The Journey
The ride down was gorgeous. We were greeted by vast expanses of clouds advancing inexorably across the sky towards the southwest, and it was a sight that I will never be able to forget. The cloud formations began hardly a few hundred feet off the ground, with small white wisps that looked for all the world like cotton candy scattered along the sky road, and rose and rose vertically until they towered thousands of feet above the ground. Bands of white and grey alternated, and competed with one another in getting to their destination as the winds nudged them along at different speeds depending on their heights. To steal a conventional description from Sanskrit mahākāvya, it did indeed look like a vast army of snow-white horses and mountain-like grey elephants on the march, the swift cavalry galloping along the side of the formation with the elephants trundling majestically through the center, as if parting the blue sea of the sky. Mountains, clouds, elephants—all merged into one poetic image of such power and vitality that it concealed a more ordinary meteorological message: we were driving straight into rainy weather. Oh well.
The southwestern English countryside is mostly beautiful chalky downlands, with gentle chalk hills interspersed with small vales. Most of the fields seemed to be covered in grass, with lots of bales of hay scattered everywhere, although we saw no cattle or sheep anywhere. And finally, after a long but satisfying drive, just as the sun's rays were beginning to pierce the vast cloud army and scatter its troops everywhere, we came atop a hill and saw, motionless in a distant green field, the monument of Stonehenge.
Stonehenge
The word "Stonehenge" is a modernized version of what may once have been the Old English words for "stone-hinge" or "stone-hang" (a more poetic translation perhaps being something like "hanging stones"), both references to the massive stone lintels that are found at the monument. Although the monument itself is quite sizable (the single tallest stone must be over 20 feet tall), it is actually only one among many, many henges and barrows and burial sites and whatnot scattered all over this part of the Salisbury Plain. Whoever lived here, over five thousand years ago, clearly ascribed great importance to these sites, whether for religious or ceremonial or astronomical purposes. A quick 360-degree scan of the landscape near Stonehenge reveals a number of barrows within plain view, plus the giant earthen work known as the Cursus which is even older than Stonehenge. Who these people were, and why they built these sites, and even how they pulled it off, is still a mystery. The sands of time have effaced their last camp sites of the mind so effectively than even a Bedouin poet-warrior would be unable to find the merest tracings upon which to base his lament.
But back to the monument. The earliest parts of Stonehenge were set up in 3000 BCE, but it remained an active site of a living culture for at least another fifteen hundred years before all signs are lost. Since then it has suffered the mindless scarring of the elements as well as the equally brainless damage effected by religious zealots and business-minded construction crews and posterity-minded tourists, as a result of which perhaps less than half of the original stones remain intact. Nowadays tourists aren't allowed to get any closer than twenty paces to the structure, so what I say about the insides comes from the audio guides we were issued and not my own eyewitness account.
The innermost "ring" consisted of a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of so-called "bluestones" probably brought in from Wales. Already at this time the site was built so as to capture the summer solstice sunrise. Subsequent generations rearranged the patterns of the bluestones, and also finally began hauling in the giant sarsen stones that are considered so typical of Stonehenge today. Archaeological evidence seems to suggest that the original plan of the structure was to form a complete ring of giant sarsens supporting lintel stones, the vertical "doorposts" being so shaped as to maintain perspective (like Greek columns), and the lintels being worked to create a perfect, smooth circle. Between this stone circle and the bluestone horseshoe were erected the super-sized trilithons that would probably have reached 25 feet skywards. Nothing like the stone ring remains today, although paintings from the seventeenth century suggest even then a more complete circle of vertical sarsens than we have today. The sheer muscle power it would have taken to haul these stones any distance, then bury them up to seven feet into the ground (yes, what we see is only two-thirds of the height of the actual stones), then erect them, then hoist the lintels onto them, is unbelievable.
Old Sarum
After wondering at the superhuman achievements of these Neolithic people, it was time to move on. We'd heard some talk about an old fort used by William the Conqueror nearby, and it was off to find Old Sarum. The drive down to Old Sarum, within hailing distance of the town of Salisbury, was even greener than our drive to Stonehenge. Thick hedges and tall trees grew on both sides of the single-lane road, at times growing so extensively as to form a green canopy over our heads. And when we finally emerged, we could immediately see why Old Sarum had been used as a fort for thousands of years.
The castle, palace, and cathedral built by William the Conqueror must have stood magnificently on top of this great hill that dominates the plains all around it. It had been used by Neolithic peoples, the Celts, and the Saxons in turn before it fell into William's hands, and in the process had developed excellent fortifications. The hill's slope is decently steep, and into it are gashed two deep, concentric moats, each perhaps fifteen or twenty feet deep and virtually impassable without a drawbridge. The cathedral, and what town there must have been at some point, was built in the annulus between the moats, but the actual castle stood with its once-great walls inside the second moat.
Of course, virtually nothing remains of castle, palace, or cathedral now. The site was abandoned nearly five hundred years ago, and royal permission was given for all the structures to be dismantled and their building materials salvaged. All that remain today of the castle are the entrance passage by the drawbridge, some ten feet tall and probably thirty feet deep, the faintest remains of its thick outerwalls, and perhaps a story or so of the great keep that must have stood here at some point. The formidable walls of the base of the keep still stand, their smooth casing stones concealing the rough flint cores that made the wall so impervious to attack.
Oh, and the Royal Lavatory survived too: a deep, stone-lined pit whose top would have been covered by wooden toilet seats to support the royal posterior. There was no flush or drainage: the only way to clean it was to lower some poor sod into it to haul out organic material by hand. The grass at the bottom of the pit seemed a lot greener than the grass on the hill; was it the fertility of the soil, or was it just my fertile imagination?
The views afforded by the remains of the castle walls are spectacular: in every direction visibility extends for miles, and there is not a single approach to the hill or to the castle that can be concealed. And far in the distance, one can descry the single soaring spire of Salisbury Cathedral, although this was built a good while after the castle itself was built. In those days another cathedral stood on the hill itself, clearly visible from the king's private quarters. As with the castle though, every usable stone was carted away in the fifteenth century, leaving behind nothing but the pebbled remains of the building's original construction: a veritable cathedral diagram made of stone, in which just about every major feature of the structure can be recognized: the aisles, the choir, the apse, the eastern end, the library, everything. The building must have been enormous in its day, but today ... Sic transit gloria mundi.
By this point the great cloud-army had reassembled after withstanding the assault of the sun, and was preparing to storm the erstwhile palace of William the Conqueror, which, now that its walls and roofs had been stripped away, presented a soft target to a foe who would simply vertically envelop the moats and drawbridge. As strong winds buffeted the hilltop and the sky changed color to match the grey stones and the clouds obscured the fields and spires in the distance, I realized how desolate this place must have been, even during its heyday: windswept, lonely, exposed to the elements, its foundations standing higher than some of the clouds.
Pompous Sermonizing
It struck me then that the most important ally one needs when visiting a monument is imagination: the ability to see the sad ruins of a place and re-cognize it into its own place in time, among the people who gave birth to it, among those who saw it as it once was, a living structure integrated into a culture, and not as a monument, an ossified reminder of a time long gone by. The greatest monuments, then, are those that have the power to fire that imagination in their visitors—sites like the Taj Mahal or the Pyramids or Stonehenge—but the smaller and less significant the structure, the greater the sensitivity and imagination needed to truly appreciate it.
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