Ancient Dominoes

We took the Volvo out this weekend for a quick road trip. Saturday, we ambled through Bath then on to Salisbury for the night. From there, we hit an old castle and then Stonehenge before getting back home Sunday evening.

Here is the basic gist of Stonehenge: It's really freakin' old (5000 years or so), it's built in the middle of a huge open plain, and the stones are as heavy as 50 tonnes each. They really don't know for certain what it was used for -- there are lots of opinions -- but since it was built before any reasonably sort of written history, it's really anyone's best guess. It was definitely a religious site, and people were definitely buried or cremated there -- but who or what was worshipped here is a bit of a mystery.

They have found ways, using methods that would have been available in ancient times, to move, shape, and position stones that big - but some think it would have taken 500 men working in tandem to get each stone to the site and then put them in place. The smaller stones (4 tonnes each) likely travelled a route 240 miles long , while the bigger stones came from about 25 miles away.

These days, the site is associated with the fantasy-novel type Druids: guys wearing KKK robes and worshipping trees and such. This is a notion that seems to be mostly nonsense since the real Druidic ideas didn't come about until long after the stones were put in place. That doesn't stop an occasional Druid wannabe from showing up and tossing some magick around. Hey, nice staff.

Cheers!