Read the introduction to this series from editor Ben Libman.
This was the Altar Stone
pale-green micaceous stone
History is made by
the reworking and transformation of a material reality
The detrital zircon load largely comprises Mesoproterozoic and Archaean sources, whereas rutile and apatite are dominated by a mid-Ordovician source. The ages of these grains indicate derivation from an ultimate Laurentian crystalline source region that was overprinted by Grampian (around 460 million years ago) magmatism. Detrital age comparisons to sedimentary packages throughout Britain and Ireland reveal a remarkable similarity to the Old Red Sandstone of the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland. Such a provenance implies that the Altar Stone, a 6 tonne shaped block, was sourced at least 750 km from its current location.
taking days to complete, the journey from quarry to circle
The life of a region depends ultimately on its geologic substratum
the physical monument becomes displaced geographically and chronologically
several communities each ‘contributed’ a stone
There were five ingredients: timber, rope, labour, time and organization
distance has a cosmological role
following old tracks on relatively level ground along intermittently peopled valleys
machines for world making
sledges could become mired, and there was always a chance of injury or worse
haunt of chuckling owls
the movement of social life is itself a movement in (not on) a landscape
From here, a broad trail must have been carved through the Wessex landscape
the form of monuments emerges through choreography of construction
(it takes a very long time to travel what is only a short distance as the crow flies)
reparations for opening up wounds in the land
to whose bosom the faithful dead returned
the coombes wend and wind their way through the landscape, with numerous side branches and “dead” ends
It too was a house of the dead
Of course, some of these could have died and been cremated elsewhere, making the journey to Stonehenge in a bag or basket
At Stonehenge
the lintels support only themselves
enclosing places that had already acquired importance
monumentalizing life could refer to the process by which aspects of everyday, unconsidered practice were made visible
crystallization of activity within a relational field
not via some once and for all methodological procedure, but by the active and imaginative creation of history
a life proper to matter
Barrows of the century-darkened
whole history
crude
Could I enter that unholpen brain
Cabined and comfortless and insecure ?
archeology is the study of . . . the temporality of landscapes
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Mr. Hayman asked the Minister of Works whether he will make a statement on the defacement of Stonehenge on the night of 1st-2nd March, 1961.
Lord John Hope: Yes, Sir. During the early hours of 2nd March, the words “Ban the Bomb” and an emblem 1175 which, I understand, represents a movement concerned with nuclear disarmament were applied in distemper across nine of the stones; and on the following night crude images of animals etc. were daubed with buff-white paint on ten stones. The police are pursuing inquiries and are co-operating by increasing their patrols in the area. The paint has been removed and no serious damage has resulted from these acts of vandalism.
Mr. Hayman: While we are all grateful that there has been no serious damage to this prehistoric monument which means so much to the country, will the right hon. Gentleman and the police do all they can to get hold of the vandals responsible in each case? Will the Minister also bear in mind that the general public will not grudge any extra expense which may be necessary to safeguard this monument?
Lord John Hope: Yes. Of course, we will do what we can. The only ray of hope I can offer the hon. Member is that the moon was full that night and these people therefore may have been lunatics.
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There is a story that during World War I a British airstrip commander had complained that the megaliths constituted a hazard to his planes, and formally requested that they be flattened
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In 1894 Sir Edmund Antrobus, owner of Stonehenge, refused to allow the Ancient Monuments Commission to fence Stonehenge. He still saw it as an important public space. If they tried to fence the stones, he said, “an indignant public might act as the London public did in regards to the railings of Hyde Park, when the claim to hold meetings was interfered with” . . . His son, however, offered Stonehenge to the nation, at the excessively high price of £125,000 and with the proviso that he retain hunting and grazing rights. When this offer was turned down, he threatened to sell it to the Americans. In 1901, with the approval of the Society of Antiquaries, he erected a barbed wire fence around the monument on the specious grounds that the new military camp on Salisbury Plain might result in damage. He put in two custodians and charged an entrance fee of a shilling a head.
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There was, for example, a fine intercession by Francis Hervey, a Tory M.P: “Are the absurd relics of our barbarian predecessors,” he clearly roared, “who found time hanging heavily on their hands, and set about piling up great barrows and rings of stones, to be preserved at the cost of the infringement of property rights?”
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Stonehenge is rather a hackneyed shrine of pilgrimage. At the time of my former visit a picnic-party was making libations of beer on the dreadful altar-sites. But the mighty mystery of the place has not yet been stared out of countenance; and as on this occasion there were no picnickers we were left to drink deep of all its ambiguities and intensities. It stands as lonely in history as it does on the great plain whose many-tinted green waves, as they roll away from it, seem to symbolise the ebb of the long centuries which have left it so portentously unexplained. You may put a hundred questions to these rough-hewn giants as they bend in grim contemplation of their fallen companions; but your curiosity falls dead in the vast sunny stillness that enshrouds them, and the strange monument, with all its unspoken memories, becomes simply a heart-stirring picture in a land of pictures. It is indeed immensely vague and immensely deep. At a distance you see it standing in a shallow dell of the plain, looking hardly larger than a group of ten-pins on a bowling-green. I can fancy sitting all a summer’s day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world’s duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring to the nerves; if you are disposed to feel that the life of man has rather a thin surface, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial grey pillars may serve to represent for you the pathless vaults beneath the house of history.
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I have returned to Stonehenge and discovered some new holes.
I noticed too, but not for the first time, that the high stones are so deeply honeycombed that the starlings use them as nests. Whether these holes in the high-up stones are natural or artificial I cannot tell. In Wales, starlings are called Adar y Drudwy (meaning Birds of the Druids). Perhaps the druids made these holes on purpose for their loquacious birds to nest in. This calls to my mind Pliny’s description of the starling in his time that could speak Greek.
While I think it is very probable that Stonehenge already existed long before the Romans became masters of Britain, they would have been delighted with the stateliness and grandeur of it, and (considering the dryness of its situation) would have found it suitable for urn-burial. There are about forty-five barrows near Stonehenge. It must have taken a great deal of time to collect so many thousand loads of earth, and soldiers have better things to do, so I do not think these barrows were for burying the dead slain in battles. When Christianity became the settled religion, the temples that had been dedicated to the heathen gods were converted to Christian use and worship.
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Stanenges, where stones of wonderful size have been erected in the manner of doorways, so that doorway appears to have been raised on doorway; but no one can conceive how such great stones have been raised aloft, or why they were built there.
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[T]he Anglo-Saxons, who rarely bothered to rename natural landscape features, feel the need to lay claim to the Celtic Gôr y Cewri (Court of the Giants). It has become Stan Hencg.
at the crossing of several leys
all the radiating
magnetic flow, I suppose
unloads its charge
Stones that whisper, stones that dance, that play on pipes or fiddle, that tremble at cock-crow, that eat and drink, stones that march as an army
sotto voce, the Ministry of Defence “owns” vast stretches of Salisbury plain
It [is] a continuous process.
in autumn rooks ritually destroy their nests, one each morning
Series edited by Ben Libman.
Ian Maxton is a novelist and critic. His work has been published in Apocalypse Confidential, Boston Review, Protean, and elsewhere.
minor literature[s] 