Stonehenge (19 page)

Archaeology had now largely succeeded, as far as the general public was concerned, in wresting Stonehenge from the Druids and it felt secure in victory. ‘Intellectually’, as Christopher Chippindale put it, there was no dispute. The stones ‘belonged to the archaeologists, as the experts in these matters’, and the Ministry of Works took its cue from them. From their point of view, they had been magnanimous in allowing the Druids to continue to hold celebrations. Over the years these had gone off largely without incident, albeit also without MacGregor Reid and the Universal Bond, who had been refused permission to distribute their
Druid’s Journal
in 1932, prompting another outbreak of cursing and their permanent withdrawal from Stonehenge. Meanwhile the Ancient Order of Druid Hermetists, founded in the later 1930s, partly inspired by Reid, carried on celebrating throughout the Second World War. More schisms, Reid’s death in 1946 and the withdrawal of the ‘fraternal’ or Masonic-style orders from Stonehenge meant that from 1956 onwards the only order left at the solstice was the Circle of the Universal Bond, founded by Reid’s son, Robert. Robert, a former diplomat, was adroit at avoiding conflict with the authorities.

By 1961, however, in the view of Glyn Daniel, editor of the archaeological journal
Antiquity
, the solstice was getting out of hand. ‘We are no spoilsport’, he announced in the editorial plural, but the Druids were ‘foolish people confusing fact with fiction’ and they should, he recommended, be kept out. With hindsight Daniel can be seen to have overplayed his hand. In fact it was not the Druids but the spectators who were the issue. Crowds at the solstice had been getting bigger since the early 1950s. The age of folk and jazz festivals was dawning and large open-air events were popular with the
young, and not only for fun. The first Aldermaston March, run by the newly formed Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, took place in 1958. As post-war austerity eased and the end of rationing finally came into view, there was a bohemianism about, an atmosphere of anti-establishment protest, political and artistic. Thousands of people were coming to the solstice and there had indeed been a certain amount of trouble, much harped on by the newspapers. It was due partly to students and largely to drunken soldiers from the army base, who harassed the morris dancers and laughed at the Druids. It was not their fault but, as the Chief Constable of Wiltshire put it, ‘so long as there were Druids about, there would be a substantial body of weirdies making a thundering nuisance of themselves’. In 1962, partly as a result of Daniel’s lobbying, a temporary electrified fence was installed to keep the public out, although, to Daniel’s annoyance, a group of Druids was allowed in. The arrangement failed and by midsummer 1966 much stronger measures were in force. As the
Salisbury Journal
reported, ‘Military police were everywhere … dog-handlers patrolled the … wire perimeter … the whole of the monument and its concentration-camp barbed-wire entanglements were floodlit throughout the night.’ It would be difficult to know what more the authorities could have done to turn the stones into an icon of anti-establishment protest. And so, in the 1960s, began the battle, cultural and sometimes physical, for the soul of Stonehenge.

From a practical point of view, however, it was not the solstice-goers who were the problem. It was the daily tramp of the paying public that was wearing the ground away to mud. In 1963 the turf and topsoil inside the circle were removed and replaced with clinker from the Melksham gasworks which
was overlaid with orange gravel. To add to this eyesore, in 1968 new visitor facilities, a larger car park and more lavatories were built and a tunnel was dug under the A344, where the ever-growing volume of traffic had made it dangerous for tourists to cross. The arrangement, always rather drab, has not worn well and now has all the allure of a motorway underpass. Described by a Parliamentary Committee in 1993 as a ‘national disgrace’, it is still in situ. Yet as so often in the twentieth century’s faltering relationship with Stonehenge, ineptitude on one front was accompanied by profound insight on another. During the excavations for the car park the archaeologist Faith Vatcher found the post holes that are now the most ancient known features of the site, proving that the area near Stonehenge had been inhabited since the early Mesolithic age.

By the mid-sixties, however, the assault on archaeology’s intellectual dominance had begun. It did not in the event come from Druids, jazz fans or disaffected students, but from science. The decade saw the dawning not only of the Age of Aquarius, but also of the space age and at Stonehenge the two met. In 1966 the English astronomer Gerald Hawkins, a professor at Boston University, published
Stonehenge Decoded
, which caused a sensation and knocked Professor Atkinson’s
Stonehenge
smartly from its position as the most popular work on the subject. Reading Hawkins’s book today, what is most striking is its tone of prelapsarian awe at the might of his computer. The IBM 704, Hawkins told his readers, most of whom had never seen a computer, consisted of about twenty units the size of filing cabinets, used roughly seventy horsepower of electricity, operated at ‘a speed approaching that of light’ and ‘does not make mistakes’. Hawkins first plotted 165
recognised positions on the Stonehenge site, ‘stones, stone holes, other holes, mounds’, and got ‘the machine’, as he rather dramatically referred to it, to work out their astronomical alignments, if any. The results were remarkable. ‘Not one of the most significant Stonehenge positions failed to line up with another to point to some unique sun or moon position.’ Hawkins’s conclusion, after many more plottings and readings, was that ‘Stonehenge was an observatory … deliberately, accurately, skilfully oriented’, and that the Aubrey Holes were designed to predict lunar eclipses on a fifty-six year cycle, a cycle only recently known to modern astronomers.

The book appeared at the height of the space race, three years before the first moon landings, and it made Stonehenge at once topical and modern. It also made it romantic again in both old and new ways. It connected it – by implication at least – with the Unidentified Flying Objects recently observed over Salisbury Plain, especially the Warminster Thing, a combination of lights and sounds that appeared between Stonehenge and Glastonbury and had – allegedly – been captured on film the year before. At the same time Hawkins’s observatory theory restored the older vision of an ancient native civilisation, a race of wise astronomer-priests, which had haunted the stones, on and off, since Stukeley’s day. Astronomical explanations of Stonehenge, though fiercely resisted by archaeologists, were not of course new. Stukeley himself first noticed the general correspondence with the midsummer sunrise, which John Smith had worked out more precisely. The eighteenth-century itinerant scientist John Waltire had called Stonehenge ‘a vast Theodolite for observing the motions of the heavens’ and Duke’s
Druidical Temples of Wiltshire
cast the monuments of the plain as components in a giant orrery.

30. A diagram from the astronomer Gerald Hawkins’s
Stonehenge Decoded
of 1966, showing the alignments he had found by computer analysis. An instant best-seller the book launched a heated debate between archaeologists and astronomers that continues today.

It was in 1906 that the first professional astronomer turned his attention to Stonehenge. Sir Norman Lockyer, founding editor of
Nature
magazine, published
Stonehenge and Other British Stone Monuments Astronomically Considered
, in which he found the stones to be aligned on an annual cycle running from May to November to May. Archaeologists in general and Atkinson in particular had been contemptuously dismissive of Lockyer. But other powerful voices were now raised in his defence. Academic astronomers were reassessing his work overall, finding it sound in principle if insecure in detail, and reprinting his books. By 1966 if Hawkins was the loudest proponent of the astronomical theory he was by no means alone. That same year C. A. ‘Peter’ Newham published an article in Lockyer’s old magazine,
Nature
, called ‘Stonehenge a Neolithic observatory’, in which he suggested that the post holes near the entrance were used for observing moonrises over several 18.6-year cycles and pointed out that the long sides of the Station Stone rectangle had a lunar alignment. Then in 1967 Alexander Thom, formerly Professor of Engineering at Oxford University, published
Megalithic Sites in Britain
. He had spent more than a decade measuring stone circles and other monuments and come to believe that, as Clive Ruggles later put it, ‘“megalithic man” laid out configurations of standing stones all over Britain using precisely defined units of measurement and particular geometrical constructions, and carried out meticulous observations of the sun, moon and stars’.

This sudden onslaught on the archaeological certainties of the last half-century caused uproar. Hawkins, Newham and Thom were not writing in any spirit of hostility towards archaeology, but the archaeologists took their work in a
remarkably personal and defensive way, with little attempt to address the argument. As the Marxist archaeologist Gordon Childe, who had read some of Thom’s early findings, put it, ‘many [archaeologists] when faced with mathematical symbols which they do not understand have aroused in them severe emotions … and it is only fair to say that this is the attitude that archaeologists are likely to display at the start’. The row was indeed highly emotional. It lasted for decades and did nothing for archaeology’s claims to scientific objectivity. It also cast little light on the facts. To form a considered view of the astronomical arguments requires an understanding of both archaeology and astronomy, as well as a good grasp of physics and more than a passing familiarity with statistics and probability theory. Nobody who leapt into the fray in the 1960s and 1970s had all of these qualifications and some of them had none. Readers possessed of such advantages are referred to the bibliography. But the facts were not quite the point. At issue were two things. One was the status of archaeology itself, so recently established as a science and now under attack from another, much older and purer scientific discipline. The other was the past. For archaeologists, the world that had produced Stonehenge was populated by simple, culturally primitive people, ‘mere barbarians’ as Atkinson was reduced to calling them in one of his responses. A view of culture as progress, as social Darwinism and all that that implied about human nature and civilisation, was being questioned.

In an effort to achieve a resolution of the conflict that was raging through the pages of his journal
Antiquity
, Glyn Daniel commissioned another eminent astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, to go over the evidence. Having done so, Hoyle
decided, embarrassingly, that Hawkins was, basically, right. Daniel was forced to publish Hoyle’s conclusion that ‘It is implausible to argue that a people ignorant of astronomy chose positions for the stones that happened by chance to display great astronomical subtlety.’ If it were merely a question of superimposing his own knowledge on prehistoric evidence, as had been alleged, then why, he asked, was he unable to obtain similar results elsewhere, at Avebury, for example? Astronomical alignments were more reliable, Hoyle concluded, than the deductions of archaeologists, for they spoke for themselves: ‘The wonder of it is that the message is still there, almost as clear as it was in the beginning.’ So it was that by the end of the 1960s a significant breach had been opened in the academic orthodoxy. Through this opening all those who disliked the Ministry of Works and its ethos, the artists, mystics, countercultural philosophers, rock musicians, pyramidologists, flying saucer watchers, ‘acid-fuelled readers of the
International Times
’, sceptics and of course the Druids, could regain entry to the cultural property of Stonehenge. They flooded in.

No single person did more to marshal the forces of the anti-establishment intelligentsia than John Michell. Born in 1933 in London, Michell was educated at Eton and Cambridge before serving in the Royal Navy and then in the Civil Service as a Russian interpreter during the Cold War. Described as ‘a radical traditionalist’, he is thoroughly au fait with the establishment he mistrusts. In elegant prose that never lost its temper or its sense of humour, he addressed his readers on ‘the many aspects of human experience and discovery not covered by conventional modern science, particularly in relation to ancient philosophy’. In 1969, the year
that saw another storming of Stonehenge at the solstice, he published
The View over Atlantis
, which became, as Ronald Hutton said, ‘the founding document of the earth mysteries movement’. In it he introduced a new generation to the work of Aubrey and Stukeley and revived the reputation of Alfred Watkins. Watkins’s theory of ley lines was based on the belief that ‘the early inhabitants of Britain deliberately placed mounds, camps and standing stones across the landscape in straight lines’. These lines, down which psychic energy flowed, could still be traced in the siting of Christian churches, the keeps of medieval castles and on a line from Stonehenge to Old Sarum to Salisbury Cathedral. It was a belief that had attracted renewed interest since the 1950s, especially among those who had observed the Warminster manifestations, which were on the Stonehenge–Glastonbury ley.
The View over Atlantis
, however, popularised the theory. It rescued Bligh Bond from obscurity and promoted the writings of Alexander Thom. The book was a compendium of occult knowledge, occult in the sense that it had been deliberately hidden or ignored by conventional science. It ranged from Stukeley’s Druidism to the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s theory of the orgone in a quest for clues to the ancient tradition by which, Michell believed, the monuments of prehistory had been raised ‘with the help of some remarkable power’. Modern humanity, in Michell’s vision, lived in ‘a vast ruin’, the remnant of ‘A great scientific instrument [which] lies sprawled over the entire surface of the globe’. Of Stonehenge itself, he wrote that it was possessed of ‘its own hidden geometry, a pattern of energy that spirals away from the centre to spread over the surrounding countryside’, and is reflected in the design of Glastonbury Abbey.