Stonehenge (10 page)

13. John Wood and his son between them created Georgian Bath in the image of a mythic past. The Circus, with its sun symbolism, was followed by the equally innovative and influential Royal Crescent, a reference to the moon.

Even more successful as an architectural form, however, was the final phase of the Wood plan, the Royal Crescent. The crescent was another new idea and one that swept Georgian Britain, was adopted by the Victorians and remains popular today. Royal Crescent was not begun until 1767, thirteen years after Wood’s death. It was built by his devoted son, the younger John, who as a boy had learned the art of surveying with his father at Stonehenge. The details of the design are certainly his – they belong to a later generation – but the idea itself has its roots in Wood the elder’s design. It is built in the Ionic, the order associated with the worship of the moon, and it makes a complement to the Circus, to which it is connected by Brock Street: the crescent moon of Stanton Drew to the sun of Stonehenge. For eighteenth-century Bath it was the Woods’ buildings that determined both the character and the direction of its expansion, driving it northwards and uphill from Queen Square, with Gay Street pointing like the Druid arrow towards the circus and the crescent. So, while it was turning into the fashionable resort beloved of Beau Nash and loathed by Jane Austen, Bath was also becoming in fact what Wood believed it always had been, a town in whose very streets the beliefs he attributed to the early Britons can be found emblematically encoded.

Wood did not win many more adherents to his theory than Inigo Jones. His
Choir Gaure
, which deserves a modern edition, has never been reprinted. Perhaps discouraged by the fate of Wood and Jones, no major architect since has tackled Stonehenge in any detail, although it long continued to be a useful stick to beat other architects with in argument. In 1841 the Gothic Revivalist A. W. N. Pugin found, like Wood, that it offered a justification for ‘The … principle, of
Architecture resulting from religious belief’. In ‘the Druidical remains of Stonehenge,’ he went on, ‘and in all these works of Pagan antiquity, we shall invariably find that both the plan and decoration of the building is mystical and emblematic’. Therefore by analogy, he argued, Gothic architecture, which expressed the Catholic faith, must be the truest expression of a modern Christian civilisation. Twenty-three years later the Scottish architect, Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson used the same evidence to make precisely the opposite point, showing that in its posts and lintels ‘Stonehenge exhibits more truthful construction than York Minster’ and that therefore classical architecture was the most morally suitable for Victorian Britain.

By the 1960s, with Stonehenge firmly in the grip of archaeology and architecture in the grip of modernism, it might have seemed unlikely that there should be any more exchange between the two. But at the end of the decade, when town planning once again reached a crossroads or, it might more accurately be said, a roundabout, the influence of Stonehenge was felt again in the new town of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. Milton Keynes was conceived, under the influence of the Californian sociologist Melvyn Webber, as a ‘regional complex’ and laid out on a loose grid to create ‘urban countryside’, with traffic flowing through the several zones via a succession of landscaped roundabouts. Like Covent Garden and Georgian Bath, it was a revolutionary design and the master-plan unveiled in 1969 underwent many changes as building was carried out through the 1970s. The designs were now in the hands of a group of young architects. Enthusiastic, idealistic and, by their own account, sometimes slightly drunk, they were in tune with the countercultural spirit of the age. Influenced by the writings of John Michell, whom we shall meet again later, they at one stage proposed laying out the whole town along ley lines, the mystic alignments through which, it is believed, psychic energy flows. Leys, too, will recur in the story of Stonehenge. At Milton Keynes, however, more conventional wisdom prevailed, although something of the spirit of the 1970s did make it into reality. The main streets of Milton Keynes are Avebury, Silbury and Midsummer Boulevards. They comprise a central grid which is so aligned that at the summer solstice the rising sun shines through the middle of the shopping centre, its first rays striking a large kinetic sculpture and a branch of John Lewis.

14. An unbuilt design by Andrew Mahaddie for the Central Park at Milton Keynes, 1975–6. Including a belvedere, cone and water carpet, this part of the Park was intended to continue the geometry of the centre of the town with its references to the alignments at Stonehenge.

‘Such as sail in the vast Ocean of Time, amongst the craggy Rocks of Antiquity’, run many risks, as Inigo Jones pointed out, and it is ‘far easier’, as he also noted, ‘to refute and contradict a false, than to set down a true and certain Resolution’ in these matters. For a century or more after Wood’s
Choir Gaure
, the attempts to resolve the questions raised by Stonehenge grew fewer in number as antiquarianism reached its limits. For the age of romanticism it became instead a muse, powerful in its very mystery.

‘In awful pomp & gold, in all the precious unhewn stones of Eden They build a stupendous Building on the Plain of Salisbury …’

William Blake,
Jerusalem

Gradually, during the eighteenth century, the European landscape turned inside out. Civilisation was no longer found only in cities and a sympathetic interest in the natural world became a sign of ‘sensibility’, an increasingly popular personal quality. Partly this was a matter of taste, of that growing appreciation of landscape that infused William Stukeley’s view of Stonehenge, and partly a matter of practicality. Methods of warfare had changed, making city walls and fortifications redundant. Across Britain, France and Germany ramparts came down and moats were filled in until ‘towns … [were] … nothing but large villages’ and a traveller through these open lands might think ‘that universal peace had been established and the Golden Age was at hand.’ So wrote Goethe in 1809, in his novel
Die Wahlverwandtschaften
(
Elective Affinities
), one of the great texts of the Romantic movement. In fact Europe, still reverberating with the aftershocks of the French Revolution, had been ravaged by war since 1792. The physical landscape was neither tranquil nor safe and for many people, including Goethe, the interior landscape, the mental and emotional states which romanticism made the subject of art, was similarly troubled. The Stonehenge of the Romantics – primitive, enigmatic and poised somewhere between art and nature – is overwhelmingly a focus for psychic menace. It has little to do with the facts of prehistory but is much involved with those of history. If, for the Middle Ages, the stones recalled a gallows, the shadow that fell across them now was that of the guillotine.

15. Turner’s watercolour view, engraved by Robert Wallis, 1829. The shepherd lies dead in the storm, the sheep abandoned. For the Romantics the stones were predominantly a place of psychic dread and terror.

The Romantics were not the first writers to notice Stonehenge, but previously when it figured in poetry it was usually as a symbol, standing for Britain’s identity. Layamon’s
Brut
or
Historia Brutonium
, written between about 1189 and 1227, was the first important poem in English after the Norman invasion, an assertion of the surviving native tradition, and it includes the Merlin story of the founding of ‘Stanhenge’. For Philip Sidney, Stonehenge was one of the ‘Seven Wonders of England’ and for Michael Drayton, in
Poly-Olbion
, a curious long poem of 1612, it was ‘best-lov’d, first wonder of the ile’, yet it remained a passive thing, a ‘dull heape’, ‘huge heapes of stones … confusde’, an enigma. It was the Romantics who animated Stonehenge, bringing it to life, as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein animated his creation, by running through it those currents of sympathy that flowed, as they believed, between the individual and the infinite.

At the height of the Romantic movement Stonehenge caught the attention of the greatest writers and artists, Wordsworth and Blake, Turner and Constable, as well as many lesser versifiers, such as the novelist Anne Radcliffe, and legions of second-rank watercolourists. By now it had become
inseparable from Druidry. Long before they manifested themselves in Henry Hurle’s Ancient Order of Druids in 1781, Toland and Stukeley’s Druids had been seeping through from antiquarianism into art, at a time when the boundary between the two was highly permeable. In 1758 Thomas Gray’s
The Bard, A Pindaric Ode
set a fashion for poems – and some paintings – that took the Druidical past as their inspiration.

If architects use facts only tangentially, then artists may dispense with them altogether or arrange them purely for effect. When antiquaries take to poetry, however, the case is altered. Their efforts tend to be viewed in a more critical light and the question of invention or deception becomes fraught. The later eighteenth century was rich in antiquarian poetry that was not quite what it seemed. The
Battle of Hastynges
, which included an account of ‘Thors fam’d Temple’ on ‘Sarims spreddynge Playne’, was not, it turned out, the work of Turgot, a tenth-century Saxon monk. It was a forgery by that quintessentially doomed Romantic youth Thomas Chatterton. In his incarnation as Iolo Morganwg, Edward Williams, the laudanum-addicted antiquary who founded the modern Gordsedd of Bards, also fabricated a quantity of poetry in the style of Dafydd ap Gwilym which went undetected for over a century. Yet Iolo objected, quite sincerely, to Gray’s
Bard
on the grounds that it was historically inaccurate and confused Celtic with Scandinavian sources. Nowhere did the web of art and antiquarianism become so tangled as in the case of the Ossian poems, supposedly translations from the Gaelic by James Macpherson, which appeared in two volumes in 1765. Gray had his doubts about them and Dr Johnson declared robustly that they were ‘as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with’. Yet Goethe admired
Ossian
and
the poems impressed William Gilpin. It was Gilpin who first developed the hugely influential theory of the Picturesque, which became the aesthetic branch of romanticism.

‘It is history as well as poetry,’ Gilpin decided of
Ossian
, relishing Macpherson’s vivid accounts of ‘circles
of stones
, where our ancestors, in their nocturnal orgies, invoked the spirits which rode upon the winds’. Stonehenge itself, Gilpin decreed, was not Picturesque, in the sense that it would not compose into a satisfactory landscape painting. The stones were ‘so uncouthly placed’ that it was impossible to find an angle ‘to form them, from any stand, into a pleasing shape’. Yet the experience of the site was powerful, belonging more to that other category of eighteenth-century aesthetic experience, popularised by Edmund Burke, the Sublime. ‘It is not the
elegance of the work
, but the
grandeur of the idea
, that strikes us,’ Gilpin wrote. ‘The walk between the two circles … is awfully magnificent.’ How much more striking it must have been, he went on, when the circle was still intact: ‘To be immured, as it were, by such hideous walls of rock; and to see the landscape and the sky through such strange apertures must have thrown the imagination into a wonderful ferment.’ Even so, for the Romantic traveller in search of either the Sublime or the Picturesque, Stonehenge posed a problem. It was visible from too far away and not only did this remove any element of surprise, the first sight of it made it look small and insignificant. One way round this, which was popular by the early nineteenth century and was famously deployed by William Cunnington to ensure the appropriate mental ferment, was to have the carriage blinds lowered before the party was in sight of the stones and allow them to be raised only once they were inside the circle. ‘A Barrister’, the author
of
A Tour in Quest of Genealogy
, was one of many thus enraptured: when ‘lo! We found ourselves within the area of the gigantic peristyle … the effect,’ he reported, ‘is wonderful.’