Salisbury and Stonehenge

The stones in the dawn light

Recently we paid a visit to Salisbury, the main reason being to see Stonehenge (of course).  I had booked this tour back in July, and we weren't visiting until December.  The reason for the long delay  was that the tour we wanted to go on was actually this special access tour. This means we went before the henge was actually open to visitors.  But even better was that we weren't restricted to standing behind the barrier (about 30m from the stones), but instead could get right up inside the stones.  As you can imagine these sorts of tickets are pretty popular, and we were restricted to weekend trips, hence the incredibly long wait.

Just a few of the barrows around Stonehenge, the landscape is full of earthworks

They are really quite big

In fact the wait was so long that I actually booked a hotel in Salisbury for the weekend, forgot I had done so, booked another hotel, and then got random text messages from the original hotel which I ignored thinking they had been sent to me by mistake.  Have to try and not do that again!  But the place we ended up booking was really good, so I can't really complain.  It had some of the best food I have eaten whilst I have been in the UK, which is kind of surprising from a hotel in Salisbury.  But the scallops, I'm drooling just thinking about them, and the pork belly with fig, oh man!

But we weren't here to eat, we were here to walk in the footsteps of the neolithic man.  So rather early on the Sunday morning we were off through the gloom and the slight drizzle to the stones.  They are set in a slightly bizarre location, really close to a rather busy road, though to be fair, the road is probably busier than usual because of the stones.  Apparently they are planning on shifting the road and building a big visitor centre and things.  Which perhaps makes sense.  You would think Stonehenge is one of the most visited sites in the UK, and yet the visitor centre is a demountable, and the car park is tiny.

Obligatory cheesy photo

The slaughter-stone and the heel stone in the distance

So anyway this tour we took, the guide is involved in a lot of the archaeological digs around the area so he really had a lot of information for us.  As we were there we could see there were some other people who had also thought the out-of-hours tickets sounded good.  But the thing with out-of-hours is that not even the visitor centre is open, so you can't get an audio guide or anything, and there aren't any interpretive signs up.  So really it's just a bunch of rocks, if you aren't there with someone who knows their stuff.  We saw a couple of them go up to the security guards and ask them questions, and some only stayed for 15 minutes.

There was also a group of drummers whilst we were there, that was slightly weird, but I imagine they aren't all that uncommon.  So they stood around in a circle and sang for a while, then started taking photos of themselves with the stones.  But our guide, Pat Shelley, was amazing.  Seriously if you are ever going to visit the stones this is the guy to do it with.  Not only does he know so much about the stones themselves, he also knows how it all fits into the wider landscape.  Though don't go with him if you want to get all druid-y and start chanting.  It seems that a lot of people in this area don't really hold with that sort of behaviour.

From inside the circle - looks bigger from this angle

The big knobbly bit used to be in the ground

Surrounding you are hundreds of other neolithic sites, there are a few in the car park in fact, which are marked with just what looks like a manhole.  They were from around 8000BC and used to hold massive wooden posts.  They are actually the oldest monuments in the area, but they don't get so much as a sign.  But all around the henge are burial mounds, heaps of them, all over the place, once you know what to look for.  There are also random ditches and banks, but these are really hard to see since they are thousands of years old.

We also walked along the avenue, from the river to the henge there is a bank-ditch then a wide path followed by another ditch then bank.  And it appears to be the route of gentlest slope up to the stones from the river.  But what is more incredible is that for most of the time the stones are hidden behind a small rise, but then when you are quite close you come round a corner and suddenly the stones just appear.  It's really quite cool to walk up that way to the stones, it really feels like that is how people thousands of years ago would also have approached, but for them it would have been this real procession (not that anyone really knows).

Stone-Age dowel

It was funny, but as we approached the stones from the outside both Dave and I commented on how it looked a lot smaller than we thought it would, but then once we got inside the stones, it suddenly felt much bigger again.  And the stones are massive, there is no hiding that.  It was incredible to see the amount of work that must have gone into the creation.  The stones are all really quite smooth, and you can see from some of the ones which have fallen over that they came from much larger pieces and the amount that they chipped away.  And these people were stone age people, so just bashing stone against stone until you got what you wanted.  It was cool to see how old the concept of a dowel is, or whatever they call it when it is in stone, but they all locked together, as you can see evidence of in the photo to the left.  The bit sticking up would have stuck into a hole in the stone sitting on top of it.

There's also the slaughter stone, which unfortunately had nothing to do with human sacrifice, apparently there's no evidence of any sacrifices going on, which I was a bit disappointed about.  It's called the slaughter stone because of the iron oxide, which makes water pooling in it look like blood.  Which you can kind of see in the photo above.  The thought is that the slaughter stone used to be a bit of a gateway into the sacred site.  Which lines up with the Newgrange passage tomb we saw in Ireland, that definitely had a stone gate that you had to step over to get inside.

Approaching the stones from the Avenue, they suddenly appear from behind the crest of the hill

Woodhenge near Durrington Wells

Near the slaughter stone is the heel stone, this is standing off by itself, almost in the road.  From inside the circle the sun rises over this stone on the summer solstice, but it's also aligned to the winter solstice sunset, and some people think that Stonehenge was actually more important at the winter solstice, than the summer one.  Though tell that to the 10's of thousands of people who descend on the stones on the summer solstice.  The idea is that Stonehenge was the area of death, whilst around Durrington Wells was the living.  And they were connected by the river and then the avenue up to the stones.  Which is why people think there are a lot of burial mounds around the place, and cremated remains, but no evidence of life.  Whereas around Durrington Wells, which is only like 5 miles away, there is heaps of evidence of life.  The idea in vogue at the moment is that on the winter solstice you would make the journey from Durrington Wells up the avenue, to see the sun set, the death of that year, marking the rebirth of the next one, that sort of thing.

What can I say, the tour was really great, and I got such a feel for the area and how much stuff was around.  It was also pretty amazing to see what an effect humans can have on the landscape.  If you knew where to look you could still see the evidence of the earthworks from thousands of years ago, still there.  Which makes you wonder what effect all our industrialisation is having on the earth now, and how that's going to look in 6000 years time.