I love my little ancient clock.

Stonehenge, the most overbuilt monument to ancient calendaring ever created, would’ve been one of the Seven Wonders of the World if its boosters had only been a bit more spirited. Instead, their efforts flagged and the richly deserving, colossal chronometer landed at #8. It was squeezed out of the coveted 7 spot by the underwhelming and easily curated Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It hardly seems fair.

In 800 BC, Mesopotamia wasn’t so much a nanny state as it was a nursery state. This trifling Wonder of forced landscaping was really nothing more than Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II ordering his duty-bound subjects to dangle floral greenery from public buildings like so much Banksy graffiti. Then they all genuflected in dutiful awe at the Royal Gardener’s 40,000 drooping spider plants. “Our King has the greenest thumb in all of the Fertile Crescent.” they crowed in mandatory praise. Big Deal I say. Growing thousands of house plants on patios in warm weather is no Wonder.

Compare this leisurely horticultural jamboree to the triumphant feat of the underfed and overburdened Druids. They built a massive sun-earth clock by heroically hefting 25-tonne stones in a precise geometric configuration that is still accurate today. Yet as great as Stonehenge’s celestial clock is (and don’t tell the Druids this), I hear it’s about 10 minutes fast. But still, they accomplished this zodiacal timekeeping in 2500 BC, using only rudimentary tools and without any Claritin to be had in all of the shires. They withstood such hardships with stoic grace and drippy noses. And in the end, nobody wanted to vote for the achievement of a bunch of snot-nosed hooded pagans. Instead, the 1878 Seven Wonders Committee chose Middle Eastern couscous over Middle England’s mucous.

Stonehenge’s exclusion seemed preordained owing to the clout of the 19^th century Nursery Lobby (you can’t make this stuff up – although I am). Stonehenge’s supporters were few and feeble – just some Quarrymen from Liverpool who threw their inconsiderable weight behind Stonehenge. Plus, their marketing pitch was less than stellar: Visit Stonehenge: The Gloomiest Place on Earth.  Because of marketing blunders like these on the part of Stonehenge’s boosters, it’s no wonder it’s no Wonder.

Modern day Druids Gandalf and Hermione revisit the site of a past life.

Perhaps the best thing about visiting Stonehenge is that you don’t have to get into a rickety submersible and dive down 2½ miles to get there – a depth that seems unfathomable. Fortunately, Stonehenge is right there, happily located above ground on the plains of Salisbury. It’s a little tricky to locate. Don’t make the Salisbury mis-steak I did and look for it in Sandwich. Stonehenge is gaining respect. It became a UNESCO World Heritage site and was voted the prestigious “Least Portable Calendar” award for the 4523^rd year in a row.

In the beginning (not Thee beginning – this isn’t a book of the Bible – I’m just referring to the early planning stages of Stonehenge.) there were a variety of proposals for creating a functional neolithic calendar. The men of Salisbury Plain were hoping for a cheese cakey “Women Without Robes” calendar while the women were in favor of a hunky “The Firemen of Station Hut #12” calendar. But as there were no First Responders in those days, and nudity (as well as bathing) wasn’t allowed, stodgy tribal elders would support neither group. Instead, in their infinitely hooded wisdom, a massive stony calendar the size of a small kingdom and weighing 6 million tons was decreed.

Notes on Druid Society

It must be said that there were no First Responders back then. There weren’t even 2^nd or 3^rd Responders. There were no responders at all. You just dealt with the situation. The best you could hope for when adversity struck, was to be a really good withstander. As they used to say in 2500 BC, “Soot happens.”

Shopping for food was no bonus either. A neighbor might ask, “Are you going shopping to Scarborough Fair?”

“Why yes I am,” they’d respond.

“Well could you pick me up some pigeons and chestnuts,” they’d inquire?

The neighbor usually responded, “Sorry. Scarborough Fair only sells parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.”

Rock On My Druid Brothers

Few realize that before there was Beatlemania, there was Stonehenge-mania. Although Stonehenge-mania was not quite as electrifying as Beatlemania, both the Beatles and Stonehenge really knew how to rock and they both loved getting stoned. Whereas the Beatles’ music became more experimental over the years, Stonehenge’s music became boulder.

 
Most Druids will never forget that Sunday night in 1964 BC when Stonehenge first performed live on the old “Gwedward Sullivan Show”. Everyone was watching – the entire clan of 2300 screaming, hooded masses. After the Stonehenge Invasion, the Druids knew their world would never be the same again. Henceforth they would always know exactly when to plant their sorghum and sacrifice thine goats. Stonehenge would become so popular that teenage Druids would imitate their rock stars and stand in stony silence for hours until their parents realized they were just trying to avoid doing homework. 

Stonehenge-mania had a different beat to it. Instead of “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” it was more like “Yea Verily Brother, Let Me Help Thou with Thine Sheaves” – which was a very catchy tune back in the day, when mankind was just marking time, waiting for Jesus to show up.

Stonehenge – Diggin’ It!

Nearby excavations indicate that Stonehenge was part of a much larger and bleaker complex. Some archaeologists maintain that Stonehenge was just one facet of a stony wonderland – a theme park that archaeologists believe was a crude version of Disneyland.  

Professor Cummerbund Lachlan of the Oxford Archaeology department explains recent excavations of the prehistoric site:

Our excavations uncovered a wealth of details about Stonehenge. While it wasn’t exactly a neolithic Disney wonderland of thrills and rides, it did have some interesting themed lands attached to it. In excavations and subsequent reconstruction our team discovered the following themed lands at the wonderful world of Stonehenge:

1. The Gravel of Tomorrow – An idealized rendering of what gravel might look like in the future
2. Scatland – A festival of feces, where young hunters and gatherers would try to track animals by matching the excrement to the organism (there was some really good sh*t in there)
3. Pyrites of the Caribbean – A fool’s gold utopia of bright and shiny rocks
4. Frontier Land – Gave the visitor a view of what primitive life was like before Stonehenge. For example, in one ride visitors were taught to keep their heads above water while standing in a Primordial Soup.
5. The Hall of Animatronic Snails – A thrilling diorama of different routes slugs took by mapping their snail trails (allow 18 hours)
6. TommorowLand – Cave paintings depicted a futuristic, visionary world of shoes, deodorant and dentistry

We in the Oxford Archaeology department remain fully dedicated to unlocking the secrets of Stonehenge for as long as it takes, or until our grant money runs out.

Trouble in Slabadise

In the days when the entire Druid community was dedicated to constructing this all-encompassing Temple to Timeliness, children would often comment sassily to their parents, “And we’re devoting 95% of our GDP in arranging these impossibly heavy stones because?…”

Their elderly 22-year-old parents would shoot back, “You kids have it easy. Back in my day the sun was black and we ate our parents for food. Everything was uphill and water flowed backwards. Gravity’s downward force was 3 times as heavy as it is today. Sometimes we couldn’t stand up for weeks and had to roll everywhere. So don’t tell me about the difficulty of stone stacking. We’re lucky we’re near a quarry. Praise be to granite.”

Druid legend has it that a young and rebellious Mick’lan Jagger protested to his father, “Dad, wouldn’t it be easier to just roll these stones instead of dragging them?” To which the elder Jagger responded, “Listen Mick, Rolling Stones will never catch on. We like our stones with moss here.”

Blue-eyed Soul-stice

Records indicate that the Druids were an industrious, grubby and musical people. In fact, scrolls found in the soot-stained hovels of wealthy teenagers list the Top 40 singles for the week of Sept. 21^st 2023 BC. It looked something like this:

1. Hey Drude
2. The House of the Rising Sun
3. Sympathy for the Weevil
4. Sorghum, Glorious Sorghum
5. Dark Side of the Moon (Yes, that Dark Side of the Moon. It’s been on the charts that long.)

The Interstices of Solstices or the Paradoxes of Equinoxes

Prof. Lachlan and his passé posse unearthed another telling scroll. This one was from tribal elder and leader of the Druids, James Equinox Polk who was more familiarly known as James Knox Polk. In JKP’s lament, he remonstrates (that’s a nice word for it) about the less than stellar conditions of the day:

“Jesus Christ (whoever that is), I’m 22 now and already gray. I have maybe another 5 years to live – and that’s only if we have a bumper crop of sorghum. Couldn’t we diversify into flax or indigo or, I don’t know, maybe something edible like potatoes! Our Irish friends seem to subsist on them just fine. And as for hunting and gathering, I can do with less burdock, chestnuts and ground squirrels. We spend half the day bringing in the sheaves and, for the life of me, I still don’t know what a sheave is, or why we must bring them ‘in.’

“I will admit that the burning of peat for heat is neat. But for Pete’s sake, peat is so sooty on my hoodie.  

“I think we’re carrying this whole “paleo” thing a bit too far. I mean c’mon. It’s not even the Paleolithic Era anymore. It’s the Neolithic. Can we please get a little biodiversity? Is that too much to ask? Criminy. This is almost 2400 and 63 BC. Is the Bronze Age ever going to get here? With the food we eat, I don’t know why God even bothered to give us taste buds. If this is what being at the apex of the food chain looks like, we’d be better off as pond scum.

“As for this whole Stonehenge preoccupation; another one of those stupid slabs fell over last night crushing my favorite dog Beowulf. I was planning on eating him this week, now he’s 2-dimensional. Sometimes I think my intelligence is a curse. And now my wife Rapunzel wants us to ‘Snowbird’ in Cardiff for the winter. What does she think we are? – migratory Whooper Swans. And my boy Cednulf with his, ‘T’sup pa? I’m axing – I’m chillaxing.’’ Does not anyone thenceforth articulate the King’s English?”

A Stonehenge Resurgence?

Stonehenge is what it is, which most scholars can’t even agree on what it is exactly. The larger point is, Stonehenge is not changing and it isn’t going anywhere. Supporters are trying to popularize and animate the silent, standing slabs by persuading Lin-Manuel Miranda to write a hip-hop musical about Stonehenge called Hamilstone. So far, their entreaties to the creator of Hamilton have been met with an icy silence – Burrrr.

Until Miranda writes, supporters press on marketing unwieldy Stonehenge watches that are extremely accurate, but only if you line-up the 7-pound watch with the Prime Meridien and Polaris. To be clear, the watch is actually 4 lbs. in weight and 7 pounds in cost. Strangely enough it’s catching on. It’s become the darling of media-influencers. This ungainly retro-watch is being hailed as an Apple Watch – if it was broken and weighed 4 lbs. People in the hood are starting to take notice. Not hipsters in the neighborhood, but Druid wannabees in hooded robes.

Having visited Stonehenge, I noticed many stoney slabs overgrown with lichens. And I remembered Prof. Lachlan likened lichens to the stalactites you sometimes find hanging from the eaves of old barns and are often referred to as barnicles – not to be confused with barnacles which form on the sheaves of ocean-going ships.

Well, I see by the old clock on Salisbury Plain that our time is coming to a close for today. I do hope I opened a door for you into the history of Stonehenge. And now having done that, I find I can’t get the darn thing shut again. It really is Stonehenge unhinged.   

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