Stonehenge, up close -- really, really close.
Over at National Geographic's "All Terrain" blog, Tom Zeller has a neat post up about his recent visit to Stonehenge:
LinkIt was a spirited evening at the Woodbridge Inn pub that adjoins the field where the Stonehenge Riverside Project has erected, just north of Upavon, its tent city staging area—a veritable Woodstock of campsites housing over 130 students, archaeologists, assorted volunteers and other academics of varying stripes. (...)
Stonehenge really is something to behold. Whatever the site's purpose—and this has been a matter of wide, and wild, speculation—the sheer size of the stones (the heaviest are estimated to weigh-in at about 45 tons) and the distance from which they came (the larger stones were brought from Marlborough Downs, about 19 miles away; the smaller Bluestones from the Preseli Mountains of Wales—some 240 miles off) conjure a frightening, slow, and surely sometimes painful dedication to purpose, considering the lack of modern hydraulics.
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The Preseli Mountains are 250km away, not 240 miles.
Agh, back in 2001 I was lucky enough to be at Stonehenge on the night of the summer solstice, it was apparently the first time in years that they'd actually opened up the site to allow people right there among the stones - that next morning I watched the sun rise right between the stones as I stood there in the middle of the circle, packed in with countless other people in various states of chemical, spiritual, and/or just plain experiential alteration ... what a glorious, happy, -surreal- experience that entire night was!
hehe, I was there too.
Apparently, the whole thing was built by one guy from Flint, Michigan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRRDzFROMx0
-- Jon
A couple of tour companies in the UK have special permission to offer tours of stonehenge either before or after hours a couple of times a week. It costs about $750 but they pick you up at your hotel in london, give you a full day tour of the countyside and then take you to stonehenge and you get to stay as long as you want. It is waaay cool.
http://www.stonehengetours.com/html/stonehenge_access_tours.htm
when i was living in london, i read an amazing story in the paper (forget which one) about the carvings found there. scientists used lasers to scan the stones and computers to enhance the detail (the carvings have been heavily eroded by time). what did they find carvings of (all over the stones)? axe heads. hundreds of them. like notches in a bedpost. so very very creepy. on a completely unrelated subject, does anyone know if human sacrifices really help crops grow? because my houseplants aren't doing so well and my roommate is reeealy getting on my nerves....
rebuilt for the tourists!
http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news243.htm
Stonehenge is an amazing experience, even if you're stuck behind a cordon looking from a distance.
We didn't used to take much care of these kind of things. Farmers used parts of Avebury stone circle to build their houses. There's a big, busy, road going through the middle of it now.
Google Maps show Stonehenge and Avebury nicely. (I can't post links here.)
I wonder if they bent a coat hanger in to one of the shapes on the stones and were mysteriously knocked out...
This comment brought to you by the people that remember the Time-Life series of books on Mysterious Phenomenon.
Actually, according to English Heritage, which oversees Stonehenge, the Preseli Mountains of Wales are 240 miles, or 385 kilometers away (see http://tinyurl.com/2n2r2m).
Tom Zeller Jr.
National Geographic
ngm.typepad.com/all_terrain/