Stonehenge

or: What is a henge?

There are a lot of words in the English language that I still haven’t heard and others that I have no idea what they mean.

Until yesterday, ‘henge’ was one such word.

Sure, I’ve known it as part of ‘Stonehenge’ but I didn’t realise this was actually two words. I thought it was merely a name. I was wrong.

Not coincidentally, yesterday was also the day I visited Stonehenge.

As it turns out, yesterday was a day of henge visits as I went to three – Avebury, Stonehenge and Woodhenge.

A henge is a monument from the Neolithic period (this is about the 3rd millennium BC) typically of upright stone or wood pillars built on top of a large circular bank and an internal ditch. They are thought to have been used during rituals as the structure of the moats are not defensive in nature so this eliminated the possibility of these henge being used for war purposes.

Both Avebury and Stonehenge are World Heritage sites and were co-listed in 1986. Avebury is also the only place that has a village within its stone circles.

Woodhenge

Woodhenge is a reconstruction of what was previously there. It was discovered that wood pillars were in a similar formation to Stonehenge. These pillars are thought to have been about 9m tall. In the middle of the circle was discovered the remains of a child. There were some other remains here and there too. The reconstruction is of fairly low pillars placed in the circle formation. It is possible to imagine how the shadows would have appeared if these pillars had been 9m.

Avebury has a series of circles, an avenue to explore and even a Neolithic tomb and are not considered the same monument. They were structured over centuries. The stones are a mix of large and small, sculptured and raw across all the monuments.

The henge itself is about 1.3km in circumference and contains the largest stone circle in the world with two smaller circles within that. It looks quite impressive. Shouldn’t be surprising since some of the stones weigh over 4 tonnes.

A carved rock at Avebury

New discoveries continue to be made. It was recently found there is a “secret square” beneath the stone circle. What this may mean is being determined.

There are eight self-guided walks or you can choose to walk with a guide.

Stonehenge was a surprise. After many years of seeing this on television and photos, I knew the shape but the scale and location was a surprise. It is possible to easily see the structure from the highway. It looks quite small at that distance.

Stonehenge from the car

This is the only site of the three which has an entrance fee. The fee entitles you to stand near the stones on one side of a barricade. There are many people here and not so many at either of the other two henge. In fact, we only met one other person at Woodhenge and Avebury is so spread out that while there are quite a few people there too, it is fairly easy to spend some time alone with each stone (should you choose) and you are able to touch these ones.

I’m unsure why Avebury isn’t more well known. I don’t remember ever hearing the name mentioned when really, mentioning Stonehenge and not mentioning Avebury is doing a disservice to that area. Not only that, they are all close to each other so from a visiting point of view, it is possible to see all three in the same day, stop to eat (since Avebury has a cafe and you could pass a pub at a meal time while driving depending on the order you chose to visit the henge).

Stonehenge has some stones stacked on top of each other in a unique way, and weighing up to 25 tonnes, whereas Avebury has its stones placed by themselves. From a “How on earth did they do that?” perspective, Stonehenge would raise a few more questions. Perhaps that’s the reason why it has more visitors and publicity?

In all cases, no-one is really sure why they were built or how they were built.

That something of this size and scale was by a group of people without the methods we are more familiar with makes it worthy of a visit in itself.

They are amazing structures.

* Thanks to Birds of Tokyo for the title to this post.