingdom, Stonehenge is regarded as a British cultural icon. It has been a legally protected scheduled monument since 1882, when legislation to protect historic monuments was first successfully introduced in Britain. The site and its surroundings were added to UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 1986. Stonehenge is owned by the Crown and managed by English Heritage; the surrounding land is owned by the National Trust of which I am a member.

Speaking of the UNESCO. Here’s a small part from their wiki page about World Heritage Sites.

“The destruction of cultural assets and identity-establishing sites is one of the primary goals of modern asymmetrical warfare. Terrorists, rebels, and mercenary armies deliberately smash archaeological sites, sacred and secular monuments and loot libraries, archives and museums.”

Hmmmmm.

Mike Parker Pearson, leader of the Stonehenge Riverside Project based around Durrington Walls, noted that Stonehenge appears to have been associated with burial from the earliest period of its existence:

Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B.C. The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge's sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument's use and demonstrates that it was still very much a domain of the dead.

Stonehenge evolved in several construction phases spanning at least 1500 years. There is evidence of large-scale construction on and around the monument that perhaps extends the landscape's time frame to 6500 years. Dating and understanding the various phases of activity are complicated by disturbance of the natural chalk by periglacial effects and animal burrowing, poor quality early excavation records, and a lack of accurate, scientifically verified dates.

Salisbury Plain was then still wooded, but, 4,000 years later, during the earlier Neolithic, people built a cause-wayed enclosure at Robin Hood's Ball, and long barrow tombs in the surrounding landscape. In approximately 3500 BC, a Stonehenge Cursus was built 2,300 feet (700 m) north of the site as the first farmers began to clear the trees and develop the area.

Charcoal from the 'Blick Mead' camp 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from Stonehenge (near the Vespasian's Camp site) has been dated to 4000 BC. The University of Buckingham's Humanities Research Institute believes that the community who built Stonehenge lived here over a period of several millennia, making it potentially "one of the pivotal places in the history of the Stonehenge landscape."

The first monument consisted of a circular bank and ditch enclosure made of Late Cretaceous Seaford chalk, measuring about 360 feet (110 m) in diameter, with a large entrance to the north east and a smaller one to the south. It stood in open grassland on a slightly sloping spot.

The builders placed the bones of deer and oxen in the bottom of the ditch, as well as some worked flint tools. The bones were considerably older than the antler picks used to dig the ditch, and the people who buried them had looked after them for some time prior to burial. The ditch was continuous but had been dug in sections, like the ditches of the earlier causewayed enclosures in the area. The chalk dug from the ditch was piled up to form the bank. This first stage is dated to around 3100 BC

The second phase of construction occurred approximately between 2900 and 2600 BC. The number of postholes dating to the early third millennium BC suggests that some form of timber structure was built within the enclosure during this period. Further standing timbers were placed at the northeast entrance, and a parallel alignment of posts ran inwards from the southern entrance. The postholes are smaller than the Aubrey Holes, being only around 16 inches (0.4 m) in diameter, and are much less regularly spaced. The bank was purposely reduced in height and the ditch continued to silt up. At least twenty-five of the Aubrey Holes are known to have contained later, intrusive, cremation burials dating to the two centuries after the monument's inception. It seems that whatever the holes' initial function, it changed to become a funerary one during Phase two. Thirty further cremations were placed in the enclosure's ditch and at other points within the monument, mostly in the eastern half. Stonehenge is therefore interpreted as functioning as an enclosed cremation cemetery at this time, the earliest known cremation cemetery in the British Isles.

Archaeological excavation has indicated that around 2600 BC, the builders abandoned timber in favour of stone and dug two concentric arrays of holes (the Q and R Holes) in the centre of the site.

The holes held up to 80 standing stones, only 43 of which can be traced today. It is generally accepted that the bluestones (some of which are made of dolerite, an igneous rock), were transported by the builders from the Preseli Hills, 150 miles (240 km) away in modern-day Pembrokeshire in Wales. What made these primitive humans haul these huge stones, weighing two tonnes each so far. What was the driving force? I think it’s incredible what they achieved.

During the next major phase of activity, 30 enormous Oligocene–Miocene sarsen stones were brought to the site. They came from a quarry around 16 miles (26 km) north of Stonehenge, in West Woods, Wiltshire.

Later in the Bronze Age, although the exact details of activities during this period are still unclear, the bluestones appear to have been re-erected. They were placed within the outer sarsen circle and may have been trimmed in some way.

The Y and Z Holes are the last known construction at Stonehenge, built about 1600 BC, and the last usage of it was probably during the Iron Age. Roman coins and medieval artefacts have all been found in or around the monument but it is unknown if the monument was in continuous use throughout British prehistory and beyond, or exactly how it would have been used. A decapitated seventh-century Saxon man was excavated from Stonehenge in 1923. The site was known to scholars during the Middle Ages and since then it has been studied and adopted by numerous groups.

Stonehenge at the summer solstice

The earliest-known realistic painting of Stonehenge, drawn on site with watercolours by Lucas de Heere between 1573 and 1575.

So there you have it. A brief history on the construction of Stonehenge. I’ve added links etc for people to do follow up information if they are interested.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/world-stonehenge/stonehenge-timeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge

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I hope I find you all happy and healthy.

Vulkan