The Claim
No One knows how the most famous ancient monument in Britain was built
Stonehenge is a fascinating monument of iron age accomplishment, with the stone circle being famous across the whole globe, and visited by more than 1.5 million people each year and growing.
Even though the structure is rather simple and doesn’t contain anything “other-worldly”, the big question is how did such early people managed to build it in the first place. The structure that stands today isn’t even the original monument on the site, with the first one believed to have been a cremation site made mostly of wood and built around 3000 BC, with the Stonehenge that stands today thought to date from around 2500 BC.
The actually physical construction method is believed to be known, as there are many other burial sites around the country called dolmens that were built in the same manner. Large rocks would be slid over wet logs and then tipped into a hole to allow them to stand up-right, after this the stone would be covered in earth to create a long ramp to slide the top stone up, before digging away the earth to let the top stone rest on the others.
The only problem with this particular monument is that the minor stones that were used to build it came from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales, which are over 150 miles away. A big problem with the distance is that the stones weigh between 2 and 5 tons each, and if so many were dragged so far, it would have taken hundreds of highly organised people years to complete.
The larger standing stones are all from a local source and weigh on average 25 tons, with the biggest one, the Heel stone weighing in at 30 tons. These bigger stones are of the type called “sarsen”, taken from a source only 20 miles away were many more of this type still litter the country side.
The smaller blue stones from the Preseli Hills are the ones that have people confused, as the level of technology during 2500 BC Britain wasn’t exactly great. There have been no remains of ships from this time that would have been capable of sailing such a large amount of very heavy stones, with the only sea capable vessels of the day being nothing more than a crude canoe or basic row boat.
(A map of the most probable route if the stones were taken by sea)
If the stones were transported over land then a huge amount of land flattening would have to take place to make sure the gradient of the slope was small enough to drag the huge stones up. The shear amount of mining and resources this would take is simply to much, with south Wales being quite hilly and carving passages through mountains and building bridges over rivers would be beyond their capabilities with basic iron age tools.
There is also no evidence that the stones were dragged from the area as there havn’t been any pathways cut through hilly terrain, suggesting the only way they could have moved them would be by boat, but they didn’t have a capable vessel to do so at the time.
One of the most widely accepted theories is that the stones were moved during the last ice age. Perhaps with them being clipped off the tops off the hills and moved inside a glacier before being thawed out some 150 miles away.
This theory is quickly dismissed by certain groups, as no other stones of this type from the Preseli Hills have been found in the area, and to think that every single stone moved there by a glacier is either in the monument or “missing” doesn’t convince many people.
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