Stonehenge

I seem to be the only person I know who likes ancient history, most people it appears aren't interested. (You don't know what you're missing!) Well this is my blog and I wanted to record something amazing I found about Stonehenge...well, a place just down the road from it.

Stonehenge is just that, a collection of stones and a henge - a henge being a round bank and ditch construction. Many stone circles in Britain have a henge. (There are also hundreds of other fascinating things at Stonehenge but I won't type them all out).

The henge was built first, and in Stonehenge's case, it was begun about 2950BC. Initially there was a timber bulding of some kind in the centre, perhaps a mortuary house. When you consider it, 2950BC is a very long time ago!

In 1966 (AD) a new car park was built just down the road from Stonehenge to handle the increasing traffic that was coming to the site. During excavation for the car park, three large deep round pits were found. They were in a row and when archaeologists dated the material found inside the pits it was discovered that the pits were dug sometime between 8500BC and 7650BC. From analysis, it seems that large, tall wooden poles were put into the pits, kind of like totem poles.

This is incredible! To keep it simple, lets assume that the pits were dug in 8000BC. That is just 2000 years after the Ice Age ended! In 8000BC Britain was still physically joined to mainland Europe, and the landscape around the pits was heavily forested in pine and hazel trees - a very cold post-glacial environment. It was so cold that traditional British trees like oaks, beeches and ashs hadn't as yet moved north - they were still only growing on the continent.

Think about it... 5000 years before the henge at Stonehenge was built, a British hunter gatherer community dug these pits to erect the poles for (perhaps) some kind of veneration. The implication is that the Stonehenge area has been a sacred site for about 10,000 years!!!!!

So why is that patch of southern Britain so important, so sacred? Nobody knows, but clearly there is something very special about that place. Again and again we are finding that ancient sites in Britain have a far older lineage than first thought.

Today on the balcony - what did I see?

I’m not sure if I can make what I’m about to write intelligible, or even make sense, but it is something I was thinking about today and I kinda felt the need to record it.

It was at about 1:50pm, I was at home alone and had not long finished lunch. I’d been job hunting in the morning and with some interviews lined up I thought I’d relax for a bit and watch a movie. Towards the end of the movie I went outside onto the loungeroom balcony for a look at the outside world. On their first visit everyone remarks what I great view I have from this balcony and I suppose I do, but after four years I’m quite used to it. If you look to your right you can see the city skyline, straight ahead you can see trees and houses stretching to the horizon, and if you turn to your left you can see some mountains.

Today was warm of course, but not as warm as the past few days. There was some rain duting the night and this morning, but that soon stopped. The breeze was nice and there were plenty of clouds. Quite pleasant weather.

Anyway, I was out on the balcony and kind of became hypnotized by what I saw. What did I see? Nothing special at all – just roads, houses, cars, clouds, telephone poles, a few people. All I could hear were cars going past below me, distant hammering, birds and the gentle but ever present hum of traffic. It was a scene of absolute peace, stability and order. I looked across the road at two of the houses on my street; they were locked up and empty – their owners away at work. But those houses…exist; they are real in the here and now. It’s like that old riddle: “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?” The owners of those houses are not here at that moment in time, to see their homes. Do those homes only really ‘exist’ when someone lives in them? If so, what state are they in during the day when the owners are absent?

This day was like any other in the history of the world. Just another day amongst trillions of days. Overhead the clouds pass without fuss, the birds fly by without anyone noticing them, people in their cars obliviously hurtle pass with their own thoughts occupying their minds. In a hundred years from now, or a thousand, nothing that happened today will make any difference – today will be just another day when the world (at least my part of it) ambled by.

Because I’m on the top floor I can see quite a lot of the area around my building. For instance, I can see a car traveling down Arthur Terrace while simultaneously seeing a person riding his bike along my street. Both of them are completely unaware of the other. But maybe they are actually connected in ways not always purely visible… Perhaps everything is connected. Is it true that if a butterfly flaps its wings in West Africa a hurricane develops a year later in the Caribbean?

Why is it all here, what’s the reason? What were the circumstances that lead the house across the road being painted blue and not yellow? Is it just because the owner liked the colour? If so, why does he like that colour? What were the causes that lead him to like it in the first place? Then I saw a truck move along a nearby road. It had a load of dirt in the back. Where was it going and why? Just to deliver a pile of dirt to a new house somewhere? The thing is, moments after it went by, a car appeared from a side road and turned onto the road that the truck had just been on. It moved pretty fast. If the car had been just slightly earlier it might have collided with the truck. As it was the two were apart enough from each other in time so that an accident didn’t occur. But if they did, the dirt would have been late in getting to its destination. And if that happened, how would that have delayed the whole building site (assuming that is where it was going). So the guys on the building site would have had to rearrange their schedule for the afternoon. Maybe that would have caused one of the workmen leaving work a little bit later, and what if that man was single and very lonely and because he left just a little bit later he got to the supermarket in the evening a little later, maybe this time he was in time to accidentally meet a nice young lady? If he had left work on time he would have arrived at the supermarket earlier and therefore not met her. So, because of a minor car accident earlier in the day and many kilometers away, the knock on effect was that he met someone special.

In the mid to late nineteenth century the region around where I live was countryside – lots of rolling green hills with a few creeks still visible. Centuries from now it might be nothing more than high rise apartments and offices. Two thousand years from now it might be a devastated wasteland. Twenty million years from now it might be at the bottom of the ocean, or the interior of a huge mountain. But right now it exists. People live here. There are boundaries and rules and divisions that control and keep check on our existence. They are not harsh things though – they are as simple as a white picket fence.

What stories are going on in those houses, what great or terrible things happen in them? Or maybe, nothing special happens at all, just people getting up in the morning and going to work, the postman delivering the mail at about 11am, the owners arriving home at about 5:30pm to make dinner, watch TV and having sex before going to sleep and starting the whole thing all over again the next morning. Their kids growing up, their mortgage being paid, their cars and household appliances gradually running down and malfunctioning.

I soon saw a large bank of clouds move overhead. The shadow it cast slowly moved across the landscape putting some areas of housing into shade, while more distant areas on the horizon were under intense sunlight. The shadows moved closer towards my building until it too was in the shadow of the clouds.