Perfectly accurate
Nobody has ever wanted the boring answer. Nine hundred years of people explaining how the stones got onto Salisbury Plain, every one of them with a better version than the last, and not one of those versions has ever been “the ice put it there.”
Continue reading “Anyone but boring old nature”
Stonehenge has never been short of folk who reckon something unaccountable goes on… Far out there, man. Far out there.
The Devil got in first. Bought the stones off an old woman in Ireland, magicked them over by night, then chucked one at a friar who caught him at it. Hence the Friar’s Heel.
Then there’s the counting. Four hundred-odd years ago, back around Elizabeth I, it was held that nobody could count the stones twice and arrive at the same total, and that whoever managed it would come to a bad end. Nobody ever says what sort of bad end. That’s the trouble with a curse. No docket. No paperwork. Nobody to ring. No Google to query. No help’s coming. (I know that trick.)
The witches turned up considerably later. Skyclad rites at the stones are a 1950s and 60s invention, Wicca first, then the free festivals, yes, sometimes naked, but as ancient as a Ford Anglia. Hasn’t stopped anybody. Thursdays out there are usually strange.
Well, well, well. The Upton Lovell shaman, dug out of a Wiltshire barrow in the early 1800s and shown off ever since as a bearded bloke in a bone cloak, turns out to have been a woman – a shamanka. Ancient DNA, three separate bones, the same answer each time. She lived around 3,800 ya (BC 1,800), and she was buried barely 10 miles (16km) west of Stonehenge.
Derived from the Tungusic word šaman meaning “one who knows” a shamanka is a female shaman. The word combines the term “shaman” with the Russian feminine suffix “-ka.”
The top part of the broken and fallen ‘fat’ upright from the central Trilithon 3 — it lays across the Altar Stone. Much of the graffiti on the top has worn away. Can just make out:ƗANE FLEMƗNG 1747
I suspect the upper case letter I with the stroke through it would be the Latin form.
Long been fascinated by these carvings. I think this stone will be the Rosetta Stone of Stonehenge. Seen with other original markings on 59a and the back of 54. There’s definitely method in the carvers’ madness.
TIL about Japanese Dogū ceramic figures. Roughly same age as the sarsens of #Stonehenge. And Jōmon flame pottery, about the same age as the beginning of Stonehenge.
Via an exhibition at the Stonehenge visitor centre comparing British and Japanese Neolithic.
Recently, tenacious Brian John, researched this bluestone found on a beach by Phil Holden, a photographer, in Mumbles, near Swansea, South Wales. It is just one of several that make up a breadcrumb trail of the ice floes from the west of Wales, North Wales, even Scotland. Which, probably, reached as far or even further than the nascent site of Stonehenge.
So much graffiti. Possibly, because some stones may be softer, easier to carve.
