Archaeologists carrying out an excavation at Stonehenge say they have broken through to a layer that may finally explain why the site was built. The team has reached sockets that once held bluestones - smaller stones, most now missing or uprooted, which formed the site's original structure. The researchers believe that the bluestones could reveal that Stonehenge was once a place of healing.
Work to answer Stonehenges big questions when the ring of stones was created, and why began in earnest yesterday with the first excavation within the sites inner circle for nearly half a century. Archaeologists believe that a small patch of grass between a giant standing sarsen stone and a smaller knee-high bluestone, marked out yesterday with orange twine, may provide clues.
Excavation starts at Stonehenge The first excavation inside the ring at Stonehenge in more than four decades gets under way on Monday. The two-week dig will try to establish, once and for all, some precise dating for the creation of the monument. It is also targeting the significance of the smaller bluestones that stand inside the giant sarsen pillars. Researchers believe these rocks, brought all the way from Wales, hold the secret to the real purpose of Stonehenge as a place of healing.
As plans for the Stonehenge tunnel scheme lay in tatters this week, Salisbury MP Robert Key called on government ministers to set up a Stakeholder Task Force to piece together new solutions to the problems of the World Heritage site and the area's traffic nightmare. For more than 20 years, both Labour and Tory governments have struggled to find an acceptable scheme for restoring the ancient stones to their original setting and easing traffic congestion on the A303 West Country holiday route that runs past the monument. And the latest project bit the dust last Thursday when Transport Minister Tom Harris scrapped the controversial proposal to bury the A303 in a 2.1km tunnel.
Why transport 82 two-tonne megaliths across more than 250 miles of mountain, river and sea to build a stone circle at Stonehenge? This is one of the greatest mysteries of Britains best-known, but least understood, prehistoric monument. Now Tim Darvill thinks he has the answer: the famous bluestones had healing powers, and the builders of Stonehenge were creating a prehistoric Lourdes. Read more
Just when you think youve seen everything, some backwards thinker has put Stonehenge in a pocket watch casing along with a compass. Its truly unique among watches, with the miniature rocks aligned up exactly as they are at the real Stonehenge.
The lives of the people who built monuments such as Stonehenge and Avebury will be discussed in a lunchtime lecture on Neolithic Britain at the University of Bath tomorrow.The lecture, Between the Monuments: Neolithic Wessex and Beyond will run from 12.15-1.15pm at Carpenter House, and includes a light lunch.
The druids will come again on Midsummer Day brooding in their re-enactment of ancient ceremony, and they will bring tourists from all over the world, who will gasp as they watch the first flash of the sun through an aperture in the trilithons and the rays will land directly on the Heel Stone.
The question of how Stonehenge was built has never been properly answered. One suggestion for how the giant rocks which comprise the 5,000-year-old monument were raised into place even involves Merlin the wizard. But what is known is the first stones - weighing about five tons - were brought from Wales by water in about 2500 BC.
UK TV Tonight 8pm, 7th August, Channel 5 A team of experts attempts to recreate a duplicate of Stonehenge. The experiment to build the megalithic structure to resemble what it would have looked like 4,000 years ago, in a bid to understand the site's function, culminates in an a recreation of a four thousand years old summer solstice ceremony.
Unfortunately the solstice ceremony is 6 months out.