You're Dead to Me - Stonehenge

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

Greg Jenner digs into the history and mystery surrounding Stonehenge. Is it really the symbol of fertility and scene of sacrifice it’s portrayed to be, and what part of Stonehenge is the henge exactly? Featuring podcasting legend Richard Herring alongside archaeologist Susan Greaney from English Heritage. It’s history for people who don’t like history! Produced by Dan Morelle Script by Greg Jenner Research by Emma NagouseA Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a history podcast for people who don't like history, or at least forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible History. I like jokes and I like facts, and in this podcast we cram them together in a sort of Frankenstein monsters way. In each episode I'm joined by an expert historian with years of accumulated knowledge

and a top comedian with years of accumulated penis gags. And today we're donning our waterproofs and wellies and heading to Wiltshire to learn about the ancient majesty of Stonehenge. Joining me in the studio are two people with very different skill sets when it comes to assessing a field full of stones. In History Corner, we've rustled up a proper expert. She's the Senior Properties Historian for English Heritage. She's a qualified archaeologist. She's midway through her PhD at Cardiff University.

It's Sue Greeny. Hi, Sue. Thanks for coming. Hi. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. And in Comedy Corner, he's one of the finest stand-ups in the country. He's a writer, playwright. He's the big kahuna of UK podcasting. He basically invented it. He once stupidly invited me on his show and I ruined it.

So this is his revenge. It's the brilliant and very silly Richard Herring. Hi, Richard. Hello. Lovely to be here. Thank you for coming. Now, it's good to have you in a room together because I know you're both obsessed with stones in fields. In our own ways.

In your own ways. Now, people at home are thinking, what does he mean? Well, Sue is an archaeologist. You know, your job is Stonehenge. That makes sense. But Richard. Yes. You've got a weird new podcast. I've moved to the countryside in Hertfordshire quite recently and I walk my dog around a field and it was very stony. And I started just moving stones to the side for my walk. then I just thought I'd try and be productive with my time so I started clearing stones off the field and making little cairns and then I became a bit obsessed with it

and now I do a podcast in which you can follow me once a week walking around the field taking stones out the field and explaining the history of stone clearing uh and uh which may be slightly imagined and techniques of techniques of stone clearing and also the encounters i have with genuine dog walkers on the way as i tried to hide what i'm doing because i'm genuinely embarrassed i mean i've listened to a couple of episodes and i have to say i did immediately think is everything all right at home well you know i kind of my comedy's always been about slightly experimenting and treading the line between sanity and insanity uh and so i kind of like i like using comedy to explore that so good all right the paranoia is is real sue i hope your experience of fields of stones is not quite as harrowing why are you an archaeologist

i just love the detective side of things i love finding out about the past i was a very precocious Sue, I hope your experience of fields of stones is not quite as harrowing. Why are you an archaeologist? I just love the detective side of things. I love finding out about the past. I was a very precocious child at the age of seven, decided I wanted to be an archaeologist, and I haven't ever changed my mind. And I'm very lucky to work most of the time thinking about Stonehenge, which is probably the most famous monument anyone can ever think of when they think about prehistory and archaeology. Not many of us get to be what we wanted to be when we were seven.

Well, I'm essentially trying to build the next millennia's Stonehenge in my field, so I'm hoping that when I've got all the stones off the field, there'll be a big wall around it that in centuries and millennia's to come, someone like you will be looking at wondering why it was created. But it's great because you're recording exactly why you're doing it,

so we'll have the evidence. Herringhenge. If that survives. If that survives. So, what do you know? In pop culture, Stonehenge is the most iconic ancient monument in Britain. Indeed, one of the most famous in the world. It is mysterious and magical. Druids claim it as a sacred site.

Archaeologists puzzle over it. Tourists flock in their millions. 1.5 million a year. Someids claim it as a sacred site. Archaeologists puzzle over it. Tourists flock in their millions. 1.5 million a year. Some people think it was built by aliens. Some people think it's magic. In the hilariously terrible film Transformers 5, it's the belly button to Earth. And Earth is a robot called Unicron. So that's great.

It's popped up in episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants, Doctor Who, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And of course in the comedy classic spinal tap stonehenge is where the demons dwell and the banshees live and they do live well so that's what i reckon you know at home possibly but what actually is there to know about stonehenge and uh you know how much fun can we have asking these weird exciting questions about it let's find out so sue can we start with the absolute basics? What the hell is a henge? A henge is an earthwork enclosure, usually circular. And Stonehenge has one of those just around the outside. Not many people notice it because they're too busy looking at the stones.

But there is a henge around Stonehenge. But I've been told that Stonehenge is actually not a henge. Yeah, if you want to get nerdy and technical about it, you could class Stonehenge as a proto-henge, so an early type of henge, because confusingly it ditches outside its bank and normally for henges it's the other way round. That's really... We don't really need to worry about it. It's the most famous henge? It's the most famous henge and it's where the word comes from. There was a time when archaeologists got very nerdy about h and classed them as class one hinges and class two hinges, but we realised there's a bit more to life than that.

Is it made of stone, though? Because if it's not made of stone, then that's really... That would be... That's double wrong. Yeah. There's nothing right in there. Is there stone in there? No.

No. Henge isn't earthwork, so it's just earth. OK. Yeah. So the point of calling it Stonehenge is that it's a henge with some stones nearby. Exactly. Rather than it being a stonehenge.

That's right. Yeah. Good. Well, we can all go home. Good. So Stonehenge is not a henge. Good start. Why did we call it a henge?

I mean, is it an old English word, Anglo-Saxon? Yeah, henge. It comes from either hanging or hinge. So that's because the lintels, the horizontal stones, hang on top of the other one. So the lintel goes on top of the two sort of, like the goalposts almost. The uprights. Yeah, the uprights. So there's an idea that it's from hanging,

as in they're hanging stones, but there's also an idea that it was a place in Anglo-Saxon times of execution. So the idea that these were hanging stones, they would actually hang people at the site. And actually one person was decapitated and buried in the middle of Stonehenge in the Anglo-Saxon period.

So that's possible as well. Wow. I did not know that. That's quite exciting. Murder mystery. How many henges are there in Britain? Probably about 500 at least, I would say. I thought you were going to say five. Almost five. There's a lot. There's a lot.

And it's a really amorphous category. So you get really big henges, which are kind of the whole field size. And then you get really tiny mini henges and everything in between. So there are a lot of henges. Would Richard's Henge now classify as a henge? I think if you were to create a continuous circuit of stones all the way around your field, that would be a henge. That is my plan. That is what I'm aiming for. I mean, you could go down in the history books.

Yeah, definitely. It's quite a thing now, actually, for people to build new prehistoric monuments. There's some people who've built long barrows and they put cremated dead into them. My main, the main. I've got one cairn that's pretty big. So I'd quite like to be buried underneath that. Wow. If they can dig down. Is that allowed?

I don't know if my wife, well, I don't know. I just told my wife to do it. It's in a field no one's around. No one knows what I'm doing. So, I mean, then everyone could come and stand in the... I think it's a pea crop. It was last year anyway, so it's not quite as... They can stand amongst the peas and see me off. And then I'll be buried under there. But I'd like it to be more pyramid-y and have some slaves and animals buried alive with me in there as well.

Sure, yeah. Then we'll be able to find anyone to do that. In a thousand years time indiana jones will come along yeah and then arrows will shoot out the walls okay so we've established that stonehenge uh not a henge and there are 500 of them so hang on why is this one important then so stonehenge is unique because the stone circle in the middle of the henge which is the bit we know as a stonehenge uh is the only one in the world that is linteled as in it's got these horizontal stones on top of the vertical upright stones and it's also the only one that's been worked and shaped so the actual stones are

connected together with joints so there are mortise and tenon joints which are kind of woodworking joints which connect the stones together and there are tongue and groove joints which connect the lintels together so it's pretty unique there's no other stone circle like it. So the joints it sounds like carpentry almost. It is, yeah. So they're carpentry techniques. And we actually think that at the time that they were building Stonehenge,

they'd have been doing this in wood as well. But we don't have those surviving, obviously. So is there a woodhenge, is there a strawhenge, woodhenge, Stonehenge? Yeah, sort of. And then a big bad wolf came. Yeah. So there is a woodhenge.

Woodhenge is quite near Stonehenge. And it's when archaeologists dug it, obviously they just find the post holes. But they're in an arrangement that could well have meant that they were connected with lintels. So the wood rots away and all you find is the holes where the wood would have stood. Exactly. Okay. Richard, I believe you did a little bit of archaeology at university. I did, yeah.

Well, before university, my year off, I should have probably done archaeology at university. I really liked archaeology and I did a couple of digs, yeah. How good are you on the Neolithic Bronze Age switchover? Not very good. I did work on a Neolithic site, but I didn't find anything on that one, really. I was a bit confused about what was archaeological and just what was bits of stone.

So that's why I'm just happy just to throw stones away, regardless of whether they're of any value. So it's quite hard to tell, because flint just, you know, naps itself, doesn't it? It gets nipped. It gets chipped. It does. So it's hard to tell. All right.

So do you know roughly when Stonehenge is first built? Do you have a guess? I would say, well, first built, the wood version, I would say 3,000 years before Christ. I'm going to go for it. I was going to say 3,000 years before Christ, I'm going to go for. I was going to say 3,000 years ago, about 3,000 BC. That's pretty good. Really good. Spot on. I must have had that somewhere in the back of my mind.

Yeah, you must have. But it's quite old, isn't it? It's older than metal stuff. Yeah, that's pretty good. So 3,000 BC is when the henge was dug, so the earthwork bit. The stones went up about 500 years later, 2500 BC. So 4,500 years ago is when the stones appear. Yeah, that's when the famous ones that we think of went up in the middle.

So the Neolithic is what we call the New Stone Age. So it's right at the end of the Stone Age. So the Stone Age goes a million years, but then you get right up to 4,500 years ago, 5,000 years ago, and then people kind of go, ooh, bronze! Yeah, there's new types of metal arrive. So copper and gold and bronze arrive in the British Isles. Thrash metal.

Sorry, that's a heavy metal joke. I'm sorry, I'm wearing a heavy metal T-shirt today. My head's gone thrash metal. And they had a new type of pottery and they started burying their dead in individual graves, which they hadn't been doing before. And we now know through ancient DNA studies that lots of new people arrived in the British Isles at that time. And the new people are probably bringing this new metal stuff and bringing the new ideas. So it's bloody immigrants turning up with their new stuff. Yeah, potentially. But this is just after Stonehenge has been built. So it's a time of great transition.

Yeah. But it's also a time of warfare. I mean, are these people welcome? The ancient DNA does not tell us. But the fact that the DNA basically was replaced in the British Isles pretty quickly shows that it was much more love than war. Sexy time.

And we call these new people the beaker people? Yeah, they tend to get called the beaker people. The term went out of fashion because there's this idea that maybe it wasn't new people and it was just new ideas, new things coming across the channel. But actually now with the DNA, we do know it's new people. So yeah, the beaker people is what they tend to get called. And why are they called beaker people? So they have a new type of pottery.

It's called a beaker. Little pots made of kind of fine pottery, new decoration. And it's a type that comes across from Europe. In a thousand years' time, Richard, what's our species? What's our civilization going to be known as if archaeologists find our stuff? Yeah, well, the iPhone, the iPod and iPhone generation. I just want to think about those numbers of electronic stuff. If there was like a wipe wipeout an alien archaeologist

came and they didn't understand you know there wasn't none of these electronic things were connected up or anything there must be so many phones yeah even now i think coffee cups as well when before they became biodegradable there's gonna be like a there's gonna be just like a little layer of those and we'll be the starbucks people yeah because you know those are the changes like if you think like in the last 10 20 years if you went back 15 years the bins wouldn't be full of coffee cups you know i mean when you walk around london it's all just coffee cups everywhere you mentioned bins is is archaeology rubbish i mean you know are we talking about stuff that's chucked away or is stonehenge very much a site where things are very lovingly, carefully buried and left?

A lot of archaeology is rubbish. It's what people leave behind. But at Stonehenge, it's really interesting because it actually seems to have been kept really clean. And when archaeologists dig in the middle of Stonehenge, they don't really find a huge amount. So that's why there tends to be all these kind of mysteries about what it's for. But nearby is a site called Durrington Walls. And that's where we think that the builders of Stonehenge were living. And that place is absolutely stocked full of rubbish

so there are huge pits with full of rubbish loads of middens which are big piles of animal bones and pottery so there they are definitely making

a big mess and leaving everything behind So that's sort of the work camp that's where people live and then they go out and do a day's labour on Stonehenge

Yeah that's what we think Is it a national monument where people are coming from miles and miles away to build is it sort of the Wembley Arena of the Neolithic or is it being built by locals? We think that it's probably being built by people from all over because there's been some recent research on the animal bones from this site at Durrington Walls and the animal bones have been shown to come from all over the British Isles. They're coming from places as far away as Northern Britain, maybe even Scotland.

There is certainly people travelling over long distances to either take part in building Stonehenge or potentially to go and take part in big feasts and celebrations and parties at the same time. Have you ever travelled, Richard, to go and build a henge? I wouldn't travel to do that, no. There's so many opportunities to do it locally. So your local field is as far as you'll go.

Yes, as far as... Once I've done that, I'll move on to the next field. But I don't approve of them bringing in stones from places that... The stones have to stay in the perimeter of the field. You can't bring them in... You can't glory hunt and bring in ones from Wales, which is... I understand where they came from. You're a stone purist.

Yeah. They've got to stay where they are, but just be rearranged to move them to the edge. They should just be around the edge and they shouldn't be in the head just local stones for local people exactly well it's interesting you mentioned that actually so we when we talk about stonehenge we're talking about very big stones yeah but there are two types of very big stones there's the sarsens yeah massive how much are they how much do they weigh roughly um the biggest one is about 36 tons bloody hell yeah

very big and the tallest one is about just tonnes. Bloody hell. Yeah, very big. And the tallest one is about just over seven metres tall. OK, so that's a massive, massive hunk of stone. But the smaller ones are called bluestones and they're not local. Yeah, we tend to call them the smaller ones, but actually if you stand next to one, they're taller than, you know, six, seven foot. So they're quite high. They're quite big themselves. So those are the ones from Wales.

And we think they were brought from the Preseli Hills. And we know the exact outcrops now that those blue stones were quarried from. And there's been some excavations there recently that have been finding the quarries. And they brought them somehow. We don't really know exactly which route and how they transported them, but they brought them all the way to Salisbury Plain and they put them up in amongst these larger stones. Richard, how would you transport stone from Wales? I mean, I know obviously it goes against your ethics. Yeah, well, if I had to, flying saucers, I'd get the aliens

to bring them in a flying saucer. That's the only real way to do it. I mean, I guess... I think that's probably how they did it, but if there were no aliens around, I don't know why the aliens had all the technology to build flying saucers and then thought, let's put some stones onto each other somewhere where they weren't originally.

But maybe they're just helping us learn. Were you meant to roll them along, aren't you, on logs? Or potentially boats. Potentially stick them on a raft or a boat. It's much easier than bringing it over land. Have there been any experiments where people have tried rolling a big old... Lots and lots of experiments. And actually the roller

hypothesis is a bit... has just been dismissed slightly. What? Yeah. Oh, my word. Because actually, the easiest way to do it is to build a kind of permanent trackway, a bit like a railway, out of wood, and then just slide the stone all the way along it. And if you've got to bring 50 stones, you're probably going to build a trackway of some kind to move them.

As long as it's downhill all the way. Yeah. But what if there's a hill in the way? Or a river? Yeah, you might have to plot your route carefully. But Wales is miles from Stonehenge. Yeah, 250 kilometres or so. And the Preselis are quite far into Wales, aren't they?

Yeah, they're right in Pembrokeshire on the west, south of the road. So you're not talking just down the road from, it's not Cardiff. We're big hilly Wales. Yeah. And they are moving 36 tonne stones. No, they're a bit smaller than that. Sorry, smaller ones. How much are the smaller ones?

About seven or eight tonnes. Oh, that's fine. That's no worry. It's easy. You can do that in an afternoon. You had a lot of people carrying them. There was a really funny project called the Millennium Project. And they tried to recreate bringing a blue stone from the Preselis.

But one of the major difficulties they had was getting enough volunteers together to actually pull the stone. So if you have enough people, moving a stone is actually pretty easy it's just getting the people together and motivating them to do it there was nothing else to do in those days yeah i mean how would you inspire a crowd richard i'd say look we're gonna do so we're gonna go out of the pit we live in in the caves we live in in the mud we live in and we're gonna go and get a big stone come on let's go we'll see some of the countryside we'll meet some welsh girls it's gonna be great come on let's go. That's what I'd do.

And there's a big party at the end. They get loads of beer and loads of food. And we're going to put these stones up on top of smaller stones and freak people out by making them wonder what the hell was going on in 2,000 years, 3,000 years' time. Is there a sense that Stonehenge is built and then they start to tinker with it? They're like, actually, those two stones, they need to swap over.

Do they feng shui it? Yeah, they do. Yeah, so the earthwork henge gets built 3000 BC, gets used for a few years as a burial monument. Then the stones get put up. But then a couple of hundred years later, the blue stones, they do move around and rearrange. And we don't really know why.

It's the time we're now sort of into the Bronze Age. So there's maybe slightly different people coming and putting their own stamp on it. But they've already got their joints there, have they? And so do they not fit? Will they fit on the next one along? Are they all the same size exactly? So the blue stones get rearranged into just a circle. But before that, they were their own little lintels.

They're a little trilithon, so two uprights and a horizontal. So if you look carefully at some of the blue stones that are on site, they've got holes in where they were originally jointed together. And was it originally just a real circle all the way around and then some of them have fallen down? Yes. Well, archaeologists are a bit... They argue about this.

Nothing else to do, is there? They've got nothing else on. They like to entertain themselves by suggesting that potentially it wasn't completed. There's kind of a really complete side, which is the kind of famous view that we think of when we think of Stonehenge. But the back, the stones are a lot more irregular,

and there's a lot of missing stones. I'm in the camp that says that it was completed and that we've just got a lot of loss of stone. So we don't have any records. Avebury, for example, has records from the medieval period saying that they were knocking the stones down and breaking them up. But at Stonehenge, we don't have any records like that. But we do know there's a lot of stone missing from the site.

So it probably got broken up to use as roadstone and that kind of thing. How many stones are in it now? And how many do you think might be missing? There's over 100 stones. OK. Of the outer circle, there were originally 30 uprights and 30 lintels. And we've probably got less than half of those remaining on site. All right. So there's a big loss there.

Yeah, a lot of them. Because they had like a thousand years to get this right. See, the idea of it not being finished seems very lazy. Yeah, I can't think that they did. I mean, the back side might not have been quite so nice as the front side. But yeah, I'm pretty sure they finished it. I'm pretty sure they finished it. So we're looking at the arse end of Stonehenge.

When we look at the famous Stonehenge photograph, it's Stonehenge's bum. No, no, that's the good bit. Oh, that's the good bit. When we look at the really nice completege photograph, it's Stonehenge's bum. No, no, that's the good bit. When we look at the really nice complete bits, that's the front. That's the kind of where people would have approached up the avenue. But the back side of it is a bit more dodgy. Well, that's not great, is it? Same for me.

Richard, the curious thing about Stonehenge is that in terms of global history, the United Kingdom, Britain, or whatever we want to call this landmass, is a bit behind the rest of the world because we get the Bronze Age really quite late. But while we're building Stonehenge here in Britain, which for us is very shiny and sophisticated, the Egyptians are building the Great Pyramid of Giza. 2.3 million stone blocks.

I mean, it's a huge number of bits of rock, beautifully hewn into mathematical perfection, and we've gone, some stones in the fields! Why are we so behind in Western Europe? So, Stonehenge is the same date as the Great Pyramid, but you're right in that the Bronze Age does come quite late to the British Isles, and there's

a period of time, so if you've heard of Oertze, who's the Iceman, he was found in the Alps. He's got a copper axe with him, but he dates from about a thousand years before copper arrives in the British Isles. It's embarrassing, isn't it? It's embarrassing for us. He's an early adopter. Old Ötzi, he was just a bloke walking around in the Alps. He's already got metal.

He got murdered as well, didn't he? He got shot in the back. Yeah, that's an idea that he was murdered. So people on the continent have got metal a long time before we did. And there's something, you know, the channel is only 30 miles across.

There's absolutely no reason why they couldn't have brought it across. They had boats, they were trans- They didn't want us to have it.

They didn't like us, they didn't want us to have it, it's clear. No, we haven't got any metal, no, still stones over here.

Yeah, just lumped together, no, we can't make them into any interesting shapes or anything, nothing. Meanwhile,

bronze. It's either that or we kind of go, no, it's okay, No, we can't make them into any interesting shapes or anything. Nothing. Meanwhile, bronze. It's either that or we kind of go, no, it's okay. Thanks. We're good for shiny, nice things. We're good with our stones. Look what we can do with our stones. We can build Stonehenge. It was a bit like that with mobile phones when they first came out.

Again, you might be too young to remember, but lots of people said, oh, no, we're not going to have those because it's only idiots will have mobile phones and pretentious people. And then by 95, everyone went, yeah, OK. But like for 90 to 95, you could have had a mobile phone. Everyone went, no, no, no, no. Really? So that's what we were like.

Yeah. So for about 500 years. And the Europeans were like the businessmen with a massive car phone going, yeah. Yeah. 500 years or so, we went, no, not having that new technology. It's not good. Can we sort of move on to the kind of legacy and the beginnings of trying to understand what the hell this thing is? Who do you think builds Stonehenge according to medieval historians uh oh that's a good

question they would have thought king arthur built oh hang on he's close yeah he's merlin merlin yeah do you want to tell us about the merlin story yeah so there's um the kind of legendary history of it is that um uther pendragon who's the king of Britain at the time, has a big battle on Salisbury Plain and decides to build a memorial to his fallen soldiers. And he sends Merlin to go and fetch a stone circle known as the Giant's Ring from Ireland and bring it to Salisbury Plain to put it up as a memorial.

And Merlin, I think the term is something like uses machines and contraptions to bring these stones from Ireland, aliens and put them up on Salisbury Plain and what's really interesting about it is that actually we then found out thousands of years later that they did actually bring stones from the west, okay not

Ireland but the west bit of Wales which you might think is kind of Ireland. Same thing isn't it? No offence to Irish and Welsh but it's basically the same. You can't say that. This is the BBC, Richard. So, yeah, so they bought stones from the West. We scroll forward a bit more into the sort of early reign of the Stuarts,

so King James, so the time of Shakespeare. The theory has changed. The most sort of notable early archaeologist there is a guy called Aubrey, John Aubrey. What's his theory? So John Aubrey comes and visits Stonehenge and he draws one of the first surveys, he draws a plan of it. And he thinks that it's a Druid monument. So he thinks that it is built pre the Romans.

So the Druids were judges and magicians and priests of the Iron Age tribes that lived here. And so he quite logically, in some ways, decided that it was the Druids that built it. Had there been anyone saying it was Romans who built it? Yes. Inigo Jones. Inigo Jones, that's a good name, isn't it? Inigo Jones, who was an architect. So he saw kind of columns and arches and he thought that that was a kind of early version of Roman architecture. If you looked at it, Richard, would you think, yeah, that's definitely Roman?

I would say not Roman, even with my limited knowledge of Roman architecture. If you looked at it Richard, would you think, yeah that's definitely Roman? I would say not Roman, even with my limited knowledge of Roman stuff. On the idea that some Romans might have come across 500 to 1,000, 2,000 years earlier and gone, let's have a go at making a forum. Oh, we don't know what we're doing. Really crap Romans.

Oh, damn. Yeah, I think that's a bit of a stretch to put the Romans on it. There was also a guy called Walter Charlton who thought it was built by the Danes, so by the Vikings. Oh, lovely. So that's quite a good theory. And then somebody pointed out that there were stone circles in parts of the British Isles

where the Vikings had never reached. So that was a bit quash. Did anyone think it just happened naturally by natural erosion? Oh. Yeah, they did. There was an early idea that they were just natural stones. Some think that glaciers brought the blue stones all the way to Salisbury Plain. However, most geologists don't think that the glaciers came this far south.

Cats could have brought them. Yes, cats. They could have all just carried them. OK, have you got enough cats? How many cats are we talking about? I mean, it would have to be, you're talking about 1,500 cats all working together. Cats don't work together. Maybe they did in those days.

They're famously selfish. They've evolved because they've been domesticated. But before they were domesticated, they were wild cats and they used to move big stones around. For what purpose, Richard? They were like big scratching posts, it could be. There's all sorts of things it could be. Do animals build hinges? Not as far as I'm aware.

Also, it's really difficult. Beavers do though, don't they? Beavers, so you laugh, but beavers move trees around. That's true. It's not that big a leap to say a cat could have done it. I hope at the end of this

someone's going to edit the Wikipedia article on Stonehenge and just say, one theory suggests that cats built it. So Inigo Jones says Romans, John Albury says Druids, then get william stukely yeah he's

quite the character he's very cool and he spends basically every summer visiting stonehenge and drawing it and discovering a huge number of monuments in the surrounding area so he finds the cursus which is this big early neolithic rectangular monument that no one had seen before the cursus i mean that sounds like circus yeah so he decides that it's a roman char racing course. Now we know that they are Neolithic monuments but he at the time thought it was Roman and thought that they'd used it for racing a racetrack. He also found the avenue which is the kind of approach to Stonehenge and he also was the first person to notice that it was aligned on the midsummer sunrise. So he was pretty ahead of his time in terms of being able to survey and notice and be a good archaeologist this is in the 1700s yeah 1723

ish so i mean he's pretty advanced and he is also an amateur druid he is yeah he um not that advanced he he follows john albury he also thinks that druids built stonehenge and he gets so into druidism that he pretends that he is one and he kind of has parties and dresses up as a druid and has etchings made of himself as a druid oh yeah we know what he's up to he's quite easy as a kind of primitive version of christianity so he does get quite into it so is he the guy who kind of sort of invents the idea of druidism as a religion yeah he does so he writes a big book which he uh puts all these ideas out and it becomes very very popular it's kind of the best-selling book on stonehenge for a couple of hundred years but actually he kind of nicked his ideas from john aubrey so he he he aubrey was the one that really came up with the idea but then stukeley was the one that made it

popular and basically until the beginning of the 20th century people and still now actually people still think that druids built stonehenge so he was responsible for that i still think it even after listening to all that i still think it was druids. Have you ever been tempted to join a druidic cult? Well, yes, it looks quite good, doesn't it? If you go up to... When they come up on the Midsummer Day, the druids all come, don't they? You let them in.

Yeah. Are they allowed to do whatever they want? Yeah, within reason. Well, I mean... Within reason, actually. I'm thinking beyond reason. Are they all going to get jiggy down there on the stones? No, not really.

There's two people. It's kind of a waste of time. It's fine, but you're all druids. Yeah. We're all druids here, mate. Come on. We do have some regulation. We're wearing those flowing dresses for a reason.

Easy access. What's fun about the druids is that the first time they went to Stonehenge was 1905. And they kind of dressed up as pretend druids for fun. Yeah. So they had cotton wool beards and they put the robes on and they had their ceremonies at stonehenge gradually over the 20th century that has developed into actual religious belief so there are people who would class themselves as neo-druids and pagans and all kinds of other things who who do come along to solstice and it's almost like religion is just a load of made-up rubbish it's almost like that

again richard the bbc it's almost like that clearly isn't that when do the alien conspiracies start i mean obviously aliens is a very 20th century idea but when do people start going maybe it was transformers or aliens or wizards say 1970s 1980s is when you get kind of yeah so you get a lot of ideas at that time about mysticism and aliens and spirits and energies and all of these things ley lines particularly quite a popular thing to to try and find and draw maps and look at them so yeah i'd say it was probably the 60s 70s um time when you know people were expanding their minds in various ways and coming up with new theories who protects stonehenge now then?

Is it your job essentially, isn't it? Yeah. When I first started working with Stonehenge a lot, I had a dream that someone was trying to knock down Stonehenge with a JCB and it was just me there trying to stop them. So yeah, basically kind of me. But no, English Heritage, who are the charity that I work for, have responsibility for looking after the stones.

And the land, basically all the land around it is owned by the National Trust. So together with the National Trust, we kind of manage the whole landscape. Richard, do you know the story of how it ended up in the nation's hands? It's always belonged to the nation. No. That is ours. Well, I mean, you can think that, but no. So in 1915, a man went to an auction with the intention of buying, apparently,

some dining chairs for his wife and ended up buying Stonehenge. That happens at auctions. He was scratching his nose, wasn't he? His name was Cecil Chubb, which is a great name. It's my wrestling name, Cecil Chubb. Yeah, apparently he went along and went, oh, I've accidentally bid on an ancient monument

and now I own it. And he gave it to his wife and she was like, thanks very much, but I prefer the dining chairs. So they ended up sort of giving it to the nation. That's right, yeah. How much did it cost? £6,600. Bargain.

Yeah, quite a lot of money in those days. It was. Yeah, but I mean, he was quite wealthy. How much do you take on the door every day at the visitor centre? I couldn't put... More than £6,000 per day. Could we club together and buy it back? That's the question.

In 1915, there was already a charge of a shilling a head. I'll give you £8,000 for that. You've made £1,400 profit straight away. What's the stop Elon Musk trying to buy it? It's in state guardianship. So it basically belongs to the government and the state and you'd have to argue with them about buying it. And the British

Army is nearby. So if anyone does try and steal it. The Salisbury Plain training area is just over the horizon. What if the aliens come back to take it away again? Yeah, I think we probably just let them. Okay. In Transformers 5, they get stopped by Anthony Hopkins.kins okay yeah well he will send him in actually no he dies no does he sorry spoilers well i mean you say spoilers but

the film itself is a spoiler it's it's a genuinely terrible film um can we talk a little bit about some of the theories as to why it was built because people have spent so much time trying to go what's it for and there's I mean, I've got a list here. Hang on a second. I'm going to go through the list of various theories. So as well as druids and Romans and Vikings and all that, there's also, it's a healing sanctuary. It's a giant vagina metaphor.

It's a cemetery. It's a celestial clock. Aliens, obviously. It's acoustically engineered. So it's like something with the sound is brilliant. And it's a national party place for weddings and gatherings. So, I mean,

I'm sure Richard's particularly enchanted by the giant vagina metaphor. Yeah, why make it a metaphor? Why have the metaphor on there? But can we just go through some of these theories? Obviously, you're an archaeologist. You're a woman of science. What's the evidence for a healing sanctuary, for example?

So the idea that it's a healing place is a professor called Tim Darville who came up with this idea. And he looked at the blue stones and he went to Wales where the blue stones are in the Preseli Hills. And there's a tradition there that the blue stones have healing qualities. And if you pour spring water over them and then drink that water or bathe in it, then you will be healed of various ailments. And if you pour spring water over them and then drink that water or bathe in it, then you will be healed of various ailments. So he suggested that Stonehenge was a bit like a prehistoric Lourdes, that you would bring these special stones all the way from Wales and set them up there and people could come and be healed. It's not a completely balmy idea, but it's just one theory that an archaeologist has come up with. OK, can we move on to the giant vagina metaphor idea? the giant vagina metaphor idea.

It's a kind of general idea that people at that time in prehistory kind of had a religious belief based on the idea of Mother Earth and Mother Goddess. And so what, it's in the shape of a vulva? What's the idea here? I've never seen one that shaped like that. I presume so. Not at all. I mean, they're complicated, but they're not that complicated. OK, so it's a sort of an idea of a female goddess. Yeah, presumably somebody has looked at it and thought it has a resemblance to each of their own. Cemetery feels a little bit more...

Yeah, that's good. Cemetery I would sign up to myself. So in the first sort of 500 years of the monument being in existence, about 150 people were buried there as cremations and quite a few of them have been excavated. So we know that people definitely were buried there, men, women and children. And so, yeah, it was one of the biggest cemeteries that we know of in that period at the time. That's pretty interesting. Solved. That's solved it. Sure, we've ruined the mystery of cemeteries.

So the idea, some people have said the stones are there in memory of the ancestors. So the people who have been buried there, it's their kind of marker or gravestone. That's interesting. So actually a lot like gravestones in our modern cemeteries exactly okay i i like that theory yeah that's it okay don't you hear any of the others richard do you like celestial clock as a theory well it's a if it's a clock you know it's a long way to go isn't it if you're you're in leicester go what's the time hold on i've just got to go down to salisbury and check the the henge. They might have a local henge that's based on the...

Well, the wooden ones, they're not going to be as good as the stone ones. I wouldn't know. The monument is aligned on the movements of the sun. So it's not really a clock, more of a calendar. So it lines up with midsummer solstice and it lines up with midwinter solstice. So the longest day and the shortest day. So the stones in particular, as I said before, there's hardly any finds from the site.

There's no kind of evidence of feasting or pottery or fires or anything going on. So we only have the stones to tell us really what the monument is about. And the fact that it lines up with the solstice suggests that people are gathering there at those particular times of year and that the sun was an important part of their religious beliefs. All right, well, that's perfectly logical. Aliens, I think we can probably

discredit. Acoustically engineered shrine. I mean, that sounds fun. What's going on here? Yeah, so some people have looked at the acoustic properties of the monument and found that particular resonances and particular rhythms of drumming in particular kind of give an echo and a resounding sound to it. So

that's an idea that if you are using it as kind of like a temple or a place for people to gather that the sounds would be quite spectacular and you would be able to amplify what somebody was saying or some music that was taking place inside makes sense no well it's just some stones it's not these are acoustically engineered stones richard all the way from wales and there's no roof on it so it it's... Would there be a roof on it? No, no roof. We don't think so, anyway. Is there a second story? No, but interestingly, on the

tallest stone, the lintel has got some little hollows on it, and some people have suggested there was maybe another story above, but I don't think most people have said that. There we go. I mean, National Party Place was a theory here, but people gathering, congregating for some religious ritual. Yeah. Sounds sensible. So, maybe it's all of those theories together.

It could be all of those and none of those. But not the aliens. Not the aliens. Okay. And at what point are we talking about Stonehenge becoming a kind of tourist site? I mean, when do people start going there and having picnics and buying key rings? People have always been visiting Stonehenge. So there were records back right to the medieval period of it being kind of a wonder of the world.

But it's really the invention of the motor car that kind of brings people en masse to Stonehenge. And so from that date onwards, really the numbers have gone up and up and up until the present day. What's the earliest tourist memento that you've discovered on site? In two places on the stones, Christopher Wren put his name.

Wow. So that's what, 1660s, 1760s 70s yeah he was born locally but he wasn't living there at the time but it was the time he was building st paul's so he comes and visits stonehenge and puts his name in and chisels his name into the stone maybe christopher ren built stonehenge i'm signed it i quite like to think that he was a bit inspired by it maybe the one person we haven't mentioned is a quite famous burial is the Amesbury Archer. Yeah, Amesbury Archer. So he was excavated in 2001. Just near

Stonehenge, there's a small town called Amesbury and they were building lots of new houses. So archaeology was taking place. And he's somebody that was buried in a grave with seven beaker pots, these new types of pots that come in just after Stonehenge is being built.

And with some of the earliest metal objects that we find in the British Isles. He's got gold earrings and he's got a copper axe and he's got various other metalworking tools with him. And he's also got a very damaged knee. So he was injured and would have had a limp. So there's an idea that he's probably one of the earliest tourists to Stonehenge. Maybe he comes across from the continent. We know from studies of his teeth that he was brought up in the Central Alps. So he comes from Central Europe somewhere. To Austria? Potentially. The oxygen isotopes that you use are not that specific.

Because Erzi's from Austria. Erzi sort of dies in Austria, Italy, doesn't he? Yeah, he's from the Italian Alps. Yeah, so in a very similar area. Amesbury Archer is travelling across. Could have been the bloke who shot Erzi with his arrow. He's doing a runner. It's a fugitive.

He's on the run. He's gone all the way to Britain and then he's become a cropper. Yeah, so he's one of the first beaker burials that we have. Is there a sense that he might have been quite important, quite powerful? It's a very, very rich grave in terms of number of objects and he's also a metal worker, which at that time was a new skill. People would never have seen metal before. People would have not known how metal was worked.

So basically it's magic. I mean, it's taking stone and making metal out of it. Yeah. To create bronze, you have to superheat copper, don't you? Copper and tin. Copper and tin. Yeah. So one idea is that he's coming looking for tin sources from southwest Britain.

Cornwall and that sort of area. So can we call him the King of Stonehenge? No, because Stonehenge was built before he got there. Ah, damn it. I could call him the first tourist, if you like. All right, fine. I like the fugitive. The fugitive of Stonehenge is much sexier.

That's a sort of true crime podcast. It could have been a prison. What if Stonehenge was a prison, a quite bad prison? Really bad. Lots of holes. There is another guy who gets buried in the ditch at Stonehenge. We call him the Stonehenge Archer,

confusingly. And he has got three flint arrowheads in his back. The nuance window! We've come to the point which is known as the nuance window, where we allow our expert to rant for three minutes, but not a proper rant, a nice rant.

And we're going to let you, Sue, tell us what your pet theory is, the thing that you want people to hear. So without much further ado, would you like to launch into the nuance window? OK, so I would like to argue that we shouldn't really be calling prehistory prehistory anymore. So we've been using a lot of terms, Neolithic and Bronze Age and Iron Age. And these are periods names that have been around for ages, but archaeologists find them really confusing and people do as well. And they basically refer to the tools that people are using at that time. And that doesn't really

tell you much about what's actually going on at the time. And the term prehistory is obviously before written record. We tend to really use that as a time for describing all of the human past before we start to write things down. But actually, it's not that useful a term because prehistory just becomes this massive and more massive thousands of years. But in archaeology now, we've had radiocarbon dating for about 50 years. And radiocarbon dating allows us to date objects like antler and bone and charcoal, anything that was living, and allows us to date that quite accurately. And in the last 10 years or so in archaeology, we've developed new techniques,

which means that we can combine radiocarbon dates with statistical methods, which basically means we can get down to about 20 to 25 years for when an event happened. So for Stonehenge, for example, we know exactly when the stones were put up. And we know that maybe it was the grandchildren or great grandchildren of those people who then moved the stones around. So we can talk about things in terms of generations, in terms of lifetimes, and we've got really precise dates. So we actually have more information about the Neolithic now than maybe some other bits of history, like maybe the early medieval period when we don't really know what's going on. So calling it prehistory, I'd like to call it history, because actually, we know events, we know that people were doing things at particular times,

and we can date those events. So for example, there's a long barrow near Avebury called West Kennet Long Barrow. And they've dated the human remains that were put into that it's a funerary monument. And people were only buried in it for about 50 years. So that's a really short window of time. And so now we know that that's a really specific amount of time. It shows that people were making specific decisions. People were having conflicts. People were sometimes at peace and sometimes at war.

There were times of boredom and sometimes times of chaos. But this kind of nuance and getting back to an idea of history in the deep past gets us much closer to what was actually going on in people's lives at that time. Thank you so much. Richard, have you got any follow-up on that interesting nuance window? What would you call the time before that bit that you do know now? Deep history. Okay, good rub we don't really know history we don't know what was going on history yeah but with um presumably with dna and stuff as well that

that gives us like a lot more information than we because it's sort of crazy the amount of i was listening to alice roberts uh audio book about um tamed it's called about uh domestication and like you're able to find a wheat just the dna of a wheat seed that didn't really even grow and that is disintegrated they're just in the subsoil there's just like enough stuff in there to be able to tell that was wheat you know however long ago that was so it's crazy how much we can find out science in archaeology is just getting a bit ridiculous to be honest we've got dna we've got isotopes we've got radiocarbon dating there's so many new techniques now that we just got so much information it's kind of if you if the time travel uh option comes available would you go back to stonehenge to see what it was like even if you

couldn't come back again if it's like going to mars i'd probably go anyway what would you would take your family with your husband your husband with you? No, I'd just go. I'm going to marry the Aeson 3 Archer. Actually, no, it would be really annoying not to come back because I reckon if we did go and set it for 2500 BC, we'd find out things that we just couldn't really comprehend and it would be so different from what we actually think. It would be nice to come back and

go to everyone. I'll tell you what you should do. Carve a little message on the bottom of a stone. You know the stonehenge is going to be there cover it in a bit of mud so i'm going to put it here and then when they go oh let's just check leave a message there it is that's a good idea what would your message be richard it will be what it is it is a celestial clock there are aliens here get out i'd write that you'd write so what do you know now I'd write that in the phone. You'd write, ah. So what do you know now? Okay, well, I think we've learned quite a lot about Stonehenge.

And in that case, it's time to quiz our comedy guest. Oh, no. Don't panic. I wasn't listening. You were listening. It's probably, well, I mean, if you weren't listening, it's going to show. But, you know, it's probably going to be fine. So this section is what's called the What Do You Know Now?

Because we've had this, so what do you know at the beginning? I'm going to give you a minute. All right, here we go. 60 seconds starting now. Which are bigger, the stones, the sarsen or the blue stones? The sarsen. Yes. Roughly how many years ago was Stonehenge first begun?

From this date, 5,000 years. Yep. Bang on. Roughly when did they stop building it? When it was nearly finished. That'll do. It's 3,500 years ago. In 1915, Cecil Chubb was meant to buy what? Some dining room chairs. He was.

The body found at Amesbury is known as the Amesbury Wat. Archer. Yes. What's the heaviest stone there, actually? Oh. Like, it was tonnes. It was tonnes. 21 tonnes.

Oh, no, I'm afraid it's 36 tonnes is the heaviest one. The average is 25. What ancient monument was built at the same time in... The pyramids. The Great Pyramid, that's it. Geoffrey of Monmouth said Merlin built Stonehenge for what reason? Yes, he was just dicking around with people to fight the giants of Ireland. No, it was a war memorial. The horizontal stone balanced on top of the two is known as what?

The lintel. Yes, very good. And what does the word henge mean in Old English? Hinge. Yes, or hanging. Yes, I mean, that's eight out of ten. Not bad. That's respectable.

Well done. Do you feel you've learned some stuff, Richard, or was this a waste of your time? No, no, I didn't really. I think the cemetery thing is very... Well, it's just obvious. If there's loads of bodies buried there and cremations buried there from the beginning of it,

that's obviously what it is. So we've solved... I've not only learned something, I didn't know about that. Me, I think, really, has, I didn't know about that, I've, we have, me, I think, really, has solved what Stonehenge is about.

By listening to all the various theories you crackpots have come up with. And we also solved an ancient crime as well, an ancient murder. Amesbury Archer, we know who that is now. Well, I mean, that's basically it,

I think, really. So join me next time for more cheery chats about some random historical thing with two other lovely humans that we've found. If you've enjoyed the show, please share it with your friends, leave a review online, make sure to subscribe. Thanks for watching. Your Dead to Me was a Muddy Knees media production for BBC Radio 4. The researcher was Emma Naguse and the producer was Dan Morrell.

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