Stonehenge (18 page)

27. Once Stonehenge became public property restoration work began. This photograph was taken in 1919, when several leaning stones were straightened and set in concrete. It shows a lintel being adjusted.

The Druids of course persevered.
The Druid
, the magazine of the Ancient Order, was founded in 1907. It carried advertisements of interest to readers in search of a ‘Druidic Haircut and shave’, a Druid convalescent home or a bona fide sample of magic cork. The editors promised, or warned, that simply because it was now known that ‘the erection of the Sacred Circles was not the work of Druid hands’ the brethren would not lose interest in Stonehenge; ‘On the contrary…’ More generally, there was a febrile romanticism abroad in Britain between the wars. It ran through modern art and
literature and had its effects on science. Even at the heart of archaeology, wisps of the mystical continued to find their way through scientific rationalism, like smoke through a loosely piled bonfire. At Glastonbury, where the abbey was placed in the care of a charitable trust in 1908 with a view to its better preservation, excavations were undertaken by Frederick Bligh Bond, who delighted the trustees by discovering, almost at once, the sites of the long-lost Edgar and Loretto Chapels. They were less delighted when, in 1918, Bond published
The Gate of Remembrance
, an account of how he had located the chapels through a series of seances in which he had contacted one of the monks who had constructed the abbey and who also revealed the sacred geometry of its layout. Despite the intervention of Conan Doyle, the Bishop of Wells was not placated and Bond was eventually sacked. But a mystical view of the ancient past was gaining ground. For those who read Jung and believed (as Bligh Bond did) in a mental world of archetypes and the collective unconscious, there was a place in the modern world where science and mysticism might meet and intertwine. In the early 1920s Alfred Watkins was busy near Salisbury and elsewhere developing the theory of ley lines and in 1936 the Reverend C. C. Dobson revisited the old Glastonbury foundation myths in
Did Our Lord Visit Britain as they say in Cornwall and Somerset?
, which quickly ran into six editions.

Artists, too, returned to Stonehenge. If they found it less forbidding than the Romantics had, they were perhaps more moved by it, for it seemed to speak a visual language they could understand. In 1921 the young Henry Moore visited the stones by night. The sight of them in moonlight made a profound and lasting impression. It helped to form his sense
of the possibilities of sculpture in landscape, of how art set within nature could become monumental. Like Barbara Hep-worth, he saw a connection by descent between himself and the creators of the stone circles, between the mute mystery of Stonehenge and the abstractions of twentieth-century art. So, too, did the painter Paul Nash. In his
Equivalents for the Megaliths
of 1935, one of a series of pictures inspired by a visit to Avebury, he set an enigmatic group of objects against the Wiltshire downs.

At Stonehenge itself, however, under the care of the Office of Works, circumstances were becoming ever less conducive to artistic contemplation; in fact they were, as the architect Clough Williams-Ellis put it in 1928, ‘intolerable’. ‘The Stonehenge Café, the derelict hangars of an aerodrome; a collection of huts … spiked iron railings and a turnstile … a picture-postcard kiosk; and a brand new bungalow’ were among the eyesores captured in a single snapshot from the road. There was widespread criticism and the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, announced, ‘The solitude of Stonehenge should be restored … to ensure that our posterity will see it against the sky in lonely majesty.’ An appeal was launched in 1927 to enable the National Trust to buy nearly 1,500 acres of land around the stones, which it duly did. In 1931 the last of the Ancient Monuments Acts was passed, prompted largely by the problems besetting Stonehenge and Avebury. The law, however, had few teeth and visitors were becoming more numerous and more intrusive. Increasingly they came by car. In H. G. Wells’s novel of 1922,
Secret Places of the Heart
, in which the plot centres on a visit to Stonehenge, one of the characters watches a little boy who is less than impressed with his visit and prefers to inspect the parked cars. ‘Old stones
are just old stones to him. But motor cars are gods.’ Indeed, the stones appeared not just in modern art but on artistic advertising posters, like McKnight Kauffer’s, for Shell petrol. Road traffic now became, as it remains, the chief obstacle to creating – or restoring – a suitable setting for Stonehenge, while those motorists who were interested in old stones did not expect to sacrifice the car in order to see them. In 1935 the first car park was built.

Four years later, with the Second World War, came another blow to the ancient landscape as giant rotivators rolled across Salisbury Plain, ploughing up whatever lay beneath ground level, making the downland over to crops for much-needed food. By the time peace returned in 1945 the setting of Stonehenge fell still further short of Stanley Baldwin’s vision. Clough Williams-Ellis surveyed the ‘tankdromes, dumps and hutments’, the debris of conflict which ‘we are assured are “merely temporary”’ but which often turned out to be permanent, not to mention the accompanying ‘hordes of heedless and destructive and very gallant young men who would bomb or trample [national treasures] into nothing as gaily as you or I would smash plates in a … fun fair’. And if the army was sometimes careless, the Ministry of Works (as it became in 1940), with its official archaeological view, was in some ways not much better. In 1949 the artist John Piper found his visit to Stonehenge depressing. He described it in the
Architectural Review
, where his article followed pictures of a terrifyingly antiseptic school at Stevenage, the first of the post-war new towns. Piper lamented ‘this guilty age of orders and self accusations’, in which imagination was still on the ration and the official guide to Stonehenge was largely devoted to the negative task of dispelling romance and popular myths, especially, of course, the Druids. ‘We are permitted to call Stonehenge beautiful or ugly at will,’ he wrote, ‘but are warned that it is not the point about it; we refer to its atmosphere of worship at our own risk, on the same terms as we leave our car in the car-park … the archaeologists have had a great deal to put up with at Stonehenge’, he added drily, ‘and this is their reply’. Archaeology marched on undeterred, but its steady rise in the post-war period was accompanied by a growing murmur of dissent from its orthodoxies and resentment of its occasional arrogance.

28. The presentation of the site was considered unsatisfactory as early as 1928 when the architect Clough Williams-Ellis published this critique in his book
England and the Octopus.

29. Edward McKnight Kauffer’s poster for Shell was printed in 1931. Soon all too many people were taking advantage of the invitation to visit by car and traffic management has been a problem ever since.

Digging began again in 1950, supervised by three professional archaeologists, an ‘informal committee’ appointed by the Society of Antiquaries; Richard Atkinson, Stuart Piggott and J. F. S. Stone, a local man who had recently excavated the Cursus. It was to be Atkinson who dominated not just the work at Stonehenge but the post-war image of archaeology. Often on television wielding his cigarette holder as he dug into Silbury Hill or got a team of public schoolboys to demonstrate how the bluestones had been moved, he was suave and authoritative. The first of the post-war investigations was into two of the Aubrey Holes that Hawley had left intact. They revealed the same sort of mixture of infill and human remains as the others but there was now a new way of understanding such previously puzzling material. Just the year before, at the University of Chicago, the chemist Willard Libby had invented a method of dating material by its carbon content. Although this was still an imprecise technique which has since been much refined, it was a huge advance for archaeology. Libby returned a date of 1848+/-275
BC
for the Stonehenge samples. Atkinson and Piggott, conscious of the damage done by their predecessors, restricted themselves to
the smallest possible areas for their excavations. Their principal achievement was to develop, modify and add detail to Hawley’s three-phase outline. They also discovered the Q and R holes, which once held an earlier bluestone setting, and Stone, in his work at the Cursus, found bluestone fragments, suggesting that perhaps there had been a bluestone structure there that was later dismantled and moved.

One of Atkinson’s greatest discoveries, however, was not the result of excavation. It was made in the same way that Aubrey had found Avebury, simply by looking at the familiar with fresh eyes. He was photographing the inscription on stone 53, which may be the sixteenth-century artist Lucas de Heere’s graffito, and he chose a moment late on a summer afternoon, when the raking sun would show it most clearly. Through his viewfinder Atkinson saw a short dagger carved on the stone. Nearby were the outlines of four Bronze Age axes. Once noticed, the carvings started to appear elsewhere. A visiting schoolboy found one on stone 4. The axes were of an Irish type. The dagger, however, was of a kind not found in northern Europe but related to examples from Greece and Mycenae. Atkinson assumed that it was carved ‘within the lifetime of someone who was personally familiar with this type of weapon in its homeland’, which was a large assumption given that objects may travel and survive far beyond the ken of their first users. If he was right, however, this meant the carving was no later than 1470
BC
. Whatever they meant, the carvings were, at last, a discovery with some visual appeal and they caught the public imagination, which was further fired in 1956 by Atkinson’s book
Stonehenge
. It instantly became the standard work. Not only was Atkinson popular for his appearances in the still-novel medium of television, he
wrote well and with none of the drabness that pervaded the official guidebook. ‘Of the stones themselves,’ he commented in his introduction, ‘no words of mine can properly describe the subtle varieties of texture and colour, or the uncountable effects of shifting light and shade … silvery grey … in sunlight, which lightens to an almost metallic bluish-white against a background of storm clouds.’

The book is chiefly devoted to a factual account of his own and others’ work, but passion and imagination keep breaking through. In describing stone 36, a bluestone that had once served as a lintel, Atkinson could not help but see it through the eyes of a generation that had grown up with the abstract sculpture of Henry Moore. He found evidence in it of ‘feeling for form and design’. He was ungenerous, however, towards his predecessor Hawley, describing his excavations as ‘one of the more melancholy chapters in the long history of the monument’, without acknowledging what he had taken from them himself. Hawley’s fault, according to Atkinson, was his fear of speculation or ‘any kind of working hypothesis’. Atkinson, however, erred somewhat in the opposite direction, allowing the axes to light a Stukeleyesque chain of association in his mind. He concluded:

I believe that Stonehenge itself is evidence for the concentration of political power … in the hands of a single man, who alone could create and maintain the conditions necessary for this great undertaking. Who he was … we shall never know … Yet who but he should sleep, like Arthur or Barbarossa, in the quiet darkness of a sarsen vault beneath the mountainous pile of Silbury Hill? And is not Stonehenge itself his memorial?

There was little more to support Atkinson’s theory of Mycenaean influence than the Reverend C. C. Dobson’s, which at least had a tradition behind it. Yet he was by now the acknowledged expert. He had, or it was assumed he had, a full set of detailed notes which would be written up and published in due course as the definitive study.

While they transformed the public understanding of the monument the archaeologists were also overseeing its physical transformation into the Stonehenge we see today. Restoration work began in 1958, when the stones that had fallen in 1797 and 1900, for which there was historical evidence of their original positions, were re-erected.
HEAVE-HO AT STONEHENGE
the local paper trumpeted, over photographs of the Ministry of Works’ 70-ton crane winching them up. This, along with the straightening and resetting of three more leaning stones in 1959 was as far as it was considered proper to take the reconstruction. Unfortunately, during the ‘heave-ho’ phase stone 22 struck the upright stone 23 a glancing blow and in March 1963 that in turn fell over. Its re-erection and concreting were the last of the physical adjustments to the stones to date and it was decided that further work should be limited to ‘what is required to ensure the safety and good display of the monument’. Thus it was returned, physically, to more or less the same state as it appears in depictions from Lucas de Heere’s time. Intellectually and perhaps less fortunately, it had been returned to the age of Inigo Jones, when it was thought impossible that such a work could be the product of a native pre-classical civilisation. Informed opinion was for Atkinson’s Mycenaeans. ‘We must look to the literate civilisations of the Mediterranean,’ wrote Stone, or, as Atkinson put it,
‘Ex oriente lux
’.