Green. Everywhere you
look – light, dark, pastel, … green. The
old red, white and blue (the old one, not the American one) may be the colours
of the United Kingdom, but in this part of England, green is everywhere. As I write this, driving through the
Salisbury Plain, I realized that with a grey sky, the only colour visible for
miles around is green – from the fields to the hedges to the forests.
We left Bath this morning with stones on our minds. Stonehenge, surely an icon of the British
Isles, awaited our pilgrimage, as it has for countless human beings for 5000
years. Though we don’t really know what
the purpose of building this monolithic structure was, we do know that if
functions as an accurate celestial time piece – somewhat like a sundial, but
for the solstices and seasons rather than the hours of the day. An enormous amount of ingenuity and effort
was needed for these ancient people to move these stones up to 240 miles to
this spot in the Salisbury Plain.
Theories abound about how they did it, but you can ask our bus driver
Steve – he knows it was only with the assistance of aliens that they uprighted
these 25 ton stoners and then placed capstones on top of them. Or, they built earthen ramps (digging the
necessay dirt using deer shoulder blades in the absence of metal tools) and
placed logs on them to make a sort of conveyer belt and dragged the stones up,
dropping them into the holes that had been dug to hold them in place. I think the weather was perfect for our visit
here – chilly wind and a bit of rain.
These stones have withstood thousands of years of all sorts of weather –
we can handle an hour in the elements. Especially
if wearing tweed.
After Stonehenge, we were off to the largest stone circle in
the British Isles in nearby Avebury.
Sixteen times larger than Stonehenge in circumference, the Avebury stone
circles actually have a village in the middle of them! I brought the students to the first stone we
saw and invited them to touch it. You
can’t do that at Stonehenge – it is roped off.
But at Avebury, the stones are in open fields and you can walk amongst
them as you please. I like to touch the
stonework in the cathedrals we visit – and imagine my ancestors working those
same stones, quarrying, chiseling, and setting them in place. The stones at Avebury were set in place by
our ancestors before written history – human ingenuity, human hands working to
create something sacred, something that will last beyond their short mortal
tenure. These stones are evidence of
people at the dawn of civilization, when humans moved beyond nomadic hunting
and gathering to an agrarian lifestyle that actually gave them some leisure
time – and time to build monuments to whatever they saw as sacred – like their
descendants – the cathedral builders of the middle ages.
We enjoyed an excellent pub meal at Avebury’s only pub, the
Red Lion, followed by a walk amongst the stones. Another wonderful day living in the present
moment while contemplating the past.
 |
| Ray dares to sit in the Devil's chair in the Avebury stone circle!!!! |
