A traveller's imagination takes another leap to unfold mystery of Stonehenge

On any other day in London, when clouds hang menacingly dark and brooding over our heads, threatening claps of thunder and lightning, we'd curse the weather. Not today though. On a chilly morning, we're zipping off to Stonehenge by road, on a two-hour drive into Salisbury to Wiltshire. I'm hoping the weather stays, in fact, a deluge would be a bonus. That's because Stonehenge stirs your imagination by merely invoking its name, of a place clad in mystery and heaving tons (literally, tons) of sarsen and bluestones, that stand as mute testimony of a time it was erected 5000 years ago.

As we turn into the large field I perceive the temperature dropping several notches. The sky obediently stays dark, as we drive further into the open space. Little mounds all along the fields remind us of the large burial grounds that these once were, in pre-historic times. Today, (as probably then) there are grazing animals, but I could swear the cows look like they had been cemented into the ground, still and almost square shaped. The sheep look like the wool that hasn't been sheared after the last Neolithic man passed away. But that didn't stop the amorous creatures from frolicking on these sacred grounds – they provide comic relief.

In the distance, the stone circle makes its first appearance. Cameras blind our sight as they go click-click in a fury, as if Stonehenge would disappear in a few seconds. When my sight clears, I look again, all prepared to gasp and go 'aww', like everyone else around. But is it only me, or do others too feel that the stones seem shorter than all the pictures I've seen of them, towering over us tiny people. Really, trick photography should be banned. They take away the magic of reality and it takes away my gasp and turns it into an 'oh!'.

And yet, grateful for once for cloudy British weather, and the sun defiantly throwing slats of rays through rain laden clouds on the stone circle, the magic is restored, and I am able to see this mystical mysterious place for what it's meant to be.

Stonehenge will throw up 1,80,000 results on Google, and you don't need me to give you its history and geography. As for the mystery that surrounds it, each of us come away with our own sense of what we want it to be. I immediately dream of druids and wiccans dancing around the stones, but the audio guide held to my ear curtly disengages that view. It says that the stone circle is a careful alignment of stones for the movement of the sun. In fact, it is a marvellous piece of engineering that allows the sun's rays to flood the inner circle with sunlight on the summer and winter solstice. Not just that, in the process it creates a long corridor of sunshine, beneficial especially in the winter to the Neolithic people for whom the incandescent light bulb was still in the realm of fantasy.

One can imagine the extreme physics involved in carting stones that, on an average, weighs anywhere between 25 to 30 tons, each. Archaeologists report that they could have been transported from the nearby quarry (several miles away, at a time when the wheel was still a source of great wonder), through the rivers Avon and Frome and then hauled to a rough raft on-ground. You can even goad your imagination to see how they created the horseshoe formation, but how on earth did they manage to get the stones atop the pillars? There were no forklifts and cranes and vernier callipers to determine how to place the stones exactly, so they don't come crashing on the heads of a fledgling population of Neolithics. But enough guessing. You have a choice: you can (and maybe, should) let your imagination get the better of you, even though the audio guide will dissuade you from some of these fantasies, as you walk past the near dozen spots that have great prehistoric significance. Visitors are not permitted into the circle of stones, because the spot has already seen some levels of corruption and the thousands of tourist footfalls annually would only make it worse. But there's ample opportunity for great pictures close enough to the circle and from various distant points, not to come away disappointed.

Later, in the cafeteria, as you're chewing away on your modern day cheese and onion pasty downed by hot steaming coffee, which thaws you and brings you back to the glass and steel of the 21st century, you can only doff your invisible hat to the marvel of the men who left no stones unturned, that we may see how brilliant they were.

Tall Tales

In her article Secrets of Stonehenge National Geographic writer Caroline Alexander points out a few usual conjectures made around the stones – temple to the sun or moon, centre for healing, city of the ancestral dead, etc.
UFOlogists point at the more-than-usual number of alleged flying saucer spottings in Wiltshire and claim that the Stonehenge may have been built to signal aliens.