craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

This is an article in my ongoing series about our trip through the British Isles. For the first article, click here.

Stonehenge! Where the demons dwell,
Where the banshees live (and they do live well).
Stonehenge! Where a man is a man
And the children dance to the pipes of Pan.

I had been playing Spinal Tap's famous rock anthem in the weeks leading up to the trip to get me in the mood for our trip, and it was to the ancient monument in Wiltshire that we set out first, an hour and a half's journey from our hotel (there are a lot of hotels nearer to Stonehenge, but I wanted to stay near Oxford, since we were visiting there too and would head north to Bangor next).

One of the most vivid moments of the whole trip for me was when the car went over one of England's many rolling green hills, and all of a sudden there it was—we could see the iconic stones and people milling around them off in one of the fields. Like seeing the Eiffel tower in person for the first time, there's something special about seeing it in the flesh, even though you already know what it's supposed to look like. For me, this was also the real moment of feeling like our vacation had started, since it was the first real site we visited.

I'll say more about Stonehenge in a moment, but first a few practical remarks on the visit itself. We had perfect weather, and that combined with it being a weekend in August might have meant massive crowds, but fortunately we were there in the morning, and there weren't many people there. When we left though (around noon), the crowds were starting to mass. So my travel tip is to arrive early if you are visiting in the peak tourist season. The admission price includes an audio guide too, so there's no reason not to pick one up. English Heritage themselves estimate a full visit will take an hour and a half, so there is no reason to plan more than a half day at Stonehenge, unless you plan to hike around and examine some of the surrounding barrows and henges—which I'm sure would be fascinating to do for someone who'd read up on prehistoric Britain beforehand (and so could visualise what was so interesting and significant about a few hillocks and holes in a pasture), but with a fifteen month-old there was no question of that for us, and for most visitors Stonehenge itself is surely sufficient.

We had two reasons for visiting Stonehenge. One is that it is the most iconic monument in England, aside from perhaps Big Ben, yet because it is out in a field in some fairly remote countryside, it isn't easy to work into most visits—no matter how world-famous and important the site may be, it can be hard to justify taking a detour of several hours in order to view what is ultimately a collection of old rocks in a field. Emilie and I had both been to England multiple times, but never been in a position to take the significant detour to Stonehenge on any of those trips. But now, on this driving vacation, we had the perfect occasion to finally take the time.

The second reason—why Stonehenge is so much more than a "collection of old rocks" to me—is harder to put into words. Obviously I have a particular passion for ancient civilisation, which is why Latin and Ancient Greek appear so frequently on this blog. Learning about history, where we come from, is a way of learning about who we are today. Stonehenge was begun circa 3000 BC. To anyone with a good sense of historical dates, that date (in Northern Europe, as opposed to Egypt or Mesopotamia!) should almost be shocking: It is so ancient that the Latin language didn't even exist yet—nor did Greek! It is as far before Socrates and Buddha's time as their time is removed from us. It is, simply put, older than history.

Which is what the word 'prehistoric' means, after all. Yet we usually assume that "before history" equals "before civilisation"—but with Stonehenge, every single detail we have about the monument gives testimony to a civilisation that had achieved all sorts of advancements and sophistication. That a 5000 year-old site survives in England at all is amazing in itself, but what it tells us is so tantalizing, that the very fact that it predates history is both fascinating and frustrating: The stones were transported there over great distances, so we know they had a developed economy, and trade routes. The stones align to astronomical events such as solstices and equinoxes, so we know they had a developed calendar and the sophistication to be able to pass on knowledge to an educated elite. Building the monument required knowledge of quarying, masonry, and engineering that with the limited technology they had on hand must have been quite ingenious. And yet we don't know who they were, or what language they spoke, or what happened to them. (Well, we know the Celts moved in at some point so it's probably safe to infer that they drove them out... whoever 'they' were.)

In brief, the tantalizing glimpse into prehistoric British civilisation—the very fact that there existed in prehistory cultures worthy of the name "civilisations", now lost—is what I find so fascinating about Stonehenge. We'll see later with regard to Hadrian's wall how different those ruins are. We have letters written by soldiers at the fort, talking about everything from the weather to the clothing they want sent from the continent—all sorts of minute, day-to-day details are known about the Romans in Britain that we can learn about and know, whereas with Stonehenge there are so many questions that will remain unanswered forever.

James, for his part, enjoyed Stonehenge as a big grassy field to run around in. Only once did he point at the stones and shout an amazed "aa!"—which turned out to be occasioned not by Stonehenge at all, but by the fact that a bird was walking about on top of it.

James is right, of course. The world is a marvelous place.

Click here (password required) to see the full gallery with all our photos from Stonehenge