Mike Pitts - How to Build Stonehenge

Mike Pitts is an archaeologist and award-winning journalist. He has been the editor of Britains leading archaeological magazine, British Archaeology, for over a decade, and is the author of Digging up Britain, Digging for Richard III and Hengeworld.

Stonehenge Complete

Christopher Chippindale

Digging up Britain

Mike Pitts

The Land of the White Horse

David Miles

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Stonehenge, simply by its mass, makes us aware of our relative scale and shortness of time. The gesture of removing a rock like the Heelstone from its place of finding, standing it vertical and making a marker in space that then becomes a marker in time and a mean for human individual and collective life, that is the ur-gesture of sculpture. The fact that our ancestors and the early farmers were able to exert these acts of collective imaginative purpose, fills me with joy, admiration and awe, in equal measure.

Sir Antony Gormley

There is, you might think, nothing like it: the simple, graphic genius of three great, arranged blocks. The stones seem to rise from the ground in some antediluvian heave of the Earth: yet an upended pair holds the third high above in joints that look humanly carved. As the day passes the sun casts an elongated frame that ripples across the grass. Beyond the empty, flat space, coconut palms rise above a thicket of hibiscus, frangipani and pandanus. Little clusters of ferns and tropical flowers hang from the megaliths, rooted in their uneven coral hollows.

This trilithon a word confected from Greek in the 18th century to describe three stones is in the south Pacific Ocean, on the largest island in the Kingdom of Tonga. Known today as Haamonga a Maui, it is the other side of the planet from Stonehenge, and, it is safe to say, has no connection with it other than an architectural coincidence. It is the exception that proves the rule: large, unadorned stones assembled in a way seen only in one other place, in Wiltshire, in the centre of southern England and done there on a larger scale, with a harder rock, sometimes alone and sometimes linked in a massive ring, some stones still standing after 4,500 years, some fallen or missing. There really is nothing like Stonehenge. The most basic of concepts (verticals, horizontals and rings, and nothing else) is despite this simplicity and perhaps also because of it unique.

In a childrens television programme back in 1987, Tony Hart, the presenter, drew a black vertical shape. How long is it going to take you to know what Im trying to show?, he asked, adding a second parallel shape. Not long, I think, and as soon as he started to block out a line connecting the two shapes at the top, viewers knew. The programme was broadcast in the UK by the BBC, but it could have been shown anywhere in the world, to people of any age, and few would have been unable to answer his question. Stonehenge is among the best known and most visited ancient sites in the world. It is, as The Sun newspaper recently put it, the famous rocks.

It is also the most copied monument, its singularity offering instant recognition for the least precise evocation. The modern practice could be said to have begun in the 18th century, when John Wood designed the Circus at Bath a grand ring of Georgian terraced houses and William Stukeley his garden in Grantham, Lincolnshire, both based on Stonehenges layout. Recent tributes are everywhere, according to Nancy Wisser who catalogues them from Pennsylvania in her Clonehenge blog, from Japan to Brazil, from New York to Tasmania, from the most realistic replica yet in the Window of the World theme park in Shenzhen, China, to a curvaceous thing in Taiwan fitted with movement sensors, speakers and mirrors. That simple, iconic , made in concrete, sparkling pink granite (a faithful full-scale model in Esperance, Australia, on the market as I write for $2.35 million), chocolate biscuits, portable toilets (Glastonbury Festival) or cars (Nebraska which inspired a more ambitious Carhenge at a sports centre in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, opened in 2020), is unmistakable and needs no translation.

There are really only two big questions we ask about Stonehenge: why, and how? Most commentators address the first, whether its in books, films or peer-reviewed research, or stapled wads of paper printed in multiple colours of ink with photocopied diagrams and dark photos covered in rings and arrows (after 40 years as a Stonehenge observer, I see no decline in such entertainments). Why might seem the harder question, but it is the easier: imagination is the only limit, and as testing against evidence can rarely be more than superficial, so it is almost impossible to prove a theory wrong. This, of course, is one of the great appeals of Stonehenge. We do not need to be an expert to come up with an explanation indeed not being constrained by knowledge may be an asset. And when we try to explain we are addressing not just stones, but the nature of human endeavour, the meaning and purpose of our own lives.

This book is about the second question: how it was done. Oddly not least because you might think its answer a necessary prerequisite for addressing the other question the previous volume dedicated to the issue in its entirety was published a century ago. How were the stones quarried and transported to the site? How were they shaped, arranged and raised and then rearranged? And how has the completed monument suffered, decayed and been restored to become what we see today? It feels like the right time for such a book, in a world where people are becoming less interested in unfounded promises about the future and more in the realities of everyday lives. Certainly there is much new to say, not just because the very idea of addressing the question feels new, but also thanks to new research and new scientific techniques. As we journey from quarries to a complete Stonehenge, in every chapter there is new evidence and new thinking, about geology, engineering and archaeology, much of it arising even as I was writing (and frequently rewriting).

The people who made Stonehenge created something that lives on in worlds they couldnt possibly have imagined (see ). In all likelihood it will survive humanity, in a few billion years, perhaps, its distinctive form encased in new geological strata as the Earth slowly folds the Eurasian land mass back into its arms. In the meantime, while it is still there and we have the skills to do so, we have to ask the question:

How do we build Stonehenge?

If I could choose, I would visit Stonehenge on a May afternoon when the blossom is out and sun-drenched showers roll across the great wilderness of Salisbury Plain. And I would do so in 1805, with William Cunnington.