Following the Sun (27 page)

“O dear boy. Be off now. Don't torture me with your wild escapades. And do write me a line and tell me you're alive.”

“I will,” I said, and mounted up.

I pushed off, waving with one hand, and didn't look back for fear she would be weeping.

And then I was on the road again, headed northward toward Boldre and on to Burley, through heathlands of gorse and forests where small herds of wild ponies scattered as I passed. By now the weather had improved dramatically, the May sun was in full force, and it was actually hot in the open stretches. In the countryside near Burley I ate lunch in a civilized little tea room, with a cool shaded interior and white tablecloths and clean white ladies in print dresses who eyed me in a curious, though not unfriendly manner when I clumped in to take a seat.

At Crow I skirted the town of Ringwood, taking a little country road that periodically dipped down into streams, and splashed through fords, wetting my legs with the cooling waters. And then it was on to South Fording and Damerham, to Sandleheath, through pleasant green villages to Rockbourne and Roman Villa, where I stopped to find a place to stay. There was nothing, so I began climbing, assaulting interminably long hills that taxed my legs, to Combe Bissette, where I finally found a pleasant little inn called the Fox and Goose.

I was now close enough to Salisbury to ride into town for dinner, so toward evening I pedaled off again and ate venison at a place called, appropriately, The Haunch of Venison Inn, which was built around 1320. I was served in an upstairs dark-paneled room with a setting of heavy silver and old seasoned waiters, who referred to me as “sir.” I had a pint of bitters and a glass of port after dinner, and then, feeling well stuffed, I rode home in the lingering dusk. There was still plenty of light even though it was nearly ten o'clock, and this was only May 12th. I still had almost six weeks to go before the twenty-first of June.

The following day at the beautifully sited cathedral on Salisbury Plain, workmen were mounting a new beam for the cathedral and were inviting people to inscribe a message on this great, heavy timber before it was hoisted and fixed in its place among the roof beams for the next six hundred years or so. I thought about what to say for a long time, and then inscribed a prayer: “May the Earth endure …”

As I was riding off I realized the prayer was ill-chosen, for the earth would endure as long as the sun maintained its present status. It wasn't the earth I should have worried about, it was the earth's human children.

After a ploughman's lunch on a hill, in the bright hot sun and a dry wind, I cycled slowly along the Avon River to Amesbury, drifting past well-maintained country houses, sweet-smelling woods, and wide fields. This was the fresh green England of myth and legend, and in midafternoon, somewhat fatigued, I pulled off the road, hoisted my bicycle on my shoulder, hiked back into the greenwood a few hundred yards, and lay back in a bed of bluebells for a short nap. Birds were twittering and singing overhead, a green light was sparkling in the leaves, and as I drifted off, in that half state between waking and sleeping, I imagined that Bottom and Peter Quince would emerge from the greenwood and play the play within the play from
Midsummer Night's Dream
. Better yet, as I slept, I imagined, some ethereal fairy queen would spot me and fall in love and carry me off from this boring temporal world to her fairy kingdom.

When I woke up a tawny owl was sitting on a branch above my head staring at me with its head tipped to one side.

I spent that night in a modest hotel in Amesbury, and very early the next morning rode out to one of my primary destinations, the great stone circle of Stonehenge.

This was in the time before Stonehenge was fenced and you could wander at will through the fields and under and between the great standing stones. I arrived, however, long after sunrise. The sun had come up at something like five in the morning. Long before I got there I could see the lonely cluster of upright trilithons standing together on the distant plain and rising above the grasses and wildflowers like the cast-off coronet of some giant king.

It was midweek and not a particularly special day in the Druidic calendar, when white-robed ovates and priests come here to pay homage to the sun. All about me in the watery light I could see, for the first time, the precisely placed stone markers that the ancients had arranged here on this otherwise unremarkable plain in order to track the wheeling sun, moon, and stars.

Of all the ancient monuments of the world, of all the temples and cathedrals, carved cliff faces, castles, lost cities, jungle-clad ruins, megaliths, and lonely menhirs, Stonehenge ranks as one of the best recognized sites. The great stone rows of the solar temple of Carnac across the Channel in Brittany are far grander. Avebury, just twenty miles to the north, was also a larger complex, and there are stone rows, menhirs, monoliths, megaliths, and stone circles strewn from the Hebrides and the Orkneys, throughout the British Isles, and south to Tunisia and into West Africa and even into India. Although they have not all been analyzed, almost all of these monuments appear to have solar or sometimes lunar alignments. In fact there was a theory, since generally disputed, that they were all constructed by a so-called Heliolithic culture that emanated out of Africa and the region of the Nile and spread across Europe during the early Neolithic period, when most of these monuments were constructed. As evidenced by the Siberian mammoth tusk carvings, however, the human mind came under the spell of the sun and moon some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, long before the appearance of these solar temples.

The importance of Stonehenge is due in part to the fact that it happens to be located in what emerged as one of the most literate nations on earth, and has been written about, discussed, debated, and scientifically analyzed for over five hundred years. Stonehenge was already a thousand years old when the Romans occupied England in 55
B.C.
It was recognized as an ancient relic as early as the sixth century; it was cited in literature in the seventh century, and had acquired a rich baggage of legend and myth by the twelfth century. It officially entered into the history of England in the thirteenth in a work by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote the first official account of the building of the site. According to his story, a race of sea giants from Africa once constructed a temple made of bluestone in Ireland, known as the Giant's Ring. In time these sea giants died out, and no one could lift the stones to carry them to the sacred site on Salisbury Plain in England, until Merlin came along. He was able to dismantle the Ring and had it transported and rebuilt in Britain.

Theories of the purpose of the temple at Stonehenge have varied over the ages. For centuries it was believed to be a Druidical sacrificial altar, or a temple to the sun, or a Danish victory arch, or a burial site for the dawn people who inhabited England in a mythic prehistory. Theories on how it was constructed are equally diverse. There are two kinds of stone in the temple complex, the sarsen stones, which are huge local sandstone monoliths, and the famous blue-stones, the closest of which are found a hundred miles to the west. Given the complexity of the engineering required in transporting these enormous boulders over hills and valleys to the Plains of Salisbury, raising them in specific positions on the plain to align with celestial events, and even setting them in such a way that the tops of certain stones line up with the eastern horizon, not to mention the effort involved in capping the uprights with massive lintels, it seems that perhaps the first explanation is the best. Merlin the Magus built the temple all by himself.

What is now known is that Stonehenge was not built by any one group. It was constructed over a period of some five hundred years and utilized by a number of different cultures, ending with the Druids, who were latecomers to the site, and were contemporary with the Romans. In spite of the fact that they more often worshipped in sacred oak groves and at sacred springs, the Druids are the group most commonly associated with Stonehenge in the popular mind. Neo-Druids still worship there today, or did when I was there. The British government has since prohibited them from gathering at the site at the summer solstice.

Stonehenge is one of the most heavily visited tourist sites in rural England, but what most of these visitors notice is the central ring of great stone trilithons and megaliths that stand out on the Salisbury Plain so dramatically. In fact, however, this central circle of massive upright stones is a later addition to the site and is surrounded by three rings of holes, known as the Aubrey holes, two of which lie close to the center, and one, an outer ring, lying well beyond the stone circle. The whole of it, holes and ring of stone, is encircled by a mound and ditch. Furthermore, on the north and south sides, there are two earth mounds, and on the northeast side, two more ditches running off perpendicularly from the circle. Not far from the modern road, and more or less in the middle of the perpendicular ditches, is an upright megalith, called the heel stone. There appears to be some order to all this, but that order is not entirely clear, even after a hundred years of analysis.

As early as the eighteenth century the British antiquarian William Stukeley had noticed that the inner circle of trilithons opened up to the northeast, the direction of the midsummer sunrise, and he surmised that the monument must have been deliberately oriented so that on midsummer morning the sun rose directly over the heel stone and the first rays would shine directly into the center of the ring. This alignment implied a ritualistic connection with sun worship and it was generally concluded that Stonehenge was a temple to the sun, constructed by the ancient Druids.

In the first few years of the twentieth century, the astrophysicist Sir Norman Lockyer, who had established the solar and stellar alignments of the Pyramids and Greek temples, made accurate observations at Stonehenge and concurred, based on his measurements, that the temple had more to do with astronomy and the sky than with ritualistic sacrifices, as the popular theory held. These studies were followed in the 1950s by the work of an engineer named Alexander Thom, who took up the cause of astroarcheology and began examining other megalithic sites in the British Isles, some six hundred sites all told. Thorn argued that these so-called barbarians of the late Stone Age in fact had precise working knowledge of the complexities of the solar passage and astronomy, including Pythagorean geometry, and even the complex variations of the lunar cycle. Thom was laughed out of the halls of academia by established archeologists.

Then in 1961, another outsider, this time an astronomer, entered the debate. Gerald Hawkins took precise measurements of the sunrises and sunsets during the solstices and equinoxes and employed a then newly developed machine, the computer, to calculate the solar alignments accurately. What he determined, as others had surmised earlier, was that whoever originally built Stonehenge had a deep and precise comprehension of the workings of the solar system.

Hawkins spent a season at Stonehenge investigating the peculiar arrangements of the stones and the holes. He stood at each position and measured alignments for moonrise, sunrise, and the rise of various stars, and like a good Druid priest he went out at the midsummer sunrise and filmed the rise of the summer sun over the heel stone at dawn on the summer solstice. He even went so far as to take the weather into account (how often, after all, can one expect a sunny dawn in England!) and determined that in fact at dawn the sun is more likely to be free of clouds than not. Once he had collected all the measurements and astronomical data, he fed the material into a contemporary computer, a device that now, a mere forty years since he did his work, seems as primitive as the stone circles of the ancient world. What Hawkins discovered was that Stonehenge not only precisely marked the moments of sunrise and sunset on the solstices and the equinoxes, it also marked the range of moon-rises and moonsets on important seasonal points. He put forth the argument that the great heavy circle of stones was in some ways a computer itself, a massive device that served as a brilliantly conceived astronomical calculator that could predict, precisely, future solar and lunar eclipses.

For Hawkins and the archeoastronomers who followed after him, the Aubrey holes were the key. They served as fixed reference points along a circle, and their number was essential to astronomical calculations. The cycle of the moon, for example, which takes 27.3 days, could be tracked by moving a marker by two holes each day to complete a circuit in 28 days. A much longer calculation could be accomplished by moving the marker by three holes per year to complete a full circuit in 18.67 years. In this way, it would be possible to keep track of the “nodes,” or those points at which the paths of the sun and moon will intersect to produce an eclipse.

As with the theories of earlier archeoastronomers, the argument met with criticism as soon as it was published. Whether this was in fact the intended use of the Aubrey holes is a matter of debate in the scientific community, and in more recent years other astronomical interpretations have been taken up in support of more fanciful notions about the cosmic significance of Stonehenge.

The main argument against Hawkins's theory is that Stonehenge was constructed by several different cultures over a period of centuries, which throws into question his idea that the whole complex, with its ditches and Aubrey holes and megaliths, was originally set up to function as a device to track celestial events other than sunrise and sunset.

The earliest Neolithic culture in Britain is believed to have been a group called the Windmill Hill Culture, which lived in the area around Stonehenge and Avebury about 4,500 years ago. They constructed large, often concentric, circular enclosures of earthworks and long barrows where they buried their dead. Around 2000
B.C.
these people were replaced or assimilated into another group, the Megalithic builders, who probably came out of the eastern Mediterranean and moved up through France to Brittany and across the Channel to the British Isles. This group tended to build henge monuments, or large circular, banked enclosures, also concentric. About this time, 1900
B.C.
, Stonehenge was first constructed by a group generally referred to as the Battle-ax People, who were followed shortly by or even contemporary with the Beaker People, who probably worked on the second stage of construction of the monument. Then around 1500
B.C.
, the Wessex culture built Stonehenge III, the great sarsen stone circle, consisting of thirty huge stones with an average weight of some twenty-six tons and massive lintels running around the top and, on the inside of the circle, a horseshoe of five trilithons that opened to the summer solstice.