Hey Blog! Last Friday I went on an “educational trip” down to Hampshire, Wiltshire, and London. The reason? Going to see Stonehenge, the most famous henge in the UK, and probably the world; and its related exhibition at the British Museum!
We went down to see my big sister on Friday, which was relatively exiting, apart from a couple of queues on the motorways. We spent the night in a Premier Inn and then, with my sister, drove the next day to Wiltshire to go and see Stonehenge. It was incredible to see these grey stones on the landscape, and know they were the famous stones I had been wanting to see ever since I got into archaeology. You could feel the power of their heritage, the feeling that so many people had respected, enjoyed, put effort into and been inspired by them. It is a place of Kings, for example Charles II went through them while fleeing the roundheads; many artists and writers, including Turner and Hardy, painted and wrote about its landscape; frequent archaeologists, admirers like me, but no Druids or aliens. Sorry.
Conspiracy theories about Stonehenge are wild, wacky, and imagination catching, but don’t help with scientific analysis. Most archaeologists now agree the “henge” part (the bank and ditch around the outside of the stones) was built c.3000BC, in the mid Neolithic. A henge in archaeology is a ditch external to a bank, but the word “henge” was originally used to refer to the “hanging stones”, meaning the lintels over the trilithons at Stonehenge. Actually, Stonehenge is not a henge – the ditch is external to the bank. Inside it when the henge was constructed were post holes which current research suggests held the bluestones now within the trilithon horseshoe; this sarsen horseshoe inside it was set up later, around 2500BC. However, setting up vertical uprights around Stonehenge was not new: in the Mesolithic, around 7000BC, at least three timber posts were set up. As yet, purpose and later influence remain unknown, but it is likely these were the reason for the construction of the Cursuses, two monuments constructed about 500 years before Stonehenge. One is 1.7 miles long – you can imagine the work and dedication that must have gone into making it, so what was its significance?
Stonehenge is part of a UNESCO world heritage site which extends all the way up to Avebury, another stone circle. This the largest in stone circle in the world, a massive 1088ft. Seeing as we were close, we chose to go over and see this as well. If anything, it was better than Stonehenge, as we got to touch the stones (it’s all cordoned off at Stonehenge!) and really appreciate the monument the way our ancestors might have. This is truly a monument on an extremely impressive scale: the ditch was 9 metres deep and the bank was nearly as high, so when they were together, from the inside it would have looked impressively tall!
On Sunday, me and Mum took the train into London, and went to meet our friends, who were coming in on a different train to meet us. We took a quick pit stop to have a picture with the Trafalgar Square lions, and then headed to Platform 9&3/4 at Kings Cross, where we had arranged to meet. Platform 9&3/4 is the portal to Hogwarts, the school in the Harry Potter books. These days, there is a shop right next to it. I wonder what the staff would say if Harry walked straight out of the archway into the queue of people waiting to have their photo taken – I expect wizards and witches have to go there at night to avoid the crowds and use Harry’s invisibility cloak to get past the security cameras, then pop through the portal to the platform and wait until the Hogwarts Express arrives. After looking through the shop, we went to one of London’s parks to have lunch. As I am used to parks as quiet spaces with not many people, this was exceptionally busy. Straight afterwards, we walked to the British museum to see the Stonehenge exhibition. This was probably the most interesting exhibition I have been to in my life – there were so many interesting artefacts, with so much detail, time and mystery. I found that a symbol I thought I had created, a triple spiral, like the one at the end of this paragraph, was in fact a Neolithic symbol, though what it stood for is unknown. There were the remains of a headdress that had been found with a woman who seems to have had a condition that caused trance-like states, gold hats that looked like witches’ hats (maybe they were, and Hogwarts is just the latest instalment of training grounds for witches and wizards?!) the only borrowable monument in the UK: Seahenge; and the Nebra Sky Disk, the earliest known record of the heavenly spheres. I don’t say this often, but if you live ANYWHERE in the UK, then I totally recommend going to see it. The rest, as they say, is history!
Next day, me and Mum went to the Natural History Museum in the morning, as the others had something else they wanted to do. We said hello to the blue whale, which has replaced Dippy the Dinosaur L and then found our way to the Our Broken Planet exhibition. Whereas the Stonehenge one was the more interesting, this was the absolute top inspiring. If you take my advice and go to see the Stonehenge exhibition, then I encourage you to do a double whammy and do both. It has sadness, hope, and anticipation.
I will be going to London again sometime soon, to see Dippy, who is having a special exhibition of his own, so watch out for future posts!