Stonehenge: Druids, Scientists and the Heritage Moneybox

 I am Serapis Bey, I am King Arthur and I am Arthur Pendragon
We are the Guardians of Stonehenge, The Rock Clock,
The Flower Festival of the Sixties, The Sundial of Eternity,
The Happy Hippies … —New Age Live

Serapis and other masters of the ancient wisdom were absent when we gathered at Stonehenge that day in June 1969, hoping to witness the sun rise beside the heelstone to proclaim the summer solstice. It was not to be. The Age of Aquarius had unleashed the first tidal wave of New Age travellers on Salisbury Plain that year, more than half of them American, obsessed with obeying Timothy Leary’s exhortation to “turn on, tune in, drop out”. So the ancient stones were as obscured by cannabis smoke as was the horizon by low cloud. I had taken an ABC microphone into the sacred circle by invitation, to record the solstice incantations of the Ancient Order of Druids. “All we do, we do in the eye of the sun and before and in the presence of the assembled congregation,” the Arch Druid intoned.

But the Druids were no match for the revellers. At the first blast of the ram’s horn they swarmed among and over the great stones, jostling the standard bearers and drowning out the invented modern ritual with their own shouting and singing. Not even the happy hippies would take the druids seriously.

This report first appeared in our September 2012 edition

By 1984, that mild hippie frenzy had become Wiltshire’s Woodstock, the Stonehenge Free Festival. Thirty thousand devotees of the counter-culture seeking psychedelic expansion turned the Wiltshire Downs into Britain’s biggest carpark; the monument became the centre of a working exercise in collective anarchy. The rock mockumentary This is Spinal Tap was the hit film of the era, the stones echoing to its satire of heavy metal bands with its theme song, “Stonehenge”:

Stonehenge! ’Tis a magic place
Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face.
Stonehenge! Where the virgins lie
And the prayers of devils fill the midnight sky.

By then the festival, in its eleventh year, was a heavy drug scene, cocaine dealers trading openly and bikie gangs adding brawling to debauch what had once been a gentle music and poetry-reading experience. In 1985 the Thatcher government put a stop to it. A High Court order set a four-mile exclusion zone around the monument, but a convoy of travellers’ trucks and buses tried to challenge the police roadblocks. What followed became known as the Battle of the Beanfield, as police in riot gear using unnecessary violence destroyed every vehicle, attacked women and children and arrested 520 people. Both the hippies’ “Stoned-henge” and the Druids’ Stonehenge remained closed to the public, by and large, for the next fifteen years.

Ironically, just as the most expensive scientific work is being directed to probe for the secrets of this grandest of Europe’s neolithic monuments, druidry, paganism and earth-mother movements are re-asserting their spurious and strangling claims on it.

Their power derives from the compromises accepted by its custodian, English Heritage, in an era when paganism has the fastest-growing following in Britain, and the Druid movement has been recognised by the Charity Commission as a religion. State relativism now grants equal rights to archaeologists and the bizarre cults of mountebanks.

Druids did not build Stonehenge. This mysterious Iron Age priestly class came along a millennium after the monument had been abandoned by early Britons. Nor is there evidence that they bothered with it—they revered the oak and mistletoe and worshipped in groves, not sarsen circles. It was Julius Caesar who gave us our first glimpse of druids in his Gallic Wars of 53 BC, impelled to record their teaching of reincarnation, a central belief of several of the groups that lay claim to the stones today:

They wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valour, the fear of death being disregarded.

For hundreds of years, the gaunt grey stones stood largely ignored, silently hiding their purpose. It was the romantic revival from the end of the eighteenth century that put Stonehenge into the public mind as the lyrical place of Wordsworth’s “Guilt and Sorrow; or, Incidents upon Salisbury Plain”:

Pile of Stone-Henge! So proud to hint yet keep
Thy secrets, thou that lov’st to stand and hear
The Plain resounding to the whirlwind’s sweep,
Inmate of lonesome Nature’s endless year.

Since then, the site has increasingly been a place of contestation, fought over by archaeologists, geologists, historians, astro-archaeologists, druids, landowners and the government. The mystery of its origins, the fascination of its solar and lunar alignments, and the sheer beauty of its stark contrast to the smoothness of Salisbury Plain have been a constant challenge to those seeking to deduce its purpose. Without in most cases any compelling evidence, it has been explained as a place of druidic sacrifice, a stone computer, a cemetery, a scene of witchcraft, an energy source on a ley line, a healing site, a temple and an astronomical calendar to predict eclipses.

The Stonehenge we know is the poor relic of a grand structure, first destroyed by the Romans, subsequently toppled by storms, used for road-building, chipped away for souvenirs and rebuilt or repaired on several occasions. John Constable’s watercolour now in the British Museum, worked up from his detailed on-site sketches of 1820, shows a very different monument—a jumbled ruin. Between 1901 and 1964 many stones were raised, straightened or set in concrete (not always in their original places) to re-create the design as far as possible. This involved major engineering works with heavy machinery which drew criticism at the time as pandering to the “heritage industry”. “Restoration is a lie!” stormed John Ruskin.

What seems to have been overlooked is that a completed monument would have had 160 stones, yet only ninety are known. Have seventy huge monoliths, weighing ten to eighty tons each, disappeared without trace? Or, as some experts suggest, was Stonehenge never finished? An earth resistivity survey of the area in 1997 showed no signs of disturbed earth where those extra stones would have stood. Did the project prove too ambitious? Or did a dispute in a priestly class change the strategy? Guessing about Stonehenge started a long time ago.

The first English writer to refer to Stonehenge, Henry of Huntingdon, in his Chronicle of 1135, listed it among four remarkable things in England:

The second marvel is Stonehenge, where stones of amazing bigness are raised in manner of gateways, so that gateways appear erected over gateways; nor can any one find out by what contrivance stones so great have been raised to such a height or for what reason they have been erected in that place.

Explanations of how it got there began just a few years later with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historiae Regum Brittaniae (History of English Kings) which created a back-history for the Britons, incorporating the Arthurian legends. Stonehenge, it said, was a monument to the 460 knights killed in battle thereabouts around 490 BC, the stones of the “Giants Ring” transported from Ireland by magic on the orders of King Aurelius Ambrosius:

Merlin accordingly obeyed his ordinance, and set them up about the compass of the burial-ground in such wise as they had stood upon Mount Killaraus in Ireland, and proved yet once again how skill surpasseth strength.

Geoffrey also suggested, for the first time, their special properties:

Whenever they felt ill, baths should be prepared at the foot of the stones; for they used to pour water over them and to run this water into baths in which their sick were cured. What is more, they mixed the water with herbal concoctions and so healed their wounds. There is not a single stone among them which has not some medicinal virtue.

These two extracts find echo today in the official archaeological theory that the central bluestones were brought from Wales (not Ireland) for their magical healing powers. Professor Tim Darvill of Bournemouth University, a leading supporter of the theory, even went so far as to declare the place may have been a “Neolithic Lourdes”.

Excavations to try to explain Stonehenge started centuries ago. In 1620 when the Duke of Buckingham, on whose estates it stood, became curious, he ordered a hole dug in the middle to see what was there. No findings have been recorded, but this first-ever dig so piqued the interest of James I that he commissioned the classical architect Inigo Jones to make a survey and report. His Discourse on Stone-Heng Restored, published after his death by his son-in-law in 1655, got it completely wrong as a Roman temple: “I should choose to assign those times for building thereof, when the Romans [were] in their chief time betwixt Agricola’s government and the reign of Constantine the Great.”

The appearance on the scene of John Aubrey in 1648 launched an era of antiquaries as amateur archaeologists lasting nearly 250 years—a period that stimulated so much excitement about the zone, but did considerable damage. He explored and mapped Stonehenge, where he identified the first five of the fifty-six pits in the circle outside the ditch. Since known as the “Aubrey holes”, they once held either wooden poles, or stones (still a source of debate), but are now yielding cremation materials for accurate carbon-dating. Aubrey was also probably the first to realise that the great sarsen stones came from the Marlborough Hills:

These downes looke as if they were sowen with great stones, very thick, and in a dusky evening they looke like a flock of sheep, from whence they take their name, the Grey Wethers …

he wrote in his Monumenta Britannica, commissioned by Charles II. Intended as a definitive study of archaeology and architecture, incorporating the chapter on his theories of the monuments, Templa Druidum, it remained unpublished, but can now be read online.

It was not until the early eighteenth century that serious observations began. The Rev. Dr William Stukeley visited Stonehenge in 1720 with the astronomer Edmund Halley, and then spent five seasons measuring and making the first accurate drawings of what he called “one of the noblest antiquities now left upon earth”. They are still a useful reference today. Stukeley was scathing of others’ ideas, describing one writer’s theory as “whimsys of his own crackt imagination”. He was an early conservationist, bemoaning the failure to preserve the heritage site, which affected him greatly:

When you enter the building, whether on foot or horseback, and cast your eyes around upon the yawning ruins, you are struck into an extatic [sic] reverie which none can describe, and they can only be sensible of that feel it … here a single stone is a ruin and lies like the haughty carcase of Goliath.

He coined the term trilithon for the gigantic three-stone doorways that awed Huntingdon. But his book, Stonehenge, a Temple Restor’d to the British Druids, peddled an unjustified conjecture that this was a temple of a primordial patriarchal religion, built by immigrant Phoenicians, the progenitors of the Celts and their Druidical cults. These views unfortunately rippled down the centuries.

Stukeley was the first to mention earthworks. In 1721 he found the Avenue, the wide pathway from the monument, one arm leading to the ancient ford on the river Avon, the other to a narrow, banked enclosure which he located north of Stonehenge. This feature struck him as a hippodrome; he gave it the Latin word cursus (racetrack) that has stuck to this day.

There were no royal derbies in prehistoric Britain. In November 2011, a team from the universities of Birmingham, Bradford and Vienna discovered a huge pit at each end of the cursus. They align (roughly) with Stonehenge’s heelstone at sunrise and sunset of the summer solstice. Moreover, at the midpoint of the cursus, the sun at midday that day appears to hover directly over the monument. The twenty-first-century speculation is from Birmingham’s Chair in Landscape Archaeology, Professor Vince Gaffney, who suggests:

It is possible that processions within the cursus moved from the eastern pit at sunrise, continuing eastwards along the cursus and, following the path of the sun overhead, and perhaps back to the west, reaching the western pit at sunset to mark the longest day of the year.

Professor Julian Thomas of Manchester University had already dated the cursus at about 3500 BC, five hundred years older than Stonehenge itself. Putting the two findings together, some archaeologists believe they are justified in hypothesising that worship of a sun god explains the celestial alignments in all the massive building activity in the area.

The special (or coincidental) alignments of neolithic monuments have always been central to the mystery of why they were built. In 1771, Dr John Smith, Anglican rector and Gaelic poet, published his research on the alignments of Stonehenge in a work entitled Cathoir Gawr [its Gaelic name], the Grand Orrery of the Ancient Druids, called Stonehenge, Astronomically Explained, and proved to be a Temple for Observing the Motions of the Heavenly Bodies. It was to be nearly two hundred years before archaeo-astronomy launched its contentious claim to be taken seriously.

Throughout the nineteenth century Stonehenge acted as a magnet for quacks, theologians, antiquarians, seers and amateur excavators. Druidism theories prevailed. Multi-faceted John Waltire, astronomer and philosopher, had conducted experiments with air which laid the foundations for Henry Cavendish’s discoveries of the composition of water. He camped at the stones for two months and observed the acoustic qualities: a speaker at the altar stone could be heard clearly everywhere in the monument. In 2010, Rupert Till, Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Huddersfield, carried out acoustic experiments with modern equipment. He speculated that when Stonehenge was in its perfect shape, it would have resonated sound to create trance-like music for rituals at the site.

Between 1805 and 1810 William Cunnington of the Wiltshire Society dug extensively around Stonehenge and found at Bush Barrow the body of a local chieftain of the early Bronze Age, laid to rest with weapons and gold ornaments. He soon became known as “The King of Stonehenge”. Cunnington excavated around the fallen great trilithon, left tokens or coins to mark his visit, and was the first to question why two different types of stones had been used in the monument.

That pondering set off one of the great unresolved debates that occupies so many archaeological careers and consumes much academic paper today—where the inner circle and horseshoe of smaller “bluestones” came from, why they were selected, and how they got there. In 1921 H.H. Thomas, a geologist and palaeobiologist, delivered a lecture pointing out that the bluestones were geologically identical to rocks cropping out in a small area around Carn Menyn in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, South Wales. (We can now see them clearly on Google Earth.) To account for their presence at Stonehenge, he put forward the least likely explanation for a geologist: that stone age people quarried huge rocks—five tonnes each—and transported them by land and sea 240 kilometres to Salisbury Plain for their magical properties. No evidence of such transport has ever turned up; nevertheless, for the archaeological establishment including English Heritage, this ambitious theory is the accepted wisdom.

In 2005 Professors Tim Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright claimed to have found the very quarry for the stones in the Carn Menyn outcrop on the Preseli Ridge. In December last year, geologists Robert Ixer of the University of Leicester and Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales matched Stonehenge fragments to rocks at a different place—Craig Rhos-y-Felin near Port Saeson, over the ridge to the north. A team from the Open University, led by Professor Olwen Williams-Thorpe, has shown that the bluestones are at least thirteen different types from a sprinkling of seven Preseli sites.

The alternative theory, first put forward in detail by a geologist, Geoffrey Kellaway, in 1971, infuriates archaeologists because it rains on their parade. It suggests the bluestones are “erratics”, entrained in the streamline formed by the confluence of the great Irish Sea and Welsh glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. The melting tongue of glacial ice which is known to have pushed into south-western England dumped the stones in Wiltshire. The builders of Stonehenge would have simply collected strange rare stones they found not too far away. When polished, some (the spotted rhyolites) shone blue and sparkled like stars. (The sky?) The large field of chips in the monument area indicates the stones were shaped on the spot, and therefore local.

To test the transport theory, in 2000 the National Lottery funded a volunteer group, Menter Preseli (Empower Preseli) to try to deliver a three-ton bluestone from Wales to Wiltshire. It was to have been a triumph of the millennium celebrations, proving the capabilities of the Englishman’s ancestors, but it got no further than the coast. After great difficulty dragging it down bitumen roads, their primitive boats let it slip into the harbour at Milford Haven. The Navy fished it out; today it lies in the National Botanical Gardens of Wales at Llanarthne. The Heritage Lottery Fund had paid £53,000 to move one stone seventeen miles.

The clergy had entered enthusiastically into the challenge of Stonehenge. A novel if unscientific suggestion came in 1864 from the prolific ecclesiastical writer Canon Henry Browne, who seemed to believe that Stonehenge pre-dated the biblical flood, and its destruction was part of God’s punishment by water. Browne and his children sold nine editions of his antediluvian tracts at Stonehenge, where they acted as unofficial caretakers.

By 1880 visitors to Stonehenge were getting their emotions under control. Professor Flinders Petrie surveyed and mapped the site, numbering the stones in a sequence still used today. Dr Joseph Anderson, in Scotland in Pagan Times, a two-volume research study of the Stone, Bronze and Iron ages, concluded:

It is clear that, in the end of the seventeenth century, there was no tradition among the people connecting these monuments with the Druids. They were simply regarded as places of pagan worship.

But Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough in 1890 rekindled interest in religion as a cultural phenomenon, with the sun as a solar god symbolising death and rebirth, and the mistletoe of the sanctuary of Nemi the token of ritual renewal. The book was to profoundly influence British cult development and the adoption of Stonehenge as its spiritual centre.

At the turn of the century, the first modern scientist, Sir Norman Lockyer, appeared, his approach setting the scene for an enduring brawl between the archaeologists and astronomers, the diggers and the stargazers. The founder and first editor of the scientific journal Nature, as an astronomer he had observed an alignment of the great Egyptian temple of Amon-Re at Karnak with sunset at midsummer. Applying these insights to Stonehenge, he found alignments for both solstices and equinoxes. It was therefore, he believed, a solstitial temple, the first English attempt to measure the passing of the seasons to time farming operations. These views were fiercely opposed by archaeologists, to whom he replied: “I wish every archaeologist would learn just a little astronomy.” Despite its failings on dating, Lockyer’s Stonehenge and Other British Monuments Astronomically Considered took the important first step in establishing a new science.

Lockyer also thought it obvious that the bluestones could not have been carted from Wales, and John Wesley Judd, an early twentieth-century geologist, agreed: “The true source of these ‘foreign rocks’ is to be found in the circumstances that such materials are constantly found transported as boulders of the glacial-drift.”

Stonehenge had been in private ownership since the dissolution of the monasteries, when Henry VIII gave the lands of Amesbury Abbey, some 200,000 acres, to the Duke of Somerset. The estate passed through many hands, slowly whittled away until the Great War, which had consequences for the acceleration of scientific exploration, the public right to rites, and conflict between the two. In 1914, Lieutenant Edmund Antrobus, the only son of the Fourth Baronet Antrobus, was killed in France. Stonehenge had been in the family’s possession since 1824; Sir Edmund, the Third Baronet, had fiercely defended public access to the monument, opposing intrusion by both inquisitive archaeologists and interfering civil servants. Old photographs show the stones a favourite picnic spot for families, for gypsies and for county fairs, but eventually these festivities caused so much damage the monument was fenced off and an admission fee charged. After five years litigation, the High Court upheld Antrobus’s right to make a charge, ending forever free access, and initiating the druid campaigns for prior rights which continue to this day.

With the death of his son, the Fourth Baronet put Stonehenge up for sale. At auction in September 1915, “Lot 15: Stonehenge with 30 acres 2 rods and 37 perches of downland”, was sold to a Salisbury businessman, Sir Cecil Chubb, for £6600. Local gossip was that he bought it on a whim as a present for his wife, who was none too pleased, but Chubb believed that Stonehenge belonged to the nation. In 1918 he deeded it to the government, subject to a list of small conditions, all but one of which have since been repudiated. Wiltshire locals can still claim free entry, but Chubb’s requirement that the public entrance fee should never be more than one shilling has long since gone.

With close to a million visitors a year, Stonehenge is English Heritage’s biggest cash cow. “Managed open access” for thirteen hours on solstice days is free, but otherwise the entrance charge ranges from £9 (about $13) for a one-hour walkaround to £15 for “Stone circle access” in limited groups by appointment, and £99 for a special guided tour at the winter solstice. Work has begun on a multi-million-pound visitors’ centre and museum that will enhance the cash flow.

The government wasted no time digging. Between 1919 and 1926 Colonel William Hawley excavated half the site for the Office of Works, later for the Society of Antiquaries in preparation for restoration work. He discovered more of the Aubrey holes and recovered five cremation burials in the ditch. Archaeologists now accept that Stonehenge was built in eight phases between 3100 BC and 1100 BC. Bluestones were the first stones to be erected, in a double circle but only half-completed. They were later taken down, the horseshoe of giant trilithons erected and the bluestones returned about 1800 BC in an inner circle and horseshoe before the outer ring of sarsens was installed. It’s believed this indicated the bluestones’ importance and some magical or other significance that earned them an honoured place in the centre of the shrine. In 1100 BC, probably not long before the site was abandoned, the Avenue was extended to the River Avon. In 61 AD Roman troops largely destroyed the monument.

This chronology has enabled Professor Mike Parker Pearson and his team of the joint universities’ Riverside Project to make sense of the buried circle of pits sixty metres in diameter that they discovered one mile away on the banks of the Avon. They have dubbed it Bluestonehenge. He is now waiting for the results of radiocarbon dating of materials excavated from the pits in 2009 to confirm his idea that twenty-seven of the Stonehenge bluestones once stood there. His theory is that the River Avon linked the “domain of the living”—the Neolithic village of Durrington Walls, the largest known henge in Britain, as well as another sacred site upstream, Woodhenge—with the “domain of the dead” of Bluestonehenge as a cremation site. Ceremonial removal to Stonehenge via the Avenue led to interment where the important dead became ancestors. He says this makes Stonehenge a cemetery, where at least 240 people are known to have been buried. Recently, a digital archaeologist, Henry Rothwell, has shown that the bluestones were arranged in an oval, not a circle, setting off new speculations about the significance of alignment. Parker Pearson told me his new book, Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery, details his discoveries that this stretch of the River Avon was central to the lives of the people who built Stonehenge. So now we have two competing theories of Stonehenge—as a healing shrine, and a sort of terrestrial columbarium. In January this year, English Heritage re-wrote its guidebook to incorporate these two theories as fact.

There are some incontrovertible facts about Stonehenge. At its latitude of 51° 10’ 42” N, the rising sun at the summer solstice appears due east and the setting sun due west, so the morning and evening shadows align in a straight line. Lines drawn between the four “station stones” (on the Aubrey circle) form a perfect rectangle, also possible only at this approximate latitude, with its longer axis pointing to the most southerly moonrise.

Gerald Hawkins was an English astronomer who held the chair of astronomy at Boston University. In 1965 he surprised and outraged the archaeological fraternity with Stonehenge Decoded, a book in which he detailed his analysis of the alignments in Stonehenge, using the University’s IBM 7090 Smithsonian computer. The stones, he asserted, could be read as a giant observatory, capable of predicting eclipses if markers were moved around the fifty-six Aubrey holes at the correct rate. Professor Richard Atkinson, who had carried out the biggest excavations of Stonehenge between 1950 and 1964, debunked Hawkins’s work, declaring that the Britons who erected the stones were primitives, “mere barbarians”. He wrote a denunciation, Moonshine on Stonehenge.

The academic controversy raged so fiercely in the pages of Antiquity magazine that its editor asked Britain’s most respected astronomer, Fred Hoyle, to review Hawkins’s work. Hoyle found many errors, but concluded: “It is implausible to argue that a people ignorant of astronomy chose positions for the stones that happened by chance to display great astronomical subtlety.”

This could not excuse the many errors in Atkinson’s and Hawkins’s work; both over-estimated the number of solar and lunar alignments involved. Worse, both had invoked rational reconstruction, their own scientific knowledge clouding their historical sensibility. David Hume had noted this tendency to anthropomorphism as “a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious”.

Nevertheless archaeo-astronomy was off and running. In 1977 John Michell published Secrets of the Stones: The Story of Astro-Archaeology. And Atkinson relaxed his views after being impressed by the work of a Scottish engineer, Alexander Thom, who had deduced what he termed “the megalithic yard” (829 millimetres) by measuring the spacing between stones in hundreds of monuments in England and Scotland. More controversially, Thom also argued that if a site aligned with four specific astronomical events, then it was at least likely that the sun and moon movements were observed and recorded. Rosemary Hill in her book Stonehenge declared that the science had evolved over the years from “lunacy to heresy to interesting notion and finally to the gates of orthodoxy”. Aubrey Burl, a Scottish archaeologist, on the one hand a supporter of the glacial stones theory, was still sceptical:

History is full of enjoyable myths but Stonehenge has too many. They mutate. Hardly had modern scholars got rid of the pre-Roman Druids than those soothsayers reappeared in the guise of third millennium BCE astronomer-priests who are said to have designed the great circle as a celestial computer for the prediction of eclipses.

In 1990, the Royal Mail issued a stamp commemorating the history of astronomy featuring Stonehenge under phases of the moon. Nine years later, Clive Ruggles was appointed the world’s first professor of archaeo-astronomy at the University of Leicester. He is now recognised as the pre-eminent scientist in the field. He has adopted a rigorously objective approach and been a calming voice. In his massive Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland, he paid tribute to Thom’s work but showed that his claim to precision in the monuments was misplaced. Ruggles has established that an inner circle in the Durrington Walls henge is aligned with the midsummer sunset and midwinter sunrise—the opposite to Stonehenge—proving, he says, the two sites were used by the same people.

Unfortunately, Aubrey Burl’s druids had not gone away. The English druids of the Universal Bond, An Druidh Uileach Braithrearchas (ADUB) had been inaugurated in 1717 with three stated intentions: the training of the mind, the cultivation of the heart, and the making of true manliness. It met in London coffee houses as a secret society. Aubrey, Stukeley, Halley, Isaac Newton, William Blake and Christopher Wren all proclaimed themselves druids. (Wren laboriously carved his name on one of the sarsens—an early graffitist.) After a period of persecution, the Ancient Order of Druids, largely influenced by freemasonry, was founded in 1781. In the nineteenth century, druidry became entangled with Welsh nationalism, the Chartist movement and the occult Societas Rosicruciana. In the twentieth century it split into two main groups and then fractured further. There are now sixteen orders loosely confederated. Most had social and cultural aims and operated like friendly societies. Druids first joined the summer solstice observation in 1905 when the Ancient Order held a ceremony among the stones. In 1912 a radical breakaway group re-claiming the title of the Universal Bond appeared, led by a socialist revolutionary, George MacGregor Reid. He led a twenty-year challenge to authority. The Bond clashed with the police, refused to pay admission and on one occasion tore down the fence around Stonehenge, allowing a thousand people in free.

When it assumed management in 1918, the Office of Works was unsympathetic. The Inspector of Monuments, Charles Peers, first described druids as “these curious persons”, but as their demands increased, he wrote: “Some limit must be set to this absurd and degrading nonsense.” The druids began describing the first archaeological diggings as “desecration”, and in 1924 touched off a national furore by asking to bury the ashes of their dead within Stonehenge.

The government first agreed, but capitulated to public campaigning. The Guardian thundered that “it took the Latter-Day Druids at their own pretentious valuation”. Three years later, Thomas Kendrick of the British Museum recorded that in the public mind “the Druids are rapidly becoming synonymous with the Ancient Britons”. By the 1940s they were also synonymous with the summer solstice. In modern times druid militancy has been maintained in the person of a former soldier and bikie, John Rothwell, who changed his name to Arthur Pendragon. With placards proclaiming, “Don’t pay, stay away”, he has been a serial nuisance, picketing Stonehenge for open access, and launching vexatious legal claims.

A new front in the battle between science and “sacred” was opened by the 2003 Human Remains Report of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. It set guidelines for determining the legitimacy of claims on behalf of a religious community for the reburial of human remains. Osteo-archaeologists saw it as a threat to their research, and the Curator of Archaeology at Guildford Museum, Mary Alexander, wrote to the Times:

It is irritating to be told how to do one’s job, by people who know little about it. Careful excavation and study reveal a great deal about burial and ritual, and an understanding of what prehistoric people were doing, and why they did it.

The druids lost the first fight under the guidelines. The Council of British Druid Orders had campaigned for the reburial of “Charlie”, a 5000-year-old skeleton of a young person held in the Avebury Museum, claiming he or she was a tribal ancestor. English Heritage decided the druids merely claimed cultural affinity with pagan heritage, but could not demonstrate close and continuous links with the skeleton in question. Since then the right of scientists to retain human remains for two years has been extended indefinitely, subject to a lengthy permit application.

Nevertheless a strange rapprochement between archaeology and cultism is developing. When Professors Darvill and Wainwright carried out the first dig for fifty years among the bluestones of Stonehenge, a druid group performed a preliminary blessing of the site; more surprising, the scientists joined in. When I asked Tim Darvill about this, he replied:

Ah! The druids! Those around today are as you say neo-druids, but there are a lot of them and English Heritage tend to humour them simply on the grounds that to exclude one group would be to exclude all sorts of people. The general line is that ancient monuments have to serve the modern world as well as provide a source of information for understanding the past.

The same thing happened when Professor Parker Pearson opened the site of the bluestone pits on the banks of the Avon. Invited or not, a druid group managed to lay claim to the right to represent the ancestors by conducting a ceremony there. Both these events were shown on British television and can be viewed on YouTube. Parker Pearson obviously believes in conciliation—he directed me to a report, The Sanctity of Burial: Pagan Views, Ancient and Modern, by Robert Wallis of Richmond University London and Jenny Blain of Sheffield Hallam University. This took the relativist line:

Many British people today—including some archaeologists—are indicating that “sacredness” rather than perceived “objective” and universally applicable scientific knowledge should be the default position.

All this leads to the question of what lies ahead for Stonehenge and its surrounding countryside. The first answer is—an increasing intensity of academic work, courtesy of the taxpayer. Parker Pearson has been awarded a grant of £800,000 for a new pet idea, the Stonehenge Feeding Project. Durrington Walls has already been revealed as the site of a significant conurbation, with up to three hundred neolithic houses, but occupied only seasonally. Possibly this was where the workers who built Stonehenge lived, he says, adding flippantly: “Who made the sandwiches and cups of tea for the builders?” More seriously, the project is to examine the thousands of bones of cattle and pigs that were slaughtered at the site in winter, to find where they and their owners came from. Already strontium and oxygen isotope analysis of cattle tooth enamel is said to be providing “exciting” indications of long-distance supply routes.

Then there is the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, led by Professor Vince Gaffney of Birmingham University. The idea of perception techniques as an adjunct to excavation is not new. In 1907, the first aerial photographs of Stonehenge were taken from a “war balloon”. Today archaeologists can use aerial surveys, ground-penetrating radar, magnetometry, earth resistivity, Lidar and other geophysical techniques to scan large areas quickly and non-intrusively. As well as the cursus pits, Gaffney’s team has already discovered a previously unknown henge a mile from Stonehenge that possibly also contained a stone circle. The plan now is to map fourteen square kilometres of the countryside in a “virtual excavation” to try to understand the inter-connected significance of henges, the hundreds of burial barrows and the two cursuses.

Digging up Britain has become a highly profitable industry for academics and their hangers-on. In the last twenty years, popular television programs have helped to create a burgeoning public curiosity. In 2008 the BBC’s Timewatch broadcast the Darvill–Wainwright dig live to 10 million people around the world. Channel 4’s Time Team recorded the unearthing of Bluestonehenge. The chief actors in the never-ending drama of retrieving interesting but comparatively meaningless bits of detritus from 5000 years ago push out an endless flow of academic papers and popular books to advertise their theories and compete for more public funding.

The problem is that, not unlike the climate change industry, very little of it beyond the basic data is science. There is enormous pressure, at a site so iconic as Stonehenge, to explain what the data means. The facts, such as they are, are often made to fit the theory. No archaeologist can hope to answer definitively the central questions of who planned the building of Stonehenge and why. With no written records from a pre-literate society, who can explain the organisation of an estimated 30 million man-hours of hard labour over centuries in a small and technically primitive society? What cultural practices can carbon-dating the cremated human remains found in Aubrey Hole 7 tell us, other than that humans were cremated? Why jump to the conclusion that very large stones were lugged from Wales to Salisbury Plain just because the rock types are the same? The scientist who set that hare running, H.H. Thomas, writing just after the First World War, was at least partly motivated by the need to show the world that Britain’s neolithic ancestors were smarter than Germany’s.

The most fertile field of pseudo-archaeology has been archaeo-astronomy, where elaborate theories of cosmic observations have been retrospectively deduced from the placement of stones. Alexander Thom was an engineer who worked on the Forth bridge and designed flying boats. A rigorous investigator despised by the archaeological fraternity, he pointed out that any ten stones in a rough circle will display a number of alignments with significant astronomical points, simply due to chance.

But the biggest fraud perpetrated on the public has been the claim that modern druids, wiccans, neo-pagans and other members of the counter-culture have on Stonehenge as lineal descendants of the ancients and custodians of their wisdom. How can people like Sue Lilly, Britain’s leading “crystal healer”, get away with statements that the bluestones combined with the chalk of the Downs give a battery-like effect of increased energy? Why did 14,000 people turn up in pouring rain in June to observe a sunrise of no proven significance? Parker Pearson says anyway they’re barking up the wrong tree—Stonehenge was built for the winter solstice, which he’s now dubbed the “Neolithic Christmas”!

English Heritage stands condemned for maintaining a complacent pusillanimity in its management of this best-known of its monuments. This year it was prepared to remove any hint of expert disagreement from its documents, possibly for fear of deterring Olympic visitors. And the centuries-old trade of speculation, conjecture, theorising and guessing goes on. At the heart of it all is intense, sometimes bitter resentment that the astronomers, geologists, and geomorphologists have intruded on the sacred preserves of the archaeologist, with little co-operation.

There are 1000 stone circles in Britain and Ireland, all indicative of a common belief and purpose of the ancients. Stonehenge is grand, it is impressive, it is tantalising. But above all it is unknowable. It is time to leave it alone.

Socrates: I have heard a tradition of antiquity, whether true or not antiquity only knows. If we had the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men?  — Plato, Phaedrus