A Georgia Girl in Germany

Stonehenge was on my lifelong list of must-visit places, so when our tour group had an optional excursion there, I naturally jumped at the opportunity to go! Stonehenge is simply the most amazing prehistoric monument in the British Isles. It was built between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago, although the exact purpose and method of construction remain mysteries to this day.

MacKenzie is listening to her (free) audio headset in this photo. I wasn’t able to listen as closely to mine as I would have liked since I had to keep calling out to Benjamin when he kept walking ahead of me on the path -- way ahead of me. So, I bought a detailed guidebook so I can keep re-reading through it.

This is the view of Stonehenge that greeted us shortly after we turned onto the path circling the monument from the parking lot. You can clearly see all of the remaining sarsen stones with lintels on top. There were originally 30 upright sarsen stones, although only 17 remain today.

There were several birds flying around and resting on the stones while we were there. This bird rested quite a while atop the mortise on the tallest sarsen stone (the black spot in the air above the stone is dirt from inside my lense that I didn't notice until well after we returned home -- grrrrr). The mortise was part of the system used to keep the horizontal lintels in place. The stones also had tongue and groove joints to secure them together.

This is the view looking north toward the best-preserved section of surviving lintels.

You can really see the variations in sizes of the different stones. You have to look closely to see the smaller bluestones in the inner horseshoe. You can also clearly see the ditch that encircles the monument.

This is the heel stone, which is one of two sarsens that once stood just outside the main entrance to the monument.

As we circled around the monument, we had a great view of the stones with the slaughter stone in the foreground. This stone wasn’t used as a sacrificial altar, but rather used to stand upright just inside the entrance to the enclosure. When rainwater collects in the shallow depressions on the surface, it reacts with iron in the stone to turn a rusty red color. Previous generations thought this was evidence of sacrifices, and led to the stone’s inaccurate name.

You can see the slaughter stone to the left and part of the ditch in front of the monument from this angle.

Zachary and MacKenzie are standing next to smaller versions of the sarsen and blue stones -- about a fourth of the size of the stones used in Stonehenge. The sarsen stones were brought from Marlborough Downs, about 19 miles away from the site, while the blue stones came from the mystical Preseli Mountains in Wales, an amazing 240 miles away! No one knows why these types of stones were chosen, or how they were transported for use in the monument. The sarsen stone is also comparatively cooler than the warm blue stone. Interesting!

MacKenzie is standing beside a mural depicting what Stonehenge could have looked like when it was complete.

There have been several plans to remove the nearby roads from the view of the stones since the monument became a World Heritage Site in 1986, but the controversy surrounding expensive re-routings has led to the plan being cancelled several times. Last December, the most recent plans were cancelled.

Labels: Benjamin, England, MacKenzie, Travel, Zachary