A Prehistoric Day: Part 2

So, Stonehenge. While numbers are limited tickets have to be booked for a half hour entry time slot, and mine was 2 to 2.30pm. There is a large, relatively new visitor centre (opened in 2013), with a permanent exhibition, shop, cafe and reproduction late neolithic houses. When I arrived it was raining slightly, so I decided to visit the indoor exhibition first. As well as the permanent exhibition on the history of the henge and the other prehistoric features in the landscape (lots of barrows, mostly of later date than the stones), there was an exhibition of photographs sent in by members of the public showing people enjoying visits to Stonehenge over the decades. Until 1978 there was open access to the stones - I remember playing on and around them when I visited as a child - but the sheer number of visitors meant that for their protection they had to be roped off. 

The visitor centre is more than a mile away from the henge, with a shuttle bus service available. I decided to do the 30 minute walk, to get more of a sense of the landscape. It had stopped raining, but there was still some ominous looking cloud when I reached the stones. Fortunately it cleared while I was there and the sun had come out by the time I left. 

It seems almost certain that the point of Stonehenge was to allow celebrations of the summer and winter solstices. The single stone in the picture above is the heel stone, which points directly through a gap in the centre of the henge to the setting sun on the winter solstice. Looking the other way, at the summer solstice the sun rises behind the heel stone. 

To help with social distancing there is currently a one way system leading clockwise around the circle of stones. When I reached the opposite point I managed to get a photo pointing exactly towards the summer solstice sunrise. The tall stone with the bump on the top is the remaining upright of the central trilothon inside the outer circle. Its partner and the lintel have both fallen, but the line leading through what was the  centre of this trilothon to the heel stone (which you can see in the distance just to the right of the upright) formed the axis along which the solstice sun rises and sets. 

English Heritage has put together a good audio tour of the stones, the exhibition and the landscape, available as a phone app.  I had downloaded the app before I went and took AirPods with me so that I could listen as I walked around. One thing I learned is that the back is scruffier than the front. The builders were very careful to make the front of the henge smart, but were more careless about the back and put less effort into cutting the stones smoothly.  

At the end of the circuit of the stones I sat on a bench for a while, enjoying the sun and the view. According to my Watch I had walked 7.5 miles by then and my legs decided they didn't fancy walking back so I took the shuttle bus back to the visitor centre. I bought myself a couple of pencils and a key ring in the shop as useful souvenirs and fuelled up on coffee before heading home. I possibly had just enough juice left in the car battery to make it home, but decided to make a quick charging stop at nearby Amesbury just to be on the safe side. A ten minute top up was all it needed and I made it home in just over 2 hours. Such a treat of a day, rounding off a busy but very enjoyable couple of weeks. Five months of lockdown, and now it seems as though everything is happening at once!