Stonehenge exerts a powerful force that brings people from all across the globe to experience its magical aura and to stand in wonder beneath this monument to a forgotten people, whose everyday lives and beliefs can now only be guessed at. Indeed, arguments still rage over the origins of this ancient enigma, for the truth is that nobody knows for certain who it was that built it and what its original purpose was. Could it have been a place for religious rituals? Was it intended as an observatory for predicting important astronomical events? Was it used as a place of worship and sacrifice by the Druids? The truth is that we actually know very little about Stonehenge. As Lord Byron pointed out in his poem 'Don Juan' “…The Druid's groves are gone - so much the better. Stonehenge is not, but what the devil is it?..”
Early mention of Stonehenge was made in 1135 by that great weaver of colourful legends the chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth. He claimed that the stones were brought from Africa to Ireland by a tribe of giants, and from there the great wizard Merlin flew them across the sea to their current location! It is worth noting that two distinctive types of stones were used in the construction of Stonehenge, bluestones and sarsens. Neither of these are, or were, readily available in the immediate vicinity. The nearest place from which stones the size of the large sarsens could have been brought from (the heaviest of which weighs in at a hefty forty five tons) is the Marlborough Downs situated 18 miles to the north east of the site. As for the bluestones they probably came from the north flank of the Prescelly Mountains in Wales, and their transportation must have been a colossal undertaking for those times. It is believed that they were carried by raft around the coast of Wales to Bristol, then transported up local rivers and heaved overland until finally being lugged on rollers up the avenue that approaches Stonehenge, there they were erected to form two circles. Considering the achievement of getting the stones to the site and the effort required to then erect them, is it any wonder that our more recent ancestors came to see the hand of sorcery or even the hand of the devil in their construction?
It was the Saxons who named the stones 'Stonehenge' or the 'Hanging Stones.' In the 12th century, Henry of Huntingdon claimed that they were given this name because the stones appear to float, a claim that is made about many stone circles. However, it is also possible that the name is an over-literal translation of the Anglo Saxon hengen which means both hanging and gallows. Medieval writers, from Geoffrey of Monmouth onwards, refer to the monument as the 'Giant's Dance,' and repeat the assertion that Aurelius Ambrosius, King of the Britons, wished to construct a memorial over the site where 400 hundred and sixty British ‘Consuls and Princes,’ massacred at a banquet by the treacherous Saxons, lay buried. He sought the advice of Merlin who told him to send for the Giants Dance from ’Kilarus,’ a mountain in Ireland. Aurelius sent his brother Uther Pendragon and an army of 15,000 men to bring the stones to him, and although they had no problem defeating the native Irish, who quite naturally weren’t keen on letting their monument go, actually moving the stones proved an almost impossible task. So Merlin intervened, and using a series of ‘engines,’ he was able to transport them down to the sea and thence by ship to Britain, where they were erected exactly as they had stood in Ireland.
