Use your theodolite

Ring of Brodgar, Orkney

Daniel Defoe​ , in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), was unimpressed by the prehistoric remains. Arriving at the circle of nineteen standing stones at Boscawen-Un in Cornwall, he noted with baffled irritation that ‘all that can be learn’d of them is, That here they are.’ Stonehenge left early modern viewers cold. Pepys looked at the megaliths in 1668 and shrugged: ‘God knows what their use was.’ John Aubrey, the first person to make a serious study of stone circles, put his finger on the problem: ‘These Antiquities are so exceeding old that no Bookes doe reach them.’ He developed a more effective method. Using measurements and comparative surveys of different circles with notes ‘writt upon the spott’, he was able to work out that megalithic monuments were of distinct types and that they predated the Romans, Saxons and Danes. He thus, almost single-handedly, created the concept of prehistory and invented field archaeology. Like many antiquaries, however, he found difficulty in screwing his courage to the point of publication. Aubrey died in 1697, leaving his notes in chaos and prehistory in the hands of a small number of varyingly eccentric specialists under whose influence megalithic sites came to be described generically as ‘druidic’, while remaining very much a minority taste. Dr Johnson, inspecting the circle at Kinchyle in Inverness-shire on his Highland tour, found ‘neither art nor power in it’, adding that, as far as druidic temples went, ‘seeing one is quite enough.’ This was his second. At the first, at Strichen in Aberdeenshire, Boswell acknowledged that he had failed to manage his friend’s expectations of the circle, having ‘augmented it’ in his mind in the fifteen years since his last visit. By the summer of 1773, all that remained at Strichen was ‘two stones set up on end, with a long one laid upon them … and one stone at a little distance from them’.

If Boswell and Johnson returned today, they would find considerably more to look at. As Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings write in Stone Circles, ‘to say that [the site] has had a chequered history is an understatement.’ Each of the individual standing stones at Strichen has been removed and replaced twice, while the three-stone arrangement has been repositioned once. Enthusiasm has at times been as unhelpful as indifference. Soon after Boswell and Johnson’s visit, the fashion for the picturesque led to attempts at making a more evocative scene. The site was ‘landscaped’ with added soil and an atmospheric planting of trees and shrubs. Then, in 1830, the whole circle was unceremoniously removed by a tenant farmer. He was told by the landowner, Lord Lovat, to put the stones back – which he did, though in no particular order.

As archaeology got under way in the 19th century, a circular bank was identified, and in 1903 the correct site for the stones was located and they were returned to their original positions. All was well until 1965, when the stones were once again removed – this time by mechanical diggers during a tree-felling operation – and dumped in a nearby quarry, triggering local and then national outrage. The archaeologist Aubrey Burl, of whose original Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany this is a revised and updated version, came to the rescue and started excavation work in 1979. Burl confirmed the correct location of the circle and found that the recumbent three-stone setting had, surprisingly, landed back in the right place. He established that the original composition had been about fifteen metres wide, with the megaliths set in a stone bank covered with broken quartz. Other curious discoveries, some of them dramatic, included an urn containing cremated female remains, a cup-marked stone buried in a rock-lined pit and, in the middle of the circle, a ring cairn with a central ‘cist’ or stone box grave. There were signs that there had been a timber circle at one time and also indications that the site had remained in use into the Iron Age. With all this information it was felt possible to reconstruct Strichen more accurately. In 1981-82, the stones were re-erected in the sockets that had been found during Burl’s excavation and the stone bank was rebuilt. Visitors are now directed to it by a brown ‘heritage’ sign and, Stone Circles tells us, there is a convenient car park with picnic table.

Strichen’s story is not atypical. The appreciation and understanding of stone circles hasn’t been a linear process. For every advance there have been setbacks, blunders and some bitter disputes. No site is safe. In 1979, an official from the Department of the Environment was checking arrangements at Stonehenge ahead of a visit from the Prince of Wales when he noticed a bright yellow digger heading towards the Heel Stone. He managed to stop it and was told on inquiry that the Post Office was installing a new telephone cable; the engineers had drawn a straight line on the map that went directly through the circle. Stonehenge by then belonged to the Crown and has been administered by English Heritage since 1984, during which time it has been an almost constant subject of dispute. If, as the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes wrote, every age has ‘the Stonehenge it deserves – or desires’, the experience of the last forty years suggests an uneasy zeitgeist manifesting on Salisbury Plain. In the 1980s, as the Conservative government introduced legislation that made increasingly heavy-handed attempts to stop the New Age Travellers’ convoys which were infuriating farmers and landowners, Stonehenge was closed at the summer solstice. English Heritage responded to protests at the site with great force, culminating in the summer of 1989 with the imposition of a four-mile exclusion zone secured by razor wire and patrolled by helicopters. There were multiple arrests and the residents of nearby Amesbury had to prove their identity to get into their own houses.

In the face of this insanity, a test case was brought by the ‘Stonehenge Two’, Margaret Jones and Richard Lloyd, who had been charged with ‘trespassory assembly’. It reached the House of Lords in 1999, where it was decided in their favour on the basis that the right to use the public highway for any reasonable purpose was ‘an issue of fundamental constitutional importance’. Since 2000, English Heritage has been obliged to grant access at the solstice. Other disputes have rumbled on, however, including a serious attempt to have Stonehenge placed on the ‘at risk’ list of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, and controversy over a new visitor centre and traffic management scheme. In 2006, a public inquiry recommended putting the A303 in a tunnel under Stonehenge, a plan which was first accepted and then cancelled by the government on grounds of cost. Eighteen years later, after another study and more recommendations, the government has once again cancelled plans for a tunnel. This has at least spared interested parties a repetition of the undignified scenes that occurred when the earlier proposals were displayed at the Society of Antiquaries. It is the only exhibition I have been to where complete strangers were shouting at each other within minutes of arrival.

It is understandable that Richards and Cummings should sound mildly resentful of Stonehenge and nearby Avebury, for these ‘extravagant monuments’ do indeed ‘dominate the narrative’ of stone circles, especially in the South of England. Overall, however, their tone is eirenic and generous when it comes to the wide range of theories, opinions and frankly bonkers beliefs that surround the subject. This attitude is particularly refreshing given the antagonism of the archaeological establishment in the last century to any theory at variance with its own. Archaeology is generally successful in determining the ‘what’ of neolithic remains and increasingly – with radiocarbon dating and probability theory – the ‘when’, but without written sources the ‘why’ remains as elusive as it was in Aubrey’s day. ‘Why’ is usually placed in a vague but capacious category marked ‘ritual’ into which non-archaeologists have ventured at their peril.

It was perhaps a certain defensiveness about the short history of their own discipline that underlay the violent reaction of 20th-century archaeologists to theories based on astronomy. Hostilities began with Gerald Hawkins’s Stonehenge Decoded, which was published in 1965 at the height of the Apollo space programme and became an international bestseller. Hawkins’s argument that Stonehenge was ‘an observatory … deliberately, accurately, skilfully oriented’ set off a chain reaction, which enraged archaeologists and forged an unlikely alliance between academic astronomy and the emergent earth mysteries movement. Alexander Thom, formerly a professor of engineering at Oxford, published the conclusions of a decade’s worth of measurements which had led him to believe that Britain’s standing stones were arranged using precise units and sometimes complex astronomical alignments.

Thom’s ‘megalithic yard’ was taken up and popularised by John Michell in The View Over Atlantis. The reaction among archaeologists can only be called hysterical. As Gordon Childe, an Australian expert on European prehistory, explained, this was only to be expected because ‘severe emotions’ are aroused when an archaeologist is ‘faced with mathematical symbols’ he cannot understand. Not all the establishment was so blinkered – Burl, for one, became an adherent of the megalithic yard – but, as Richards and Cummings tactfully note, ‘times have moved on.’ Belief in a universal organising system of megalithic measurement and precise astral and lunar alignments has gone the same way as other total system theories of the later 20th century. Stone Circles nevertheless gives the latitude for each site (‘to assist those with astronomical interests’) while pointing out that ‘just because an alignment exists does not mean that it meant anything to the people who built or used the stone circle.’ It also cautions that ‘the movement and cycles of the moon are extremely complex’ – the lunistices, the most northerly and southerly positions each month, shift over a period of 18.61 years. Unwilling, however, to deter anyone from circle visiting (‘one of the most pleasant of pastimes’), the authors conclude by advising the use of a theodolite.

Despite their generous acknowledgment of Burl, this is a very different book from his. Most notably they have excluded Brittany because, while there are parallels with neolithic structures in Britain and Ireland, circles are ‘not a convincing component of that Megalithic architecture’, which consists mostly of stone rows. Stone circles are found to the north and west of the British Isles and across Ireland. It was this spread which led Aubrey to conclude that, since the Romans had ‘no dominion’ in Ireland and never advanced far into Scotland, and the Danes never got to Wales, these were native British monuments. He assumed that they were temples and attributed them to the druids. This almost passing remark had huge consequences when it was vastly elaborated by the antiquary and archaeologist William Stukeley in the 18th century. Druidry took on a life of its own, which continues even though it has been known for more than a century that stone circles long predate the Iron Age, when such scant accounts of the druids as exist were written. Exasperation with this side of his legacy turned many archaeologists against Stukeley (Burl was again an exception). Stuart Piggott could barely contain himself, describing modern druidry as the refuge of ‘many a psychological misfit and lonely crank’ – despite the fact that Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill were both inducted as druids.

Stone Circles takes a balanced approach, appreciating Stukeley’s contribution to the scientific as well as the mythic. Having trained as a doctor, he transferred his skills from anatomy to field archaeology, where he pioneered the technique of vertical dissection. His observations were careful; he was probably the first person to recognise the inter-visibility of megalithic features and to study the sightlines between them. He also made notes of features that have since been lost. The druid obsession got the better of him, however. The stones at Boscawen-Un, so mute for Defoe, spoke volumes to Stukeley, revealing themselves to be the first British druid stone circle, built by the first Christian druid, the ‘Tyrian Hercules’. Treading a delicate path between accuracy and empathy, Richards and Cummings remark that, even if this designation is false, it is ‘completely comprehensible’, given the ‘splendid form and constitution’ of ‘the most beautiful stone circle in Cornwall’. They also acknowledge that myths, if they are believed for long enough, seep into reality; not so much ‘build it and they will come’ as ‘believe it and it will happen.’ In 1928, Boscawen-Un was the site of the inauguration of the Gorsedh of the Bards of Cornwall.

The use of the term ‘architecture’ in Stone Circles is another sign of the way archaeology has mellowed. If architecture is defined as construction aesthetically conceived, then stone circles, which often have a clear entrance and worked surfaces to distinguish between the interior and the exterior, are unquestionably architecture. Indeed that is one of the few things that can be securely said about them. Some recent investigations suggest that neolithic architects were as liable as their modernist successors to put artistic vision before responsible construction. At the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, both Burl and Thom drew conclusions from which contemporary archaeology differs, since it has become apparent that many of the stones fell in antiquity, having been set in sockets too shallow to support them. It would seem, Stone Circles notes disapprovingly, that for the builders ‘imagery was of far greater concern … than endurance.’

Prehistory moves constantly in dialogue with archaeology, which, until about 2000, was primarily concerned with excavations undertaken by bearded men with monosyllabic forenames who courted publicity. The late Geoff Wainwright embodied the type. Having caused a stir in the 1960s with his use of bulldozers on Salisbury Plain, he went on to become chief archaeologist for English Heritage. Today’s archaeological investigations are subtler. Ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry have made findings more accurate and their retrieval less invasive. Sites that were interpreted in the Cold War years by a predominantly male and often classically educated profession as the work of ‘savages’, possibly practising human sacrifice, are now seen as the cultural and spiritual expressions of an organised society. Once it was assumed that the Beaker people had killed the native population; now it is suggested that they were successfully integrated migrants.

On the ground, meanwhile, circles come and go, lost by carelessness or erosion or suddenly appearing – like Bluestonehenge, a circle henge at the end of the Stonehenge Avenue, found by chance in 2008 during a small excavation. Drones can spot henge outlines from the air, especially when drought exposes their outlines, but observation with the naked eye should not be underestimated. The carvings of axes on the megaliths at Stonehenge were first spotted by a visiting schoolboy. The Stones of Callanish on Lewis, one of the most complex and spectacular of the Hebridean monuments, have been closely studied since 1857, but only in 2013 did the archaeologist Ian McHardy notice that the sun cast a single shaft of light out of the cave-like opening. The effect – a line pointing along the narrow avenue that leads to it – was certainly intentional.

Richards and Cummings urge their readers to be thorough when visiting a circle, to consider the views from it and through it, to walk across as well as around it, to make notes and take measurements and consider the inter-visibility of sites. Stone Circles is the I-Spy book of megaliths, with its blend of up-to-date information and sensible advice about waterproofs and footwear, instructions for calculating the weight of a stone and a brisk list of dos and don’ts. ‘Sticking pins in the ground is prohibited.’ ‘Never scrape a stone or remove lichen.’ And the best advice: ‘Always keep an open mind.’