Stonehenge a New Understanding (43 page)

Other finds include spotted dolerite hammerstones, just like those from Stonehenge, which were found at a small quarry for extracting metamorphosed mudstone. No rock of this type has been found at Stonehenge so this quarry cannot be linked to the extraction of bluestones.

Tim and Geoff have developed their own ideas about why bluestones were brought to Stonehenge. For them, the reason is revealed by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britanniae)
, written in 1136.
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Geoffrey of Monmouth was not what we’d call a real historian—his work is described as pseudo-history by scholars today, and is full of fantastical stories mixed with matters of fact. His highly embroidered history, like similar fanciful tales today, sold very well.

In one passage, Geoffrey of Monmouth describes Stonehenge as a cenotaph put up by the Britons to commemorate the massacre of 460 Britons by the treacherous Saxons during peace talks at “the Cloister of
Ambrius” (an old name for Amesbury). Merlin the magician decides that the stones for this memorial have to come from a magical stone circle—the Giants’ Ring or Giants’ Dance—erected on Mount Killaurus in Ireland by a race of giants. He takes thousands of men with him to capture the Irish circle and bring the stones to England. The reason that only these stones will do is that they have healing powers. The giants throw water against the stones and then bathe in it to be cured of maladies. Of course, Geoffrey’s account of this magical episode doesn’t distinguish between bluestones and sarsens.

Proposed routes by which the bluestones were taken from Preseli to Stonehenge. I favor the more northerly route because it avoids difficult sea crossings.

Is it possible that a Neolithic myth survived as oral tradition for over four thousand years, to be eventually written down by Geoffrey of Monmouth? Tim and Geoff think so, but others are less than convinced. Aubrey Burl, doyen of stone-circle studies, considers that the story was
developed to explain the presence of standing stones that monks had noted in Kildare in Ireland: “Geoffrey’s Stonehenge story is not a relic of folk memory but an early twelfth-century attempt, blemished by geological incompetence, to explain how the ponderous sarsens had been erected. The legend is no more than a monkish mixture of Merlin, magic, and imagination. It has nothing to do with the bluestones, but by geographical misfortune the Preselis happened to lie midway between Kildare and Salisbury Plain. Archaeological gullibility did the rest.”
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It has to be pointed out that any connection between this twelfth-century story and the Neolithic building of Stonehenge would be the most outstanding example of the survival of mythic tradition anywhere in the entire world. Oral history generally doesn’t survive for more than five hundred years, so the chances of Geoffrey of Monmouth recording a myth with Neolithic origins are exceedingly remote.

Since Geoffrey of Monmouth’s time, however, people have indeed occasionally believed that the Stonehenge stones have healing properties. Richard Atkinson noted in his book
Stonehenge
that an eighteenth-century guidebook lamented the use of hammers by visitors to break off fragments as keepsakes, stemming from “the belief that the stones were factitious and were possessed of unusual powers of healing.”
⁴³
Hammers could be bought for the purpose in nearby Amesbury. Geoff and Tim have drawn attention to the preferential selection of bluestones for this treatment, but this is not really evidence that people believed that it was only these stones, and not the sarsens, that were supposed to heal. The problem here is that sarsen is desperately resistant to chipping with a hammer whereas dolerite flakes more easily.

Geoff and Tim have also pointed to the large number of bluestones removed from Stonehenge. Yet, when the proportion of missing bluestones is compared to the proportion of missing sarsen uprights and lintels, there is no evidence for selective bias in choosing bluestones to take away. Even if there were a bias, it would not be evidence for a longstanding belief in healing properties. I would argue that the bluestones had a particular meaning in the Neolithic (and only then), which is why they were brought here, and that that meaning no longer exists. We are left with the pragmatic historical reality that the bluestones are smaller than the sarsens, and therefore may have been easier for subsequent
inhabitants of Salisbury Plain to “quarry” for making stone tools or to heave off the site to reuse as building stone for barns, walls, churches, houses, and so on.

Support for the “healing stones” hypothesis is also gleaned from historical accounts of certain of the springheads of Preseli as being holy wells. There is some Pembrokeshire folklore about stones and healing, too. Geoff and Tim have identified a few “enhanced springheads,” where stones have been removed from around the water source to create a small pool, sometimes by also constructing a dry stone wall. In their view, the presence of occasional cup-marked stones, small stone cairns, and standing stones at springheads around Carn Menyn is proof that these folkloric traditions of holiness and healing date back to prehistory.

Finally, Tim has looked for any evidence from the Stonehenge area that people might have come there to be healed of illnesses—as though it were a prehistoric place of pilgrimage, something like Lourdes. The argument goes that if this particular place attracted lots of very sick people, there should perhaps be a large number of previously sick dead people buried nearby (readers will of course bear in mind that bluestone healing doesn’t actually work, and Geoff and Tim have never suggested that it does).

Tim points to indications of trauma in three skeletons from burials in this part of Salisbury Plain.
⁴⁴
The most spectacular of these is the Amesbury Archer, the long-distance traveler from the Continent.
⁴⁵
When Jacqui McKinley examined the Amesbury Archer’s skeleton, she noticed a couple of bones were missing: one of his ribs (which might have been removed before burial) and his right patella (kneecap). On closer inspection, Jacqui also saw that the top of his right tibia (the larger of the two leg bones below the knee) has a deep lesion caused by an unhealed wound. At some point in his youth, many years before his death, this man suffered a knee injury that destroyed his patella; this wound would have festered for the rest of his life, exuding pus continually, and would have caused great pain.

Tim also points out that two skeletons, dating to around 2000 BC, are examples of healing. These have evidence of trepanation, or trephination, and are from two round barrows, Amesbury G51 and Amesbury G71, both east of the River Avon near Bulford.
⁴⁶
Trepanation is the practice of
removing a piece of bone from the skull to expose the surface of the brain, known as the
dura mater
. Trepanation has been practised in modern times, in East Africa and Britain, for example.
⁴⁷
Guides to self-trepanation are today available on the web (carrying it out on another person is illegal). It is thought to have been used in prehistory as a means of releasing evil spirits, curing epilepsy, or alleviating headaches; with luck the patient could survive.
⁴⁸
In one case in Germany, a Neolithic skull was trepanned to treat a depressed fracture of the skull caused by blunt-force trauma. Trepanation was practiced across Europe from the Mesolithic to at least the Bronze Age, and there are about ten examples known from Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain. Unfortunately for the healing theory, they are widely scattered across Britain, but two of the ten
are
from round barrows three miles from Stonehenge, so it could mean something.

Thus, out of more than fifty skeletons of the Copper Age and Early Bronze Age from the Stonehenge environs, three individuals have evidence for healing. This is not a particularly convincing number. If Stonehenge really were a sort of hospital, it seems not to have served a very large clientele. Most people buried in the area have no visible traces of long-term illness (although, of course, not many illnesses leave traces on the human skeleton). More importantly, these three that Tim uses as evidence of trauma/surgery, were all buried here some 700–1,000 years after the bluestones came to Stonehenge.

The healing hypothesis is alluring, but it has a number of difficulties and contradictions. If the bluestones were brought from Preseli because of their healing powers, why are they all concentrated at Stonehenge, and not more widely distributed in contemporary monument complexes, such as Avebury and Stanton Drew? None of the Avebury standing stones are of bluestone. Six small chippings of bluestones have, admittedly, been found near Avebury,
⁴⁹
four on the top of Silbury Hill, one in the top of a ditch of the Windmill Hill causewayed enclosure, and the sixth from the surface of a field near Avebury—all could have ended up in these places long after the Neolithic, maybe even deposited as recently as the last few centuries. Why also were bluestone chippings not treasured as, for example, grave goods? Prehistoric objects made of spotted dolerite include axes, ax-hammers, battleaxes, and a mace, but they are very rare compared to those made of other rock types. Might
we not expect something with healing powers to be more widely disseminated?

The theory also suffers from anachronism. One may be able to identify modern or Medieval stories and attributions linking bluestones and their Preseli source with healing, but to then force on to these a link four thousand to five thousand years back into the past requires some convincing evidence of continuity through the ages. It’s not enough to simply show that a spring described as a holy well today also has a prehistoric standing stone or cup-marked stone nearby. As Aubrey Burl has pointed out, the healing story is likely to have arisen within the historical circumstances of the Christian Church during the early Medieval period, when there were plenty of stories about healing involving water and stones. Holy wells are found throughout Britain and Europe, but there’s no way to find out whether they were considered to have special properties before the start of Christianity, let alone as early as the Neolithic.

In the summer of 2010, the Stonehenge Riverside Project team found time to visit Preseli together and take a look for ourselves. The most recent geological work had pinpointed a spotted dolerite outcrop at Carn Goedog as a likely source of many of the Stonehenge dolerite orthostats (standing stones) and, at Craig Rhosyfelin, in a small valley to the north, a rhyolite source for many of the Stonehenge chippings. The position of these outcrops on the northern slopes of Preseli suggested to us that the route from Preseli that is usually proposed—southward to Milford Haven—might be completely wrong. A northern emphasis for the bluestone sources would also run counter to the local evidence supporting the healing hypothesis, since the holy wells and springs are principally on the southern flanks of Preseli.

My Sheffield colleague Andrew Chamberlain focused on four standing stones on the hill of Waun Mawn, also on the northern slopes of Preseli. Previous archaeologists have wondered if this arc of dolerite stones is all that remains of a stone circle that has been dismantled.
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If so, are the stones that once stood here now among the bluestones standing at Stonehenge? To drive home the possibility, Andrew pointed out that the diameter and spacing of this possible former circle at Waun Mawn would have been almost exactly the same as that of the Aubrey Hole circle at Stonehenge.

On a sunny summer day, the team walked out to Waun Mawn. One of the stones still stands upright, but the other three have fallen. Unlike the stones of the six stone circles elsewhere in Preseli, these are proper Stonehenge-sized monoliths and not
Spinal Tap
miniatures.
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They occupy a commanding position on a natural saddle with views to the sea in two directions, across the Gwaun and Nevern valleys. Would geophysical survey reveal whether Waun Mawn was once a stone circle?

The hill on which Waun Mawn stands slopes down to the village of Brynberian, not far from the portal dolmen of Pentre Ifan. Nearby lies the rhyolite outcrop of Craig Rhosyfelin, a mass of pillar-shaped bluestones, rising vertically from the valley floor, and just waiting to be detached and taken away.

Colin has excavated a standing-stone quarry at Vestra Fjold in Orkney so he knows a fair bit about what a Neolithic megalith quarry should look like.
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He has discovered that Neolithic quarry workers did not need stone mauls and pounders, nor did they leave much in the way of stone waste. Instead, they split natural pillars away from the bedrock by following existing fault lines, presumably using wooden wedges that were hammered into cracks and left in the rain to swell, thereby detaching the monoliths from the living rock. Neolithic quarry workers would then dig a rough trench at the base of the outcrop, within which the monoliths could be propped on stones before being set on to wooden cradles and hauled away.