My Adventures 3: Stonehenge

I've been wanting to attend a Solstice at Stonehenge for years now, so I finally decided to go. I left home at 1240 pm on Saturday the 22nd December 2018 and drove to Woodhenge on Fargo Road and after a 2 hr drive I arrive at 240am. Well that was the plan anyway, but Wiltshire council decided to close Fargo road so no access to Woodhenge, so I park further up Fargo Road on a track that leads to a footpath. I folded down the seats in the estate and had a blow up double mattress and sleeping bag and got a few hours sleep.

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So after a couple of hours sleep, I get up and finish packing the car up and just in time too as a Landrover comes up the track I was blocking.

After a quick cuppa from my flask, I walk off down the dark footpath lit by my torch.

Looking over to Amesbury in the darkness.

It was a glorious moonlit Winter Solstice, I just hoped for a sunrise as good.

I walk along the King Barrow Ridge, not much to see as its still pitch black.

I eventually walk out onto Fargo Road a lot further up where I see a huge group of people walking away from parked cars all heading for Stonehenge. I take a path next to an electrical substation and another across another field that crosses The Cursus. The Stonehenge Cursus is a large Neolithic cursus monument on Salisbury plain, near to Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. It is roughly 3 kilometres long and between 100 metres and 150 metres wide.

I chat to a local heading there, he tells me he used to live and work in Chelmsford but moved away to escape people and the noise, I know exactly how he feels.

Anyway up ahead I get my first sight of Stonehenge, only visible briefly as peoples flashes on cameras go off, still pitch black.

I am now in Stonehenge, its only during the Solstices and equinox's you can actually get up next to the stones and touch them.

The winter solstice occurs in December and in the Northern Hemisphere the date marks the 24-hour period with the fewest daylight hours of the year, which is why it is known as the shortest day and longest night.

After the shortest day, the days start getting longer and the nights shorter. At the spring and vernal equinox the day and night hours are around the same length, each lasting around 12 hours. The number of daylight hours peaks at Summer Solstice.

Winter solstice is an important time for cultures across the globe. Under the old Julian Calendar, the winter solstice occurred on 25 December. With the introduction of the Gregorian calendar the solstice slipped to the 21st, but the Christian celebration of Jesus’s birth continued to be held on 25 December. Here are some of the festivals celebrated internationally, past and present:

Yule (Neopagan)

The pre-Christian festival, the Feast of Juul, was observed in Scandinavia at the time of the December solstice. Fires would be lit to symbolise the heat and light of the returning sun and a Yule log was gathered and burnt in the hearth as a tribute the Norse god Thor.

Present day Christmas customs and traditions such as the Yule log, Yule boar, Yule singing, and others stem from pagan Juul. Today the event is celebrated in some forms of Modern Paganism.

Saturnalia (Ancient Rome)

In Ancient Rome, the festival of Saturnalia began on 17 December and lasted for seven days. As the name suggests, the festival was celebrated in honour of Saturn, the father of the gods, the same deity after which the sixth planet in our solar system is named. People would make sacrifices at the Temple of Saturn, before banqueting and giving gifts. The usual law and order would be suspended, schools and businesses would close, and quarrels would be forgotten.

Today, people from the UK and beyond visit the ancient site of Stonehenge to celebrate the winter and summer solstice. One reason why this is a popular site to visit is that you can glimpse the sun’s rays through the stones which are lined up with the path of the sun. Most people arrive late on the night of solstice to catch the sunrise and while both solstices are celebrated by modern day religions and tourists alike, the ancient civilisation that first built the monument most likely did so primarily for the winter solstice, perhaps to request a good growing season in the year to come. The main features of the Stonehenge site date from the centuries around 3500 BC.

For people throughout the ages—from the ancient Egyptians and Celts to the Hopi—midwinter has been a significant time of ritual, reflection, and renewal. Creating a meaningful celebration of winter solstice, either in place of or in addition to other holiday activities, can help us cultivate a deeper connection to nature and family and all the things that matter most to us. Winter can become a time of feeding the spirit and nurturing the soul, not just emptying our bank account and fraying our nerves.

While we don’t know how long people have been celebrating the solstice, we know that ancient cultures built huge stone structures designed to align perfectly with the sun at specific times, such as dawn or high noon. And some ancient peoples performed sacred rituals and made offerings when the sun dipped below the horizon to ensure its daily return, especially during the darkest days.

Many of the traditions now associated with Christmas are believed to have originated centuries earlier with nature-based communities and indigenous peoples. For example, the idea of Santa Claus may have come from the story of the first shamans who were said to climb high into the upper worlds and return with gifts of wisdom and prophecies, postulates Tony Van Renterghem in When Santa Was a Shaman(Llewellyn, 1995). The word “yule” may derive from an Anglo-Saxon term that means “wheel,” and in pagan Scandinavia, village people sat around bonfires of burning yule logs throughout the night while drinking mead and listening to the stories of minstrel-poets.

It’s easy to mock Pagans and Druids, though the religion rooted in Britain’s heritage is attracting a growing number of people who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’. Many point to the focus on worshipping nature and lack of doctrine as reasons for this growth, which makes sense in a world in which climate change sceptics occupy the highest offices.

There was a type of service held by Arthur Uther Pendragon in the centre of the circle. It was too packed to get near enough to listen what was being said, I heard odd words like peace etc.

Arthur Uther Pendragon (born John Timothy Rothwell, 5 April 1954) is a British eco-campaigner, Neo-Druid leader, media personality, and self-declared reincarnation of King Arthur, a name by which he is also known. Pendragon was the "battle chieftain" of the Council of British Druid Orders.

Born to a working-class family, Pendragon served in the British Army's Royal Hampshire Regiment before being discharged following an injury. Identifying as a greaser, he formed a biker club known as the Gravediggers, moving in counter-cultural circles at free festivals around Britain. After reading a book on King Arthur by the occultist Gareth Knight, he came to believe that he was the reincarnation of the legendary king and changed his name by deed poll. He formed the Loyal Arthurian Warband out of his supporters and began describing himself as a Druid. Angered that English Heritage charged entry to visit Stonehenge, an archaeological site in Wiltshire, between 1990 and 1991 he picketed outside the site on a daily basis.

Later that decade he joined various eco-protests against road development across Britain and, with the Council of British Druid Orders, campaigned for open access to Stonehenge during the solstices. For several years, Pendragon engaged in direct action protests and was repeatedly arrested. English Heritage agreed to implement open access at the solstice in 2000. Pendragon later focused on campaigning for the return of human remains removed from Stonehenge by archaeologists in 2008. He continued to call for free access to the site.

It very slowly got light as we waited for sunrise that would come at 0803 hours.

After much waiting the sun began to appear above the clouds.

Arthur Uther Pendragon.

People celebrated the return of the sun in their own ways, some playing instruments other dancing and chanting.

Arthur Uther Pendragon watching the sun rise.

I left Stonehenge to continue my walk towards Amesbury.

I managed to find a short gap in the A303 traffic and made a dart across the busy road.

On the path opposite on Normanton Down, with the sun still gloriously lighting the sky.

Looking back to Stonehenge and the A303.

I leave the footpath through a gate and follow a path to Stonehenge Down.

Looking across to Coneybury Hill.

Coneybury Henge is a henge which is part of the Stonehenge Landscape in Wiltshire, England. The henge, which has been almost completely flattened, was only discovered in the 20th century. Geophysical surveys and excavation have uncovered many of its features, which include a northeast entrance, an internal circle of postholes, and fragments of bone and pottery.

I take a track leading to West Amesbury Farm.

A Yellowhammer.

I walk out onto a road that I follow all the way into Amesbury.

I enter Amesbury by crossing The River Avon by the Queensbury Bridge.

Queensberry Bridge, the road bridge over the River Avon close to the main entry into Amesbury Abbey. The bridge, which is Listed Grade II, built in 1775 by John Smeaton, is constructed of limestone ashlar on elm plank foundations. Built to carry the London to Devon road later the A303 before it was re-routed.

The bridge was named after the third Duke of Queensberry, the owner of Amesbury Abbey at the time of its construction.

Queensbury Bridge.

It is most famous for the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge which is in its parish, and for the discovery of the Amesbury Archer—dubbed the King of Stonehenge in the press—in 2002. It has been confirmed by archaeologists that it is the oldest continuously occupied settlement in the United Kingdom, having been first settled around 8820 BC.

King Alfred the Great left it in his will, a copy of which is in the British Library, to his youngest son Aethelweard (c.880-922).

Eleanor of Provence, Queen consort of Henry III of England, died in Amesbury on 24 or 25 June 1291, and was buried in Amesbury Priory.

Amesbury sits in the River Avon valley on the southern fringes of Salisbury Plain and has historically been considered an important river crossing area on the road from London to Warminster and Exeter. This has continued into the present with the building of the A303 across the Avon next to the town. Originally the town developed around the water meadows next to several bends in the river, but in time has spread onto the valley hillsides and absorbed part of the military airfield at Boscombe Down.

Gateway into Amesbury Abbey.

I pass the Church of St. Mary and St. Melor, Amesbury

There was a church at Amesbury from the foundation of the abbey in 979 and it is possible that there may have been a church before that. It is thought that the dedication of the church was to St. Mary and that it became a joint dedication when the relics of St. Melor were brought to the abbey. The abbey church itself would have been open to all inhabitants as there would not have been any other church. The abbey was dissolved in 1177 and the church was granted to Amesbury Priory which, by 1186, had built a new church. It was believed that the original abbey church then became the parish church although there has been disagreement over this. If you walk around the church today you certainly receive the impression that it has been more than a parish church in the past but there is now general acceptance that Amesbury had both a priory church and a parish church and that it is the latter which has survived.

I pass the Amesbury History Centre as it was closed.

I walk on passing The George Hotel, a 17th century coaching house founded by King Henry II.

The George in Amesbury, operating as an inn in the 16th century, has continued business, almost certainly occupying the same site on the High Street, to the present day. A timber framed building was built about 1560 after the inn was damaged by fire. Renovations were done after another fire in 1751. About 1908 the accommodation was expanded with the addition of a new brick wing.

During the English Civil War, the George became an overnight stay and headquarters for the Parliamentary commander-in-chief Thomas Fairfax on 29/30 June 1645. He was urged by the preacher Hugh Peters to demolish ‘the monuments of heathenism at Stonehenge‘. Fairfax would have had neither the time nor resources to consider this. After his success at the Battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645, Fairfax led his army at a fast pace of 17 to 20 miles a day heading southwest to relieve Taunton. On 1 July, Fairfax and the New Model Army marched from Amesbury to Broad Chalke, a town to the southwest of Salisbury, and on the following day they arrived at Blandford in Dorset.

In the days of coach travel, posting was the stabling of horses and carriages for the use of travellers.

Tourism to Stonehenge was boosted in 1847 by the opening of passenger service on the railway line from London to Salisbury.

Early in 'Martin Chuzzlewit', Dickens introduces a little Wiltshire village within easy journey of the fair old town of Salisbury. It lies a short a distance off the main coaching road to London and has a snug alehouse, which he calls the Blue Dragon where much of the action takes place. Nearby is a church with a tapering spire, a forge, a sparkling stream and a three storey house where the architect Mr Pecksniff lives

Two Wiltshire pubs claim to be the original for the Blue Dragon, this one and the George at Amesbury, but the latter has little evidence to support its claim. To complicate matters, Dickensian scholar Robert Allbut - working on the coach-route clue - has suggested a third possibility; the Red Lion at Winterslow. He suggests All Saints as the church where Tom Pinch played the organ, and that Clarendon Park, between Winterslow and Salisbury then less a park than a wood was the scene of Jonas Chuzzlewit's murder of Montague Tigg

The charming 15th-century Green Dragon is generally accepted as Dickens's model and it does have a lot going for it. Dickens's pub had an unusually large upstairs room for a village alehouse which required a couple of steps down to enter. Look at the photograph and you will see the floor level of the big gable end room is slightly lower. There is also an adjacent forge which is still working today

On the down side, Alderbury is not enroute to London. It lies South East of Salisbury and is directly on the old coaching road to Southampton. The village sits on a hill with views to the Cathedral spire. There is a stream but it is down in the valley and the church is half-a-mile mile away.

I pass Amesbury Abbey now a nursing home.

Amesbury Abbey was a Benedictine abbey of women at Amesbury in Wiltshire, England, founded by Queen Ælfthryth in about the year 979 on what may have been the site of an earlier monastery. That foundation was dissolved in 1177 by Henry II, who founded in its place a house of the Order of Fontevraud, known as Amesbury Priory.

The name Amesbury Abbey is now used by a nearby mansion, a Grade I listed building which has been converted into a nursing home.

I cross back over the Avon and up to a busy roundabout on the A303.

After managing to negotiate the roundabout via the different phases of lights I walk up Countess Road. Then take a path on my left.

I should have taken the path marked to Larkhill which follows a dismantled railway, but instead after realising my mistake I walk through a field of turnips and thankfully find a gate so I can get back on the right path.

Deer running off from me in the turnip field

I now walk across to Woodhenge.

Woodhenge is a Neolithic Class II henge and timber circle monument within the Stonehenge World Heritage Site.

Woodhenge was identified from an aerial photograph taken by Squadron Leader (later Group Captain) Gilbert Insall, VC, in 1926, during the same period that an aerial archaeology survey of Wessex by Alexander Keiller and OGS Crawford (Archaeology Officer for the Ordnance Survey) was also being undertaken. Although some sources attribute the identification of the henge to Crawford, Crawford himself credits its discovery to Gilbert Insall. However the site had been previously found in the early 19th century and described as an earthworks and thought to be a disc barrow. It was originally called Dough Cover. Maud Cunnington and B.H.Cunnington subsequently excavated the site between 1926 and 1929, confirming that it was indeed a henge.

While construction of the timber monument was probably earlier, the ditch has been dated to between 2470 and 2000 BC, which would be about the same time as, or slightly later than, construction of the stone circle at Stonehenge. Radiocarbon dating of artefacts shows that the site was still in use around 1800 BC.

The site consists of six concentric oval rings of postholes, the outermost being about 43 by 40 metres (141 by 131 ft) wide. They are surrounded first by a single flat-bottomed ditch, 2.4 metres (7.9 ft) deep and up to 12 metres (39 ft) wide, and finally by an outer bank, about 10 metres (33 ft) wide and 1 metre (3.3 ft) high. With an overall diameter measuring 110 metres (360 ft) (including bank and ditch,) the site had a single entrance to the north-east.

At the centre of the rings was a crouched inhumation of a child which Cunnington interpreted as a dedicatory sacrifice, its skull having been split. After excavation, the remains were taken to London, where they were destroyed during The Blitz, making further examination impossible. Cunnington also found a crouched inhumation of a teenager within a grave dug in the Eastern section of the ditch, opposite the entrance.

Most of the 168 post holes held wooden posts, although Cunnington found evidence that a pair of standing stones may have been placed between the second and third post hole rings. Excavations in 2006 indicated that there were at least five standing stones on the site, arranged in a "cove". The deepest post holes measured up to 2 metres (6.6 ft) – and are believed to have held posts which reached as high as 7.5 metres (25 ft) above ground. Those posts would have weighed up to 5 tons, and their arrangement was similar to that of the bluestones at Stonehenge. The positions of the postholes are currently marked with modern concrete posts – a simple and informative method of displaying the site.

Further comparisons with Stonehenge were quickly noticed by Cunnington – both have entrances oriented approximately to the midsummer sunrise, and the diameters of the timber circles at Woodhenge and the stone circles at Stonehenge are similar.

At the centre of the rings was a crouched inhumation of a child which Cunnington interpreted as a dedicatory sacrifice, its skull having been split.

Over 40 years after the discovery of Woodhenge, another timber circle of comparable size was discovered in 1966. Known as the Southern Circle, inside of what came to be known as the Durrington Walls henge enclosure, located only 70 metres (230 ft) north of Woodhenge.

There are various theories about possible timber structures that might have stood on and about the site, and their purpose, but it is likely that the timbers were freestanding, rather than part of a roofed structure. For many years work on the study of Stonehenge had overshadowed any real breakthroughs in the understanding of Woodhenge. Recent ongoing investigations as part of the Stonehenge Riverside Project are now starting to cast new light on the site and on its relationship with neighbouring sites and Stonehenge.

Theories have emerged in which the sites may all be integrated into an overall layout, in which the structures were linked by roads, and which incorporated the natural features of the River Avon. One of these paths, consisting of a series of wide parallel banks and ditches referred to as Stonehenge Avenue, crosses the ridge between the two sites that would otherwise make them both visible from one another, possibly connecting them physically as well as spiritually.

One suggestion is that the use of wood vs. stone may have held a special significance in the beliefs and practices involving the transformation between life and death, possibly separating the two sites into separate "domains". These theories have partially come about with the findings of bones of butchered pigs exclusively at Woodhenge, showing evidence of feasting, leaving Stonehenge as a site only inhabited by ancestral spirits, and not living people. These same possible representations have also been seen in ritualistic megalithic sites on the island of Madagascar, at least 4,000 years after the erection of Woodhenge.

I walk back across the field to The Cuckoo Stone.

The Cuckoo Stone is a Neolithic or Bronze Age standing stone. The stone, which is now fallen.

The Cuckoo Stone is a squat sarsen stone which lies on its side. It the same type of stone as the largest stones used in the Stonehenge circle. The site of Woodhenge is around 500 metres to the east of the Cuckoo Stone, with Durrington Walls to the northeast. Stonehenge is around 2.5 kilometres to the southwest. The Cuckoo Stone was recorded by Richard Colt-Hoare on his 1810 map of the Stonehenge landscape. The nearest other known sarsen stone is that found within Woodhenge during excavations in 1926-28.

The site was excavated in 2007 as part of the Stonehenge Riverside Project. The excavations revealed the pit in which the stone once sat immediately to the west. The stone was originally a natural feature, which sometime before 2000 BC, was placed in an upright position. A posthole was found in the pit, indicating that a wooden post had been placed in the hole for a time before being replaced by the upright stone. Around 2000 BC the Cuckoo Stone became the focus for several nearby cremation burials.

In the Roman era a rectangular building was constructed southwest of the Cuckoo Stone.The presence of pits and a scatter of coins suggest that the building was a small shrine.