Stonehenge: England’s Megalithic Mystery (Author: Morris M.) If you were to ask people to name the most-famous
structure in Britain, what do you think they’d reply with? The Tower of London, perhaps; or Buckingham
Palace? Or do you think they’d pick somewhere else;
somewhere like - say - a small, prehistoric stone circle out on the Salisbury Plain? We’re talking, of course, about Stonehenge. The greatest of neolithic Britain’s monuments,
Stonehenge is so old that it predates even the Pyramids. Built in the dim and distant past by a people
without writing, it is as powerful today as it was back then. A monument fairly thrumming with mystery. But what was it for? Who built it and why? And how did they transport those heavy stones
all that way? In this video, we’re investigating the story
of northern Europe’s grandest neolithic site… and its vital place in the history
of modern Britain. The Dawn of Time At some point in the centuries before the
Roman invasion of Britain, an ancient pagan group known as the Druids gathered on Salisbury
Plain. There, as the sun of the summer solstice shone
down on them, they consecrated Stonehenge, the newly-built pagan temple the Celts had
made for… (SOUND EFFECT: RECORD SCRATCH). At least, that’s the intro you might be
expecting, if your primary knowledge of Stonehenge comes via pop culture. In reality, Stonehenge has nothing to do with
Druids, or Celts, or pre-Roman Britain’s pagans. And no, to shoot another persistent theory
down, that’s not because it was actually constructed from a pile of rubble in the late-19th
or mid-20th Centuries. While it might be exciting to imagine Britain’s
most-famous monument is either a place of Druidic worship or a clever fake, the actual
story is far more fascinating. To tell it properly, we’re going to have
to travel back in time over 9,000 years. At some point between 8,500 BC and 7,000 BC,
humans arrived on the Salisbury Plain. We know this because there are manmade pits
in the Stonehenge area that date from this era. At least three of them once had wooden totem
posts installed in them. Interestingly, there was nothing like this
in the rest of northern Europe. For some reason, humans living so long ago
that the time scale is almost incomprehensible were drawn to this vast chalk plain, where
they established a sacred site for reasons we can never know. OK, let’s wind the clock forward now some
4,000 years. A span of time nearly equivalent to that separating
you from the pyramids swept by with nothing on the plain but those totem poles. Then, suddenly, around 3,500 BC, the area
transformed. As the British Neolithic era got its groove
on, new work was undertaken where those wooden totems had once stood. Long barrows - big old earthen monuments - appeared. The place we now call Robin Hood’s Ball
was dug; a set of two circular ditches within which feasts or religious rites may have taken
place. We can’t say for certain what motivated
Neolithic Britons to undertake this construction spree. It’s been theorized that the plain seemed
inherently mystical to them. That, on an island covered with trees, this
open land was as awe-inspiring as dense, primeval forest would be to us. But we can say that these early earthenworks
are likely the reason that Stonehenge exists at all. Because neolithic Britons weren’t going
to stop at mere ditches and long barrows. In no time at all, their descendants would
transform the Salisbury plain forever. The Work of Giants When he wrote his 12th Century history of
Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth included his theory of Stonehenge’s construction. Six hundred years earlier, he wrote, a group
of Brits had been massacred on Salisbury plain by the Saxons. To symbolize this misdeed, King Arthur’s
uncle, Aureoles Ambrosias, asked Merlin to bring a suitable monument there by magic. So Merlin whisked a stone circle belonging
to giants away from Ireland, and deposited it near Salisbury. And that was how Stonehenge came to be. Great as old Geoff’s tale is, it does the
original builders a disservice. Stonehenge wasn’t built in a day. Or even a century. No, it was the work of millennia. Around 3,000 BC, a neolithic group with connections
to Wales suddenly dug a ditch and built a bank where, until now, there had only been
barrows and totem poles. Into this bank, they placed 56 pieces of bluestone,
creating Stonehenge's earliest form. It’s actually thanks to this bluestone that
we know the builders had Welsh connections. The stone came from the Preseli Mountains,
a collection of small hills with an inflated sense of self-importance some 200km away. While there’s a theory that these rocks
were dumped in Salisbury by retreating glaciers, it seems far more likely that they were brought
here by humans. “But wait!” We hear you cry, “how do a bunch of dudes
who haven’t even gotten it together to invent the wheel drag 4 ton rocks all the way from
Wales?” The thing is, provided a few beasts of burden,
it wouldn’t actually have been that difficult. Especially when you consider some of the trip
may have been made by floating the stones on boats downriver. And accepting these guys were connected to
a huge Neolithic group in Wales makes a lot of other stuff suddenly make sense. Take the cremations. We know that people’s cremated remains were
buried around the 56 slabs of bluestone. Genetic tests in 2018 showed that many of
these long dead dudes hailed from Wales. Like the bluestones, they may well have arrived
by boat. 1.6km from our proto-Stonehenge, on the banks
of the River Avon, sat a smaller version called Bluestonehenge. Today, it’s thought that corpses were burned
there before their burial. Were you to randomly step out a time machine
at this point, you probably wouldn’t even recognize Stonehenge. The bluestones didn’t have tops - or lintels
- lying across them like you’re used to seeing. This was stone circle 101. The sort of thing any bunch of semi-motivated
neolithic hicks could knock up. It would take another 500 years for the Stonehenge
of legend to appear. Around 2,500 BC, the site’s caretakers abruptly
got the building bug again. The huge pillars of stone you associate with
Stonehenge were dragged 32km down from Avebury, each weighing around 25 tons. At the bluestone circle, they were pounded
smooth with hammers, then carved until their tops made dovetail joints. Finally, they were hauled upright using rope,
and the heavy stone lintels - those horizontal bits the rest on top - moved into place. It was a massive operation. Huge. We know this because a workers’ village
was discovered in the mid-2000s just 3km away, with space for almost 1,000 dwellings. It was likely the largest construction site
Neolithic Britain had ever seen. Possibly northern Europe. Finally, around 2,740 BC, a 3km ceremonial
avenue was added, connecting the newly built henge to the River Avon, parts of its route
aligned to the summer solstice sunrise. But neolithic Britain’s greatest architectural
triumph would also be its last. In just a few short centuries, the ancient
people that had built Stonehenge were destined to completely vanish. Here Come the Beakers Around 2,750 BC, something happened on the
Iberian peninsula that would change Europe forever. The first humans were buried with pottery
drinking vessels known as Bell-Beaker cups. It may not sound much, but these cups marked
the emergence of one of neolithic Europe’s great cultures: the Beaker Folk. No, sadly this wasn’t a race of people who
looked exactly like Beaker from The Muppets. For a long time, scientists argued over whether
they were even a race at all. In the centuries after Bell-Beaker cups appeared
in Iberia, they swept across Europe, leading many to conclude the pottery was a sign of
technology transfer rather than immigration. But, in 2018, genetic testing revealed a more
complex story. While not all Beaker Folk were related, there
was a huge Beaker monoculture that emerged in Central Europe. Originally from the Eurasian Steppe, these
Beaker Folk were fair-haired, blue-eyed, and pale-skinned. And it wouldn’t be long before they completely
overran ancient Britain. Not that this was the first time a bunch of
outsiders had taken over the island. Those mesolithic guys we opened our story
with, the ones who stuck wooden totems into pits near modern Stonehenge 9,000 years ago? Well, those guys - the original Britons - had
themselves been completely replaced around 4,000 BC by a bunch of Aegean farmers. It was these Aegeans who’d brought the Neolithic
era to Britain, and got it together to build Stonehenge. Now they in turn were destined to be replaced. As far back as 2,200 BC you have signs of
Beaker Culture on the Salisbury plain. This was when the wealthy Amesbury Archer
was buried near Stonehenge, his grave replete with Bell-Beaker cups. Within a few centuries, his fellow Beakers
had pushed Neolithic Britons to the brink of extinction. Not long after, Stonehenge’s golden age
finally ended. Four centuries after the Amesbury Archer was
buried, two circles of ring pits were dug around Stonehenge. It’s likely they were intended to hold yet
more standing stones. But those stones were never laid. For whatever reason, construction work on
Stonehenge ended with the Beaker takeover of Britain. Still, it’s clear the site retained at least
some of its original importance. As late as 700 BC, the Iron Age Celts were
building a fort overlooking Stonehenge. So, yes, Druids probably really did hang out
around these ancient stones. We know, too, that the Romans showed an interest
in Stonehenge, because they left a crap-ton of their pottery lying about. After that, though, things get hazy. By the Medieval period, most knowledge of
Stonehenge had been lost. It was just a weird place sitting on the southern
landscape, a bit of history that no-one could quite remember. But this obscurity wasn’t destined to last. The Medieval period was just when Britons
were starting to become interested in their own past. It wouldn’t be long before Stonehenge found
itself at the epicenter of English life again. The Medieval Henge There’s a weird misconception that Stonehenge
was “lost” until the modern era, like you could just misplace a gigantic stone circle. But go looking at Medieval sources, and you’ll
see that people have been fascinated by it for hundreds of years. In 1129, Henry of Huntingdon named Stonehenge
the second of England’s four great wonders, writing that: “stones of remarkable size are raised up
like gates, in such a way that gates seem to be placed on top of gates. And no one can work out how the stones were
so skilfully lifted up to such a height or why they were erected there.” Well, almost no-one could work that out. This was the same period when Geoffrey of
Monmouth was deciding that the answer was “Merlin did it”; a theory people would
seriously believe for hundreds of years. Wacky old Geoff aside, it’s clear that Medieval
writers were just as befuddled by Stonehenge as we are, albeit in a different way. While back then there were arguments about
whether it was built by druids or giants; today we debate if Stonehenge was a burial
site, an ancient observatory, or a place for healing the sick. That’s not to say everything is guesswork. There’s lots of evidence that hints in certain
directions, and plenty of seriously clever people have some seriously clever theories. But with stuff like whether the bluestones
were placed there as a form of ancestor worship; or whether they were political gifts to bind
two large Neolithic tribes, we can’t really say. In the end, all we can do is look at the evidence
and hope that, a thousand years from now, our conclusions don’t look as silly as blaming
everything on wizards. As the Medieval period slowly gave way to
the early modern period, fascination with Stonehenge only grew. In the 1570s, Flemish artist Lucas de Heere
painted the earliest, most-accurate image of the henge for his guidebook to Britain
- looking eerily similar to how it does today. (HEY EDITORS: HERE’S A LINK TO THAT IMAGE:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/stonehenge-corte-beschryvinghe-van-engheland-schotland-ende-irland) Not fifty years later, George Villiers, the
1st Duke of Buckingham, went and dug up the center of Stonehenge, convinced there was
treasure buried there. There, uh, wasn’t. But Villiers expedition was unusual in that
it was purely about personal gain. Most other visitors wanted to understand the
stones, not loot them. Take Inigo Jones. The great architect visited in the mid-17th
Century, observed the symmetry of the design, and came away convinced it was a Roman temple. In 1655, his posthumous tract on the subject
even declared that the name “Stonehenge” was a vulgar piece of barbarianism and Stonehenge
was really evidence of Rome’s architectural might. But not everyone was down with Jones’s ideas. Others spent the best years of their lives
trying to prove it was really the vikings who were responsible. One theory, though, would prove more durable
than most. At the very end of the 17th Century, the great
antiquarian John Aubrey made his way to Stonehenge and conducted the first proper survey of the
site in history. It was Aubrey who found the 56 holes those
Welsh bluestones once stood in. Aubrey who realized Jones was talking out
his be-pantalooned backside about the Romans. No, it was clear to an expert like Aubrey
that whoever built Stonehenge had pre-dated the Romans, likely by hundreds of years. Unfortunately, the only known peoples to fit
the bill in those days were the Celts. So Aubrey just came right out and declared
Stonehenge was the work of the Druids. And that’s why, over 300 years later, there
are still people convinced that Stonehenge was all about paganism. The King of Stonehenge So now we come to what is undoubtedly the
weirdest sentence in our video. The fact that Stonehenge is a tourist attraction
today may come down entirely to a set of curtains. On September 21, 1915, Cecil Chubb’s wife
asked him to go an auction at the Palace Theatre in Salisbury to buy a set of matching curtains. A working class boy who’d studied hard and
wound up becoming a wealthy barrister, Chubb was a well-known figure around Wiltshire. Yet even he probably couldn’t have realized
how notorious he was about to become. That day, Chubb attended the auction as his
wife had told him to. But, rather than focus on the curtain sets,
he found his mind captivated by Lot 15. There, before his very eyes, the firm Messrs
Knight, Franck and Rutley was putting Stonehenge under the hammer. As he’d later tell the story, Chubb became
convinced that a wealthy American millionaire would buy Stonehenge, have it dismantled and
shipped to the US, just as would happen to London Bridge decades later. So convincing was his fear, that Chubb decided
to hell with the curtains, and put all his available cash into bidding on the monument. By the time the hammer fell on Lot 15, Cecil
Chubb was £6,600 poorer, but the legal owner of Britain Stonehenge. We’d love to have seen the expression on
his wife’s face when Chubb returned home not with a set of velvet curtains, but the
title to a prehistoric site. Sadly, that priceless moment has been forever
lost to history. That Chubb was able to buy Stonehenge sounds
crazy to our modern ears. But his wildcard bid didn’t come out of
the blue. By 1915, Stonehenge had been in private hands
for the best part of a thousand years. At some point in the Middle Ages, a Benedictine
Abbey was built nearby Stonehenge, which used the land around it for husbanding animals. When Henry VIII decided he wanted a divorce
so badly that he was willing to smash up England’s links with the Catholic Church to get it,
Stonehenge was confiscated from the abbey and given to a private owner. Yep, it seems weird to us too that a 4,000
year old ruin could become someone’s property, but there you have it. Anyway, by the 1820s, the henge had passed
into the hands of the aristocratic Antrobus family, a bunch of toffs who loved private
property rights and hated preserving ancient monuments. In the century that they owned it, Stonehenge
fell into disrepair, culminating in one of the upright stones simply falling over in
1900, taking its top lintel down with it. The damage to the site led to public outcry
for the government to step in and use the Ancient Monuments Protection Act to, y’know,
protect this ancient monument. Unfortunately, the act required the permission
of the landowner, and Sir Edmund Antrobus considered the idea of the British government
preserving British monuments for the British people as outrageous as a pair of bacon underpants. Instead, a fence went up around the site in
1901, and people who couldn’t pay were kept far, far away. But fate was about to take Stonehenge out
the hands of the Antrobus family forever. In summer of 1914, the assassination of an
archduke in Sarajevo led the whole of Europe to go marching to war. That October, the current Sir Edward Antrobus
was killed on the Western front. Because he died childless, there was no-one
to take over the family lands. So his more-distant relatives decided to just
sell the lot, including Stonehenge. Fast forward almost a year, and the auction
of the Antrobus lands ended with Cecil Chubb walking out Salisbury Palace Theatre with
the deeds to Stonehenge. But if Chubb thought the tale was gonna end
there, he had another thing coming. The People’s Henge On June 13, 1917, death came droning out the
skies over London. In broad daylight, 20 German planes descended
over the city, dropping bombs onto shops, homes, businesses. The explosions that tore through the British
capital that day killed 162 civilians, including 18 children at a school. It was the first modern Blitz the city experienced. A foretaste of the carnage Hitler would unleash
over two decades later. And there was no way the British could leave
such a brazen attack unanswered. Within hours of the London bombing, orders
went out to build an airfield for developing and training long-range British bomber squadrons. The site they chose for this experimental
airfield? You guessed it: Stonehenge. Weird, right? But hey, all is fair in love and war, and
this was currently the biggest war Britain had ever seen. That same year, a giant airfield sprang into
existence just a few hundred meters from Stonehenge. There are images from the time, showing aircraft
hangers sat where now there’s nothing but fields. Composite postcards depicting biplanes zooming
over the stones themselves. It’s easy to imagine an alternate history
where some accident leads to a plane smashing into the rocks, permanently damaging them. Or maybe one where the military simply requisitions
Cecil Chubb’s land and keeps it forever off limits. Luckily, though, this reality turned out different. By late 1918, the war was winding down, and
it was clear that Germany was not going to be the winner. With planned air raids on Berlin canceled,
the Stonehenge aerodrome began slowly shutting up shop. It was at this point that Cecil Chubb finally
made his move. On October 26, 1918, Chubb gifted Stonehenge
to the nation, making it forever public property. Not that this was an entirely selfless gesture. For his generosity, Chubb was given a knighthood. That same year, the Ministry of Works took
over the site. Over the next 12 months - and again in the
1950s - they undertook extensive restoration, lifting fallen lintels back up, shoring up
some stones with concrete. If you’ve stumbled across the internet hoax
claiming Stonehenge was secretly built in the 20th Century, this is probably where the
pictures came from. The Ministry really did haul several fallen
stones back upright, including the biggest ones of all. But while there’s always a healthy argument
to be had about when restoration is appropriate, to claim Stonehenge was “built” in the
20th Century is a stretch too far even for Mister Fantastic. Fast forward to today, and Stonehenge is likely
the most famous site in the whole of Britain. Hell, it’s probably one of the most famous
sites in the world - up there with the Pyramids and Taj Mahal. Yet Stonehenge still has something those other
places will never have: an air of mystery. We will never know why mesolithic hunter-gatherers
first decided to start digging pits on the Salisbury plain. Why they suddenly got it into their heads
to set up wooden totems on the site. We’ll likely never know, too, why the Aegean
farmers who replaced them started building bigger structures in that same area, culminating
in Stonehenge itself. These were cultures without writing. Cultures who left behind no memory. The ancient Egyptians at least had hieroglyphics
we can try to find and decode. The builders of Stonehenge left no record
of any kind. Nothing but the henge itself, as awe-inspiring
today as it was four and a half thousand years ago. The people who made it may be long gone, but
Stonehenge itself will continue to stand into the far-distant future - outlasting our skyscrapers,
our countries, maybe even the human race itself. We may not know why it was built, but we can
still appreciate Stonehenge: the greatest Neolithic monument
of them all.
