Do Not Touch the Stones
Photographing Stonehenge
I stood on a small dirt road, next to a highway in the English countryside, alone with the ghosts of people who walked this land before the druids did. The stones I was photographing were placed on the Amesbury Plain more than 4000 years ago, and their mystique has called to people over the millennia. On this inky, cloudy night, they were a darker blackness, barely silhouetted against the faint orange glow of Salisbury.
We had an appointment to go inside Stonehenge the following morning, but in the weeks since we’d planned the trip, I had thought of nothing but making pictures at night. My fondest hope had been to get a clear night, to shoot stars wheeling over the site, because I simply could not conceive of a more magical look than that. However, March in the UK doesn’t generally provide too many clear nights, so I had prepared myself for the possibility that I’d have to find different magic. Clouds had formed a solid sheet of grey as we’d driven south from the Birmingham airport, and showed no signs of breaking up before the end of time. The eerie glow of distant city lights on those clouds made a nice second place to star trails.
A light breeze blew across the land, so I hung a camera bag on my tripod’s center column for stability and started shooting. Focusing on dark shadows against a slightly less dark sky was extremely difficult, but the stones’ solid edges made it just possible. My first shot, which was 30 seconds long, turned out to be my best. Always looking for a new angle, though, I made several more exposures at a variety of settings, including one that was 921 seconds, or a little over 15 minutes.
Standing alone in the dark with no light and only a 3 kg club for a weapon does strange things to your mind. We evolved with daytime eyes and a need to be in a protected area once darkness falls, or at least with other people and a fire. Even in a place where we can be pretty confident there aren’t any predators, fear of the dark gnaws at the ancient corners of our minds. I had to keep suppressing the urge to flee, to hide under something. And when I successfully pushed non-existent wolves, bears, and highwaymen out of mind, I still had to contend with fleeting thoughts of ghosts and devils. My modern, rational mind isn’t immune to such imagery, deeply buried as it is in humanity’s stories and fears.
So close to a place that many believe to have been a center of human sacrifice, it was easy to conjure wavering beings of malevolent green light sliding across the land to possess my soul. I saw horsemen rising over the curve of the hill, rough furs flapping in the wind of their passage, battleaxes waving above their heads. The best image I conjured, probably due to a life of sci-fi novels, was the one in which there had been a dimensional shift, and aliens had pulled me into another universe, where I was to live alone, in the dark, to the end of my days.
It was about then that I realized that I hadn’t seen a car in about a half hour. As empty as the countryside can feel, the UK’s population density is over 400 people per sq. km., or more than twice that of the Mid-Atlantic States, the US’s most populous region. Though it was completely dark, it was only 8 pm, and with two highways meeting just a few hundred meters from where I stood, there should have been a nearly constant flow of traffic.
My wife and her brother had dropped me off on their way to buy groceries for our family vacation, so I waited in the increasingly cold breeze for them to come back. I shook off the disturbing images out of my amygdala and got back to shooting, since I knew that would distract me enough to keep me warm. I knew I already had the picture I wanted, but it never hurts to try a few more ideas. Besides, the only other option in the darkness was to check email on my work-provided phone, and that is no way to start a vacation.
As I waited for my camera to run the 15-minute exposure, my phone’s buzzing, the first sound I’d heard in some time that I didn’t make myself, made me jump. My wife was calling to say that the highway department had closed the road for construction just after they dropped me off. She had arranged with one of the guys to come pick me up, so I needed to be at the main road within a few minutes.
The truck pulled up shortly, and a man with a shaved head and rough-looking face asked in a dense Welsh accent, “Are you Brian, then?”
“I am. Are you the bold knight come to rescue the village idiot?”
He gave a hearty laugh, tinged with the slight rattle of lungs that have smoked a lot of cigarettes, “Aye! That I am tonight. Didja get good pictures?”
“I think so. It’s spooky out here with the ghosts of the druids, though.”
“I expect it is. Here we are, then,” he finished, dropping me off. “Have a good visit.”
The next morning, still under a cold, cloudy sky, I practically vibrated with excitement as we crossed the tunnel under the highway from the visitor center to Stonehenge itself. I love to touch and be near the things that people make, especially old things. Nearly all of my mugs are handmade, because I like to commune with the artists who made them as I have my morning coffee. Knowing that a craftsman of 500 or 1000 or 2000 years ago made a column or a statue with hands exactly like mine connects me to the thread of human history, and I was greatly disappointed that the one rule I really had to follow at the monument was not to touch the delicate, 50-ton stones.
For years I’d heard two themes when people talk about Stonehenge: “You can feel the energy coming from earth itself, it’s a power center, you know,” and, “Underwhelming. Do you realize the rocks are only 6 meters tall? And the circle itself is only 20 across?” I suppose that if one were to expect visions of Sulis, Maponos or other Celtic gods, and then discover that Stonehenge is merely a circle of giant stones built over several hundred years from huge boulders dragged across as much as 240 miles of open land, it could be a disappointing experience. While I didn’t feel the hands of ancient gods upon my brow, and the ghosts, marauders and aliens of the night before were long gone, I did feel the weight of all that time and work.
Although we regularly use building materials that are larger than those at Stonehenge, we have trucks and trains to haul this stuff. We have cranes to erect it. We have computer models to design it. We have a hundred schools of design theory to determine how we want it to look, or to provide us with rules we ought to break. In 2400 BCE, they had to haul these massive blocks from the North Sea coast and from Wales, by hand, with few roads, and no centralized government.
According to the Stonehenge web site, construction required at least 30,000,000 man-hours over several phases of work, spanning more than 1000 years. Being unable to conceive of just how much time that is on its own, I divided by 24 to get days (1.25 million), by 365 to get years (3424.65), and one more calculation to arrive at 85 lifetimes of people with a 40-year lifespan.
The first earthworks, now a small, circular berm on the plain, were made in 3100 BCE, about the same time the Mayan calendar begins, and Egypt’s First Dynasty is founded. Seven hundred years later, around 2400 BCE, the first stones were dragged about 240 miles from Wales to the Amesbury plain to make the outer circle, while elsewhere, the Great Pyramids were completed and legal codes started to appear. A few hundred years later, around 2000 BCE, the largest stones, weighing 50 tons, were hauled 25 miles by teams of 500–600 men and erected in the inner circle, and in other parts of the world, people began domesticating horses, China entered the Bronze Age, the Minoan civilization began in Crete, and Abraham founded Judaism. In 1500 BCE, 300–400 years before the Trojan War, just as the Mycenean civilization began, the final pieces that make up the Stonehenge that we still recognize today were put into place. For more than 1500 years people built, used, and added to the stone circle.
After its construction 400 years passed before the Trojan War occurred, and another 300 rolled by before Homer codified the legends about it in 800 BCE. A few hundred years later, the 500-year rise of the Roman Republic, began, followed by the invasion of England by Rome, and then the 500-year fall of the Roman Empire. About 100 years after that, English monarchy developed in the 7th or 8th Century CE. In 1215, feudal barons wrote, and forced King John to accept, the Magna Carta, one of the first examples of a king giving up some of his power. Four hundred years later, England began its colonization of huge swathes of the world, eventually covering a quarter of Earth, and a fifth of its population. In 1776, one of those colonies rose up to declare itself an independent nation, amidst English wars against the French. Finally, the 20th C. saw the zenith of England’s power, and the growth of monument tourism in the peace that followed the world wars. For 3500 years those stones have stood on the plain, witness to nearly all of British history.
In a completely irrelevant side note, but since you’re still with me, I figure you’ll forgive a couple paragraphs to further explicate my love of ancient things, there’s a bridge on the Peloponnesian Peninsula that is supposed to be the oldest bridge still standing on Earth. It’s a tiny, but massive-looking pile of boulders that spans a narrow gully, with a track just wide enough for one ox cart, and the hole through the boulders for a stream is less than a meter across. The bridge stands just off the main road that takes you to Nafplio from the east and is marked with a small brown sign that modestly says, “Mycenaean Bridge.”
What the brown sign doesn’t say, and what I said to every visitor I took from my home in Athens to Nafplio, my favorite town in Greece, is, “This bridge is ooooooooold! It’s from the 17th Century, BCE! It was built before Agamemnon and Achilles and Odysseus lived!” The bridge is simple, crude, and resilient, having survived 3700 years of Greek earthquakes, spring floods, once-a-decade freezes, forest fires, and the pillaging that has wrecked so many of the temples and governmental buildings throughout the country for a couple thousand years. It’s also the oldest known answer to the question, “Hey, maybe instead of taking the path up the hill, around the top of the gully, what if we just built a … thing … to cross it?” Seriously, they might not even have had a word for it yet.
Standing in the circle at Stonehenge, recognizing that its construction began fully 700 years before the Mycenaean Bridge was built, my heart just about stopped. I know I couldn’t breathe for a moment. To hell with the legends about human sacrifice, the marking of the new year, the New Agey wiccanism that has developed over the past 50 years around it, I was standing in the middle of a human construction that spans the shift from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Most of the world still hadn’t developed writing when it was built. The urge to reach out and touch the stones, to feel an object that had been worked by human hands so long ago nearly overwhelmed me. My hand was stayed by the docent, eyeing me ever more narrowly as I got closer to the stones, who would surely kick me out of the site if I broke the only rule we’d been given – “Do not touch the stones.”
