Stonehenge (6 page)

7. Stukeley’s view looking up the Avenue. He was the first person to appreciate the full extent of Stonehenge and to understand it as part of a connected landscape.

Stukeley made a great contribution to the understanding of what the prehistoric Stonehenge had been. His work is still invoked by modern archaeologists. Later, in his interpretation
of his findings, he gave the monument much of the popular resonance it has today and so both aspects of his study deserve serious attention.

Over the years that he considered Stonehenge, Stukeley’s view of history and of the human condition changed, in a way that disconcerted some of his contemporaries and his later critics, but which is not in itself perhaps incomprehensible. His
Stonehenge
, when it finally appeared in 1740, was cast as the first volume of a projected study of
Patriarchal Christianity: or, a chronological history of the origin and progress of true Religion and of Idolatry
. A profoundly thoughtful and pious man, Stukeley had always been anxious to discover the meaning of this wonderful ‘Universe of things’ in which he found himself. What he sought was a single first cause: ‘We must go up to the fountainhead as much as possible,’ as he put it. Like Newton (whose own theory was that Stonehenge was a temple of the earliest religion), Stukeley sought a fuller explanation of existence, but not a godless one. He lived at a time when the search for such certainty was becoming more complicated and more urgent. The horizons of the European mind were expanding through exploration, faster than in Aubrey’s day, and the published accounts of travels to Egypt and the Americas told of other peoples and cultures, new plants and animals, Incan temples and similar mysterious structures. It all raised questions about the biblical framework through which history and the nature of mankind were still understood. How could so many people, living and dying beyond the reach of Christianity, be simply lost to salvation? Why were the religions of Peru and China and Egypt in certain ways similar? How could so many different sorts of animals have fitted into the Ark and where, after the Flood, did all the water go? Stukeley struggled to understand, to justify the ways of God to man and reconcile his faith with the experience of his generation. He was immensely energetic in his intellectual efforts. In 1735 he was learning Chinese.

8. The figure of the Druid as he appeared in Stukeley’s
Stonehenge
of 1740. From that date onwards the Druids were to be indelibly associated with the monument.

Between his first survey and his finished book he moved from a deist position, a belief that humans have an innate moral sense and that reason, rather than revelation, is the basis of faith, to a profoundly Christian one. His Stonehenge changed with him from a Neoplatonic model of the cosmos that could transmit ‘the divine influences of the archetypal mind’ to a material world into a more or less Christian church, and his Druids became priests of a religion established by Abraham and ‘so extremely like Christianity, that in effect, it differed from it only in this: they believed in a Messiah who was to come into the world, as we believe in him that is come’. As his unifying theory emerged, Stukeley looked for material that might support it and found plenty in the writings of John Toland and indeed in those of Aylett Sammes. As Toland had noted, people ‘easily … convey their own ideas into other men’s books, or find ’em there’, and to some extent this is what Stukeley did. He was prepared even to allow Sammes’s Herculean visit to Britain. From his reading, Stukeley described – or conjectured – the rituals that took place at Stonehenge and deduced from them complicated arguments about the Druids’ intuiting of Christianity and the Trinity. This belief in a single patriarchal ur-religion that had spread across the world and reached the early Britons was by no means peculiar to Stukeley, but the particular ways in which his native Druids had anticipated the Virgin Birth and the Crucifixion were.

When the book appeared, many of Stukeley’s
contemporaries were sceptical about it and even more so when his
Abury
followed three years later. Here again Stukeley offered a detailed survey and an invaluable record of the site, noting the recent destruction of parts of it by farming. But he also found Avebury to be a ‘serpentine’ temple, laid out like an Egyptian hieroglyph to symbolise a snake passing through a circle. In his belief that he was dealing with an allegorical landscape ‘a picture’, as he put it, of Druidic faith, he allowed himself to adjust the measurements he had so carefully made to fit what he believed was a higher truth. What happened in Stukeley’s inner life nobody now can know. His ordination in 1729 astonished his friends and may have marked a moment of spiritual revelation, or it may merely have been one stage along his curious journey. For all that Stukeley was sincere in his profession of faith, the Anglican Church of his day was hardly a hotbed of religious enthusiasm, nor were the average clergyman’s duties onerous. Like many an antiquary before and since, he may have realised that a steady income in a quiet parish would allow him time to pursue his researches. Charles Darwin, a century later, seriously contemplated the same course for the same reason.

Yet whatever the process, Stukeley found himself drawn ever deeper into his strange visions. His friend Roger Gale warned him there would be ‘great carping and piqueering upon everything you advance’ and so there was and is. But Stukeley’s admirers were many. Domestic tourism of the sort he had always advocated was becoming increasingly popular and his descriptions were lifted wholesale for guidebooks. Later editions of Defoe’s
Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain
were amended to include references to Stonehenge as a Druid temple and by 1750 visitors were advised
to ‘Take a staff 10 feet 4 inches and ¾ long, [and] divide it into six equal Parts: These’, it was explained, ‘are the Cubits of the Antients.’ Not everyone felt the charm of Druidry. Dr Johnson, to whom Stukeley dedicated the
Itinerarium Curiosum
, was unimpressed. In his
Tour of the Hebrides
he remarked that ‘to go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it; and seeing one is quite enough’. But if Johnson was bored by the Druid remains he did not question that that was what they were. By 1787 Joseph Strutt’s
Chronicle of England
had a whole chapter on the Druidical religion of the Britons and that ‘curious remaining proof of their indefatigable labours, Stone Henge’. Stukeley’s Druid Britain lay behind Blake’s Albion, it influences the New Age Druids of today and has once again been the subject of lively debate in very recent years.

After Aubrey and Stukeley no later antiquary made so great an impression on Stonehenge studies, but several made substantial contributions. William Cooke hastened into print in 1754. He sought to support Stukeley on nearly every point, especially his suggestion that the name Chorea Gigantum was a corruption by ‘trifling monks’ of the original
‘choir gaur
’, which derived from the Hebrew – via Welsh – for ‘circular high place of the assembly or congregation’. After Stukeley Choir Gaur became the preferred name for the monument among those who felt they had a really original theory to offer. Dr John Smith’s
Choir Gaur
of 1771 was subtitled ‘The Grand Orrery of the Ancient Druids … Astronomically explained, and mathematically proved to be a temple erected … for observing the motions of the heavenly bodies’. It was Smith who launched the idea of Stonehenge as an observatory, aligned with both summer and winter solstices.
He was able to be more definite about this than Stukeley for he had one great advantage over him. In 1752 England at last adopted the Gregorian calendar. The old Julian calendar of Stukeley’s day had been falling behind for centuries and Stukeley could not be sure when midsummer was. His 21 June was really 3 July. But Smith knew the date exactly and so could visualise ‘the Druid in his stall’ at the centre of Stonehenge, watching the sun rise over the marker to which Smith now attached the name of Heel Stone, by which it has been known ever since. In fact the sun rises just to the north of the Heel Stone, a point which has at varying times been made to count both for and against astronomical alignment. In Smith’s book the outer circle represented the solar year, the inner one the lunar month. The theme was taken up again in 1846 by the Reverend Edward Duke in his
Druidical Temples of the County of Wiltshire
, which was responsible for naming the Station Stones, but it was only in the twentieth century that astronomy became a major element in the discussion of Stonehenge, rivalling the Druids as an irritant to archaeology.

Edward King’s
Munimenta Antiqua
of 1799 had ‘more of fanaticism than historical discrimination’ in it, according to his fellow antiquary and Stonehenge enthusiast John Britton. But its lurid naming of the Slaughter Stone has stuck and it had one great event to report. On 3 January 1797 a horse pulling a cart along a road ‘at a distance’ from Stonehenge was startled by an almighty reverberating crash that sent a tremor through the ground. The western trilithon had fallen, its lintel breaking as it fell. It was to lie there prone for more than a century. But, as is often the case in archaeology, catastrophe was also opportunity. The upheaval
of the ground and the chance to examine the underside of the uprights was welcomed by William Cunnington, a wool merchant and antiquary who lived at Heytesbury, about ten miles from Stonehenge. It was he who began the next stage of on-site investigation. In 1801 he published his ‘Account of tumuli opened in Wiltshire’, which attracted the notice of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, whose home was at Stourhead nearby and who sponsored Cunnington’s work. From 1810 to 1812 Colt Hoare published the first volume of his
Ancient History of Wiltshire
, which included the account of Stonehenge. In it he and Cunnington set out their discoveries, including many finds from the burial mounds, and their theories in measured terms. Theirs was a work of consolidation more than innovation, although their examination of the Slaughter Stone showed it to have been worked equally on three sides, suggesting that it had once stood upright and had never been the blood-soaked site of sacrifice that King imagined.

‘We speak from facts not theory,’ Colt Hoare stated at the beginning of his
Ancient History
, and he and Cunnington are sometimes hailed as the founding fathers of modern British archaeology. Yet for the antiquary facts did not preclude emotional and artistic pleasure. One visitor reported, ‘When Sir Richard Hoare opens tumuli, a week is generally set apart for the operations, and the Baronet … is generally attended by a party of his friends … the time passes with much festivity and good humour.’ The serious work of excavation was interspersed with dinners, toasts and mock-Druidic ceremonies and if the late Georgians knew fewer facts about Stonehenge than we do, they were perhaps closer to it in their understanding of ritual and symbolic
landscape. Colt Hoare’s house, Stourhead, was surrounded by one of the greatest landscape gardens ever created in England. It was begun, by Henry Hoare, shortly before Stukeley published his
Abury
, and its programmatic walks, artificial mounds and structures embody that vision of landscape art and architecture which Stukeley thought he could detect on Salisbury Plain. After 1771 it included a Druid’s cell built from ‘old Gouty nobbly Oakes’. Cunnington (the Druid Mordred to his antiquarian intimates) had a grotto in his own garden, a modest version of the Stourhead features, with a plan of Avebury set into the floor in pebbles. While Colt Hoare had his reservations about some of Stukeley’s conclusions, he shared his sense of ecstasy and concluded his own account with the observation that ‘even the most indifferent passenger over the plain must be attracted by the solitary and magnificent appearance of these ruins; and all with one accord will exclaim, “
how grand! how wonderful
! how incomprehensible.”’

Few travellers across the plain were indifferent by now. Those who were lucky enough to run into Cunnington himself might be treated to a sight of his museum at Heytesbury, where the finds from the barrows were on show. ‘Nothing could be more curious and systematic than the arrangement of the museum,’ according to one tourist at this first ever Stonehenge visitor centre. The contents of the individual burials were grouped together and interpreted to show, for example, the grave of a hunter buried with his dog: ‘an epitaph could not have let us more into the rank and character of the dead,’ the admiring visitor noted. This emphasis on recovering individual characters from the past was also very much of its time, a time when historical fiction and fictionalised history were becoming deeply intertwined. This was the age of Walter Scott, himself an enthusiastic antiquary, whose novels brought the past to vivid life and created an appetite for the minutiae of the Olden Times. Readers and tourists expected a good narrative with plenty of detail. Descriptions of the food, the furniture, the ‘manners and customs’ of bygone days were popular. In Smith and Meyrick’s
Costume of the Original Inhabitants of the British Isles
of 1815, the Grand Conventional Festival of the Britons at Stonehenge is illustrated in full colour. It is a magnificent display of pageantry, a prehistoric
Ivanhoe
.