Jacquetta Hawkes once said that every age has the Stonehenge that it deserves – or desires – and that is the theme of this book. Rosemary Hill mercifully advances no new theories about the function of the monument but explores how past generations have constantly reinterpreted Stonehenge to fit their own needs, making it a mirror of changing times and attitudes. The chronological structure is also satisfactorily thematic, from the first antiquaries down to the new millennium.
She begins with a lucid summary of the site’s history, then moves on to its historiography. The first recorded mention of ‘Stanheyeg’ was as a boundary marker in a deed of ad 937. It puzzled and impressed Henry of Huntingdon, but Geoffrey of Monmouth solved its mystery by announcing it was built by Merlin as a tomb for King Arthur’s father. He perceptively suggested that the stones had come from the far west and that they were used for healing purposes, a view most recently reiterated by Wainwright and Darvill, following their excavations in April 2008. A competent drawing of the trilithons dates from 1440, but the site did not receive serious attention until the seventeenth century, after King James i encouraged proper investigations and his son’s architect, Inigo Jones, wrote a pioneering treatise, Stone-Heng Restored. Jones, as befitted an Italianate architect, concluded that it was built by the Romans, using Vitruvian principles and employing the Tuscan order. But Wiltshire-born John Aubrey made the more patriotic case that it was built by ancient Britons as a temple for the Druids. The Irish Protestant scholar, John Toland, expanded this theory at length, even though his image of ferocious priests was firmly based on his hostile view of contemporary Catholic clergy. Meanwhile, a baffled Samuel Pepys announced of the stones: ‘God knows what their use was!’
The Druids may be the elephant in the living room for serious scholars of Stonehenge, but Hill is unembarrassed, and confidently states that the monument is not just for the archaeologists. Indeed her attitude to the profession remains somewhat sceptical throughout, and some Fellows might take issue with her remark that modern Druids have a longer pedigree than modern archaeologists. However, she does concede that the seventeenth-century antiquaries – who rightly bulk large – were the first archaeologists. She makes a sturdy defence of William Stukeley (who once happily dined on top of a trilithon), hailing his perceptive observations at the site and reinterpreting him not just as obsessed by the Druids but someone who made a genuine attempt to unify all systems of belief into a sort of ur-religion.
The Romans versus Druids debate was superseded from the late eighteenth century by Stonehenge’s new role as a monument of Romanticism, which incorporated a whole spectrum of interpretations, from the Picturesque to the Sublime. It became a symbol for radicals, invested by Wordsworth with forebodings of the French Revolution and by Blake as part of his vision of Jerusalem. Romantic painters were also attracted to the site. James Barry set it as the backdrop for King Lear and the mystical Samuel Palmer used it to illustrate Milton. Its commercial appeal is also suggested by Constable’s version, which he made some twelve years after his only visit to the site.
For scientific Victorians, the monument had a very different function. After Lyell’s Principles of Geology finally undermined Ussher’s alarmingly brief chronology of creation, a new generation of scholars emerged out of former antiquaries and pushed the monument back in time. Sir John Lubbock assigned it to the Bronze Age, following the Dane Thomsen’s definition of the three-age system. (Hill also reminds us that Lubbock, ‘one of the great Victorian optimists’, spent three months trying to teach his poodle to read, one of many such delightful plums in this book.) And Charles Darwin visited the site in pursuit of his ground-breaking research into earthworm activity. But even the methodologies of the new geology failed to reveal the secrets of Stonehenge, and nothing could deter the Druids.
Stonehenge was beginning to suffer from its own popularity. By the mid-nineteenth century, tourists were already inflicting considerable damage. This was made worse by the advent of the railways – in the 1890s, it was even planned to run a branch line direct to the stones. Even worse was the motor car. In 1899 the brand- new Automobile Association actually held a rally at the site. Such threats naturally attracted the attention of the developing conservation movement, and Stonehenge was eventually scheduled as an Ancient Monument in 1913.
The story gets more depressing. Hill is sceptical about the interventions of those twentieth-century archaeologists who have laboured over Stonehenge ‘for better and worse’. They include the Society of Antiquaries, whom she accuses of failing to give proper support to the destructive excavators of the 1920s (a time when muddy Stonehenge compared unfavourably with Howard Carter’s dazzling discoveries in Egypt). The military and the Ministry of Works also stand accused, although Hill seems to retain a sneaking sympathy for the Druids and their schismatic sub-divisions. She recounts how, in the second half of the century, Stonehenge became a site of anti-establishment protest, a home for rock festivals and even an inspiration for the hippy architects who aligned Milton Keynes on the summer solstice and named its main boulevards Avebury, Silbury and Midsummer. (It is also interesting to learn that its longer-term architectural influences include Covent Garden piazza and church, and the circuses and crescents – ie, suns and moons – of Georgian Bath and Edinburgh.) Meanwhile scientists and archaeologists argued whether it was built as a giant astronomical computer, theories which gave rise to the initially implausible concept of astro-archaeology and, at the other end of the spectrum, the association of Stonehenge with ley lines, Atlantis and UFOs.
Hill suggests that the site’s enemies today are not tourists, archaeologists or travellers but managers and administrators. Her final chapter recounts the dreadful story of Stonehenge in the new millennium and the government’s endless postponement of the decisions over access, in what Roger Mercer has elegantly called ‘the delicate minuet of consultation’. Will the need to impress visitors to the 2012 Olympics at last break the logjam of stalled proposals and inquiries, which may have already cost £25 million?
This book is a worthy contribution to Profile’s ‘Wonders of the World’ series on iconic sites and monuments. The delightful endpapers (from Stukeley’s Stonehenge) show the huge stones dwarfing tiny antiquaries, like Gulliver surrounded by Lilliputians – an apt metaphor.
