I
can even make out the line of a highway not far off, cutting across the
meadows, commuters’ headlights poking through the grim mist. In the
half-light, the surrounding stones seem almost familiar and scarcely
mysterious. Is this really the place that Thomas Hardy called “a very
Temple of the Winds,” describing it “rising sheer from the grass,” its
stones seeming to hum with sound? Did Christopher Wren, the great
architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, really think so much of
Stonehenge that he left his signature chiseled in one of the stones? And
why should this site now lure as many as 18,000 celebrants to a summer
solstice festival on the day the sun rises through a gap between its
central stones, bisecting the monument?
But
after the rain, when the sun breaks through the clouds and the pillars
of rock cast corridors of shadow, all misgivings are cast aside. In the
privileged calm of early morning — an enviably timed visit that can be arranged with English Heritage,
the government agency that manages the area — I begin to understand why
more than a million visitors a year are drawn here. I see, too, why its
nearly completed $44 million transformation has been so celebrated.
The
renovation has eliminated a highway that nearly abutted the stones
(leaving intact, at least for now, the heavily trafficked road some 500
feet away). And it demolished a similarly intrusive visitor center,
replacing it with another a mile and a half away, invisible from the
monument, designed by Denton Corker Marshall
to appear delicately self-effacing even while enclosing an introductory
exhibition, a cafe and an extensive gift shop. A shuttle transports
visitors to the main attraction, which requires tickets, typically
costing about $25, for entry at a specific time or about $35 for “out of
hours” stone circle access.
This
touristic enterprise also involves a kind of restoration. The goal is
not to restore the stones themselves. That would have been impossible,
even in the 12th century, when the earliest known history of Stonehenge
appeared (in a volume now on display at the visitor center): Constructed
by a race of giants, it was transported to its current site by the
wizard Merlin.
And,
anyway, what would Stonehenge be restored to? It began as a circular
earthwork, created about 3000 B.C.; its major stone circle with enormous
pillars topped by lintels, dates to about 2500 B.C. The evolving
ceremonial site included circles, ovals and horseshoe patterns and
apparently remained in use for another thousand years. Extensive work in
the 20th century lifted, straightened and set some stones in concrete
to prevent tipping. (The largest weighs more than 35 tons.)
The
goal now is to restore the landscape, which researchers have been
examining recently because of its intimate connections to the site. This
emphasis can be felt throughout the new visitor center. A 360-degree
theater uses finely detailed laser scans of the stones to show the
monument’s evolving shape, while a wall-size animated map shows
Stonehenge within a puzzling network of mounds and ditches, barrows
containing burial remnants, and vestiges of unexplained earthworks that
extend over miles. Display cases show some 300 artifacts that outline
the region’s varied modes of life and death during the site’s evolution.
A similar emphasis is evident in the elegant new $4 million Wessex Gallery,
at the nearby Salisbury Museum, which gives a reverse archaeological
history of the region, proceeding backward in time. Its 2,500 artifacts —
including the Stonehenge Archer,
a skeleton dating from as early as 2400 B.C., found in a ditch in 1978 —
are accompanied by images of a pastoral landscape that still holds
unexplored secrets.
I
am also preoccupied with the surrounding landscape that morning,
standing within the Stone Circle. It is an enclosure that leads us to
look outward. During the hours of sunrise (and sunset), when shadows are
long, the patterns change every moment. The shadows of the stones hug
the ground, climb neighboring pillars, slide over nearby ditches. The
axis of Stonehenge was originally determined by the sun’s rising and
setting during summer and winter solstices, when symmetrical movements
of shadows must have been something to behold. But even visiting at
another time of year, I feel as if I were in a languorously turning
kaleidoscope. The stones provide a medium through which we perceive the
landscape. We emerge, entranced by the expanse around us, attentive to
its details. The site reveals the setting; the setting, the site.
At
first, the landscape seemed a nondescript series of meadows; now it
becomes far more intricate. Look toward the northeast, and you clearly
see faint traces of the Avenue, an ancient earthwork path that extends
1.5 miles, ending at the River Avon. One hypothesis is that the river
was used to transport the stones of the inner ring (called “bluestones”)
which came from Wales, some 150 miles to the west.
I
walk across these fields and become aware of dips and banks, ridges and
mounds: eroded remnants of ancient human activities, many seemingly
related to the monument. Recently, the remains of a Neolithic human
settlement were discovered at the Avenue’s other end, near a circular
timber counterpart to Stonehenge. During the recent restoration, natural
rock fissures were discovered beneath the Avenue that are aligned with
Stonehenge’s solar axis and may even have determined the monument’s
location. In an article in Smithsonian magazine this month, “What Lies Beneath Stonehenge,”
Ed Caesar describes the latest explorations using three-dimensional
GPS-guided measurements that have revealed new subterranean features.
The
temptation is to think of Stonehenge as a “thing,” a monument erected
at a particular time with a particular purpose. Yet displays here
suggest that over the 1,500 years or so that the site was in use,
cultures and rituals changed along with it.
One
of the intriguing things about Stonehenge, as we are reminded again and
again, is that it can’t really be pinned down; we will never know
enough. Was it a burial site, a temple, an astronomical model, a healing
center, a monument to the ancestral dead?
We are destined to feel unsettled, even after learning from the fine exhibitions nearby. In J. M. W. Turner’s 1827 watercolor of Stonehenge,
on display in Salisbury’s Wessex Gallery, lightning strikes near the
center of the Stone Circle. The flash is luminous, exhilarating. But
dread mixes with illumination, mystery with enlightenment. Why is the
outer ground littered with the carcasses of shepherd and sheep? A bolt
from the heavens? We aren’t certain. It is a bit frightening, which
makes the painting as uncanny as the place.
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