The Heel Stone

This sarsen stone stands a few hundred feet from the stone circle, outside the earthworks, on what would have been the avenue approaching the monument.

It's placed to align with the sunrise at the midsummer solstice, and the sunset at the winter solstice. You can get tickets to go inside the monument to watch the sunrise and sunset during the hours when the monument isn't open to the public, not just at the solstices.

More Stonehenge

The amazing lintels

If you zoom in on this picture, you can just see where the separate lintel stones are joined together.

Some useful models

These models in the Visitor Center are really useful for understanding what Stonehenge looked like in 2500 BC and what it looks like today. It consisted of trilithons—two standing stones topped with a lintel—in a rough horseshoe shape, surrounded by a ring of smaller bluestones. The sarsen stones (sarsen is a kind of sandstone common in southern England) in the outer circle are each about thirteen feet high and seven feet wide. Most incredibly, the lintels on top of those stones were connected with mortise and tenon joints. How did they do that?

In the model on the left you can really see the ditch and banks surrounding the site, which were built hundreds of years before the stones were put in place, and are quite impressive on their own—we climbed the bank to see the view on our way to the stones. The “henge” in Stonehenge probably originally meant to hang, but is now used by archaeologists to refer to any circular ditch and bank. We saw another one at Avebury later that day.

Salisbury Plain

It's a little over a mile from the visitor center to the stones. There's a shuttle bus, but I opted to walk across the fields with the archaeologist who was leading the group. The land is so flat the Dakotas would be envious, and we didn't pass that many people on the path—unlike at the monument, which was of course very crowded. Lots of sheep though.

It was fun to imagine how the people approaching Stonehenge thousands of years ago would have seen a landscape not that different from the one we were walking through, and how amazing that first glimpse of the stones in the distance must have seemed to them. I mean, I knew it was coming and it was still a thrill.

Approaching Stonehenge

I have wanted to visit Stonehenge ever since I took some astronomy classes in college. It may or may not have functioned as a prehistoric observatory, or as a religious site, or as a place of healing—or, all of the above—but it had such a fascination for me. For years, at every solstice, I'd think, “I wish I were at Stonehenge.”

And when I caught this first glimpse of the stones through the bus window, I couldn't breathe for a moment. There's such a thrill in seeing a place you've seen pictures of all your life: the pyramids, Mont St-Michel, Machu Picchu, even the White House. Oh my God, there it is! I'm really here!

Bonus bird blogging

There will be no problem identifying this bird: it is most definitely a magpie, looking forward to enjoying the delicious insect it just caught.

Taken by Christ Church Meadow earlier this week.

Sunday bird blogging

Those are starlings sitting on top of the stones, in case you can't tell from the picture, and you probably can't.

But I don't imagine I will ever get to post a picture of birds at Stonehenge again, so tiny starlings it is.

Oh, and I also went here today

 

The darker side of fame

One of the things I wondered about at Apsley House was how Wellington had coped with his fame, which was relatively sudden and must often have felt overwhelming. At least he didn't know that his false teeth would be displayed to the world after his death.

The original wellingtons

Yes, the boots were named after the duke.

I couldn't get a good picture of them, but I thought it was interesting so I'm including it anyway. The boots generally worn by cavalry were thigh-high and protected the legs during battles, but were difficult to walk in. And the boots worn by infantry were ankle-high, good for walking but not great for keeping the feet dry. So Wellington had waterproof knee-high boots made for himself and they became very popular. They've been made of rubber rather than leather since the mid-nineteenth century, but they're still called wellingtons.

Napoleon and Josephine

The art collection in the museum is really impressive—there are paintings by Velazquez, Titan, Goya, Rubens—and more interesting than all the gilt and mirrors and Adam ceilings in the house itself. But this also includes dozens of paintings and statues of Napoleon (including a colossal statue in the front entryway.) Apparently anyone who owned a painting of the former emperor foisted it off on the duke as a show of admiration.

I do really like these portraits of Napoleon and Josephine, though.