Stonehenge: A Novel of 2000 BC

252 Pages·2000·4.81 MB·English

by  Bernard Cornwell

wonders of the world
STONEHENGE
ROSEMARY HILL
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also by rosemary hill
God’s Architect:
Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain
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stonehenge
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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
Profi le Books Ltd
3a Exmouth House
Pine Street
Exmouth Market
London ec1r 0jh
www.profi lebooks.com
Copyright © Rosemary Hill, 2008
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset in Caslon by MacGuru Ltd
[email protected]
Designed by Peter Campbell
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays, Bungay, Suffolk
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written
permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 86197 865 3
The paper this book is printed on is certifi ed by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship
Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of
custody SGS-COC-2061
SGS-COC-2061
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For
Christopher Logue
‘Cyclops Christianus’
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CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 6
chapter A Very Short Prehistory
2 21
chapter Contending with Oblivion: The Antiquaries
3 59
chapter Art, Order and Proportion: The Architects
4 86
chapter ‘Cold Ston’y Horror’: The Romantics
5 117
chapter The Age of Darwin
6 146
chapter Archaeology, Astronomy and the Age of Aquarius
7 190
chapter The New Millennium
207
Planning a Visit?
211
Further Reading
223
List of Illustrations
227
Acknowledgements
229
Index
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INTRODUCTION
‘The rational reader, if he is interested in the history of ideas,
must be willing to hear about all ideas which in their time have
been potent to move men.’
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory
The desire for knowledge and the love of mystery are two of
the most powerful human impulses and Stonehenge satisfi es
both at once. That is why it has never lost its hold on our
imagination or our curiosity. It is the most famous mega-
lithic structure in the world, instantly recognisable from the
sketchiest of outlines and visited by over half a million people
a year. Yet after more than a millennium of speculation and
investigation we still have no certain idea of what it is or
why it was built. By 1695 the antiquary Edmund Gibson
was already complaining that Stonehenge is ‘so singular and
receives so little light from history that almost every one has
advanced a new notion’. Three hundred years later there has
been considerably more light and many more notions, but
few secure answers.
This book, unusually in the vast literature on the subject,
supports no particular theory about the purpose and meaning
of prehistoric Stonehenge. It is concerned instead with what
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