Chorea Gigantum

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From early childhood I have longed to see Stonehenge, yet the opportunity never arose until this Easter – and then the weather proved so bad that a visit to the monument itself proved impossible and a brief drive-by view was all I was permitted. The visitor is warned that a first sight of Stonehenge may be an anticlimax but for me this was far from the case; the long drive up the desolate A360 from Salisbury had prepared me, perhaps, for the otherworldly nature of Stonehenge itself. Salisbury Plain is an abandoned place; no wonder that it has stimulated so many overactive imaginations over the centuries. I was impressed not by the massiveness of Stonehenge but by its alien nature. Was this a place of worship? A little earlier that morning I had visited Salisbury Cathedral, a successor to the temples of the Romans and even the sacred groves of the Britons – an enclosed place of contact with the gods. Churches follow a culturally familiar temple theme at least three millennia old; and yet here, at Stonehenge, is something altogether other – set far outside any centre of population, as it were deliberately in the centre of a desolate wasteland, by a people to whom a pantheon of anthropomorphic gods and even a seasonal cycle would have been meaningless – a culture of the most extreme, almost cubist abstraction (as the lozenge on the chest of the Amesbury Archer demonstrates). What language did these people speak (an ancestor of Basque, perhaps)? What gods did they worship, if any? What were their social structures? The modern observer may believe that, in contrast to William Stukeley, he has thrown off the straitjacket of ‘historical’ thinking that led the 18th century antiquary to attribute the structure to the Druids. Yet we still feel uneasy once far removed from our historical reference points. 800BC means Homer, 1400BC the fall of Troy – but what does 2500BC mean? Stonehenge seems needlessly, uncomfortably old when we know so little still about our more recent ancestors, the Britons. The builders of Stonehenge are more distant from us than Australian Aborigines or stone age tribes in New Guinea – for them we have no point of reference; we cannot trace the links (are there any?) between their culture and ours. The Englishman surveying the ruins of Rome enjoys Roman culture, a Roman-influenced language, Roman laws, Roman government – to all intents and purposes he is still a Roman. The Englishman surveying Stonehenge might as well be gazing into the stars; he knows as little and has as little in common with the mysterious culture that gave this monument birth, even before one considers the questions of why and how Stonehenge was built. His Roman and British ancestors would have gazed at Stonehenge with the same wonderment and confusion that he, with all available archaeological knowledge, still cannot shake off. Prehistory is usually hidden; to investigate it is a choice, and a difficult one; but Stonehenge is prehistory that refuses to be hidden and obscure. Whoever built to last millennia purchased immortality at the price of a frustrating anonymity.

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