Murdoch Mysteries - Season 1 Episode 1
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00:00:00The greatest stone circle in the world, Stonehenge, challenges all who see it to solve its riddles.
00:00:11Over 5,000 years, it has been many things to many people.
00:00:19In the past few years, revolutionary new technologies have provided answers thought lost in the
00:00:25depths of prehistory.
00:00:27This is the best time to solve the mysteries of Stonehenge.
00:00:34From discoveries about the people who built it, and the monuments that inspired them.
00:00:39The really amazing thing is the kind of Steven Spielberg kind of moment.
00:00:46To what it was for.
00:00:48The fact that it so tightly captures the alignments makes Stonehenge the peak of prehistoric architecture.
00:00:56The motive behind its construction.
00:00:59I think that the society that built Stonehenge did it in reaction to an existential threat.
00:01:04And the latest extraordinary revelations about where its most sacred stone came from.
00:01:11The new discovery about the altar stone is truly thrilling.
00:01:17If it's correct, then that is just mind blowing.
00:01:20Today, we know more about Stonehenge than any time since it was built.
00:01:26But with every answer, another mystery lies waiting.
00:01:30You keep thinking that Stonehenge has been solved, and then you go and take some more
00:01:34data and bang.
00:01:46Stonehenge is one of the world's greatest prehistoric monuments.
00:01:51It stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England.
00:01:56Archaeologists believe it was constructed in several phases 5,000 years ago, from around
00:02:013,000 B.C. to 1,500 B.C.
00:02:05But so much of it remains a mystery.
00:02:09How was it created?
00:02:10Who built it?
00:02:12And what was it used for?
00:02:15I think it was aliens.
00:02:16Sorry, that's what I think.
00:02:17I do.
00:02:18I do.
00:02:19I do.
00:02:20That's what I think.
00:02:21Nobody knows, right?
00:02:22So, I mean, they know, but nobody really knows.
00:02:25What freaks me out is the slaughter stones, because you sort of can imagine the horrific
00:02:31things that took place there, whether it was, you know, sacrifice of a virgin or not.
00:02:37My feeling is a feeling of awe in how significant something like that was, and the size, and
00:02:43also what they used it for.
00:02:46Today, the Stonehenge Monument is managed by English Heritage, who try to help visitors
00:02:52make sense of the puzzling array of stones.
00:02:56And the first lesson is that it's not just stones.
00:03:05So Stonehenge was built in stages, and, you know, Stonehenge, the stone component, is
00:03:12actually just one part of it, because it starts with an earthwork feature.
00:03:18Constructed around 3000 BC, the circular earthwork that surrounds the site is referred to as
00:03:25a hinge.
00:03:27And that would have been gleaming white on the landscape, almost monumental in its own
00:03:32right, because they're digging into chalk.
00:03:36Surrounding the monument's outer circle are the iconic sarsen stones.
00:03:42The tallest one is about seven metres above the ground.
00:03:46We think there's about a third under the ground.
00:03:48You know, they really are very tall and heavy, but it really is an amazing feat of engineering.
00:03:54Made of sandstone, sarsens are found all over this part of England.
00:04:00But how did they get some of them seven metres into the air?
00:04:05As well as the huge uprights, the lintels, in a way, is one of the great mysteries, how
00:04:10they actually got the lintels on the top.
00:04:12It is one of the things I get asked most by visitors, how did they get the lintels up
00:04:18there?
00:04:20Inside the circle, there are 43 smaller bluestones, thought to have been transported an incredible
00:04:28300 kilometres to the site.
00:04:32They surround the most distinctive stone structures of all, the trilithons.
00:04:37Trilithon literally just means three stones in Greek, and it's the two uprights with one
00:04:43lintel on the top, and that's the classic symbol of Stonehenge, if you like, the trilithon,
00:04:50and it's sort of iconic all around the world.
00:04:53And we have five of those trilithons, and they make a horseshoe shape, facing down behind
00:05:01me, which in fact is the alignment of the rising of the midsummer sun.
00:05:12Yet, one mystery that no one can answer for certain, is why choose this site in the first
00:05:18place?
00:05:21The answer is thought to be found almost 10,000 years ago, to a time when hunter-gatherers
00:05:27had come to Britain after the end of the Ice Age.
00:05:39With trees blanketing most of the country, Salisbury Plain was a rare open space, grazed
00:05:45by large animals.
00:05:48Ideal for hunting, it also had a surprising advantage, the wide open night sky.
00:05:56The bright moon, we still have the expression now, hunter's moon.
00:06:00The moon would have aided the hunt, and so I think what we have to imagine is 8,000 years
00:06:06ago, people are out here laying in wait for big animals who may be slightly off guard
00:06:11because of it being night time, and people would have been very, very observant of the
00:06:17moon, the passage of the moon, and working out what advantages it would have given them.
00:06:24By around 8,000 BC, over 5,000 years before Stonehenge began, these bands of migrating
00:06:32hunter-gatherers made camp at a local spring.
00:06:37Today, it's called Blick Mead.
00:06:40It's a place of buried treasure and ancient secrets.
00:06:45In some ways, this place is the genesis to the whole of the Stonehenge landscape happening
00:06:52in the future.
00:06:53It starts with really practical things.
00:06:56Here you have accessible water all year long, right from the beginning.
00:07:01That drew in animals.
00:07:03People followed the animals.
00:07:06Little bit by little bit, stories and myths and histories become attached to this place,
00:07:12so what we're seeing here is potentially a cradle for where all of that later comes from.
00:07:22First excavated only in 2005, archaeological work at Blick Mead has yielded some astonishing
00:07:30finds.
00:07:32Beautiful flint tools, up to 8,000 years old, and the remains of exotic foodstuffs we certainly
00:07:39don't eat today.
00:07:41We found some beaver teeth.
00:07:44Beavers are great for people who need fat.
00:07:48A beaver tail alone is 70% fat.
00:07:51That would have been a massive protein source for people.
00:07:55The site also contained bones that were on a whole different scale.
00:08:00The remains of a giant prehistoric monster called an aurochs.
00:08:05I've got two pieces of aurochs here.
00:08:09First one is a tooth.
00:08:11There are a lot of teeth in the platform.
00:08:14This one would have been part of a ferocious animal.
00:08:17It's actually only part of its tooth as well.
00:08:20This is also from an aurochs, and it's from a piece of vertebrae right at the top of the
00:08:26neck.
00:08:27So if you can imagine, touch the base of your neck at home and feel how small that vertebrae
00:08:34piece is.
00:08:35This is a piece of whopper, and it's from a very large animal, probably from a bull.
00:08:44Hunting by the light of a full moon, gangs of hunters would have needed all their wits
00:08:51to bring an aurochs down.
00:08:54Racing at speeds of over 50 kilometers an hour and weighing over a ton, a full-grown
00:09:00bull was a formidable and lethal beast.
00:09:04But the risks were worth it.
00:09:09There would have been food for about 300 people as well.
00:09:12So this is something that's a major resource.
00:09:19It was these hunters that almost certainly created the first monument on the site of
00:09:24Stonehenge.
00:09:26Almost lost to time, the discovery was made in the aftermath of a major restoration project.
00:09:35So the last major excavations that were done were in the 60s, and at that time then they
00:09:42decided to build a car park because more people were coming to visit Stonehenge.
00:09:47And interestingly, they discovered a series of pits which were from the Mesolithic, and
00:09:54some of these pits contained pine wood, and they date back to about 7,500 years BC, so
00:10:01over 9,000 years ago.
00:10:05These pits housed the bases of large poles.
00:10:10We know that they're probably something like the height of a telegraph pole.
00:10:14They could have had art on them.
00:10:16I think that's probably very likely, so they could have been like totem poles.
00:10:21What purpose did these poles serve?
00:10:24One answer is hunting.
00:10:27The area around the Stonehenge Knoll, in effect, at the beginning, we think, was a kill zone.
00:10:33If you were standing where I am now, in the hunter-gatherer period, you would have seen
00:10:38those animals like dots moving across, and you would have seen those posts.
00:10:42So those are important time markers there for hunters to anticipate the right time to
00:10:48move in for the kill.
00:10:50It's not the only possibility.
00:10:53These poles might have served a different function.
00:10:57In the late 1960s, the suggestion was also made that these Mesolithic posts might have
00:11:02had an astronomical function, because from the perspective of Stonehenge and certain
00:11:07spots around Stonehenge, looking in the direction of those posts, they might mark significant
00:11:13sunsets or moonsets.
00:11:18It was more than 5,000 years after the first timber posts were put up on the site of Stonehenge
00:11:25that the Great Stone Circle was built.
00:11:29One question has mystified people for centuries.
00:11:33Who built Stonehenge?
00:11:36Stonehenge was built by people who were early farmers, and it's 1,000 years after the
00:11:42arrival of farming in Britain.
00:11:44So that's the period that we call the Neolithic, the New Stone Age.
00:11:48Before that, Britain was inhabited by hunter-gatherers, and they we call the Mesolithic or the Middle
00:11:57Stone Age.
00:11:59Around three kilometres away from Stonehenge is an ancient site called Durrington Walls.
00:12:06It's named after a large circular earthwork half a kilometre wide, and it's here that
00:12:13archaeologists made one of the greatest Neolithic finds of the 21st century.
00:12:20Underneath the grass that I'm standing on was the biggest discovery that we were to
00:12:27make at Durrington Walls.
00:12:29The remains of probably hundreds of houses and the rubbish heaps that they'd accumulated
00:12:35while they were living here.
00:12:38Home to 4,000 people, it would have been the biggest Neolithic settlement in the UK,
00:12:45a prehistoric metropolis.
00:12:48What was really exciting for the Stonehenge story was this was about the people themselves.
00:12:54This is where they lived, no doubt while they were building Stonehenge, just a couple of
00:13:00miles away.
00:13:02So they were gathering from all over Britain, many different parts, and they brought their
00:13:08animals with them, they brought all their supplies.
00:13:11They came here maybe for a decade to build Stonehenge, and then they left.
00:13:20How they did it remains a matter of debate.
00:13:23Over the ages, there have been innumerable theories, some more magical than methodical.
00:13:30And in the Middle Ages, people believed none other than Merlin was involved.
00:13:36Our first written work around it is Geoffrey de Monmouth, and he wrote a mythical history
00:13:41of Britain, and that was the early 12th century.
00:13:45And he connected it to Merlin, so the myth of King Arthur and this magician.
00:13:51And he said that originally the monument was built in Africa.
00:13:57Carried to Ireland by a race of African giants, the stones are hauled to the top of the mythical
00:14:04Mount Kiliris, where they are set down and named the Giants' Dance.
00:14:11In Arthurian legend, there's a story about this place called Mount Kiliris in Ireland,
00:14:16where there was this amazing henge that was full of these very sacred stones that were
00:14:21full of healing properties, very magical stones.
00:14:25Meanwhile, in England, a great battle had been raging between the Britons
00:14:30and the treacherous Saxon invaders.
00:14:33But eventually, the Britons win out, and Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur,
00:14:39seeks to commemorate their hard-won victory.
00:14:44As a result, there was a desire to create a monument to those fallen,
00:14:50and people cast around for ideas, and eventually...
00:14:54Stories vary, but Uther Pendragon is told,
00:14:58well, if you want something, you should go and seek out Merlin, and he'll tell you.
00:15:04Merlin is approached, and Merlin says, go to Ireland and fetch the Giants' Dance
00:15:10and bring it up and set it up as the monument to this battle, to the fallen.
00:15:17It's a fitting memorial.
00:15:20So 15,000 men went across the water, and they actually had a big fight
00:15:25with the Irish king over there, a big battle, and they won,
00:15:29and they actually took the stones and brought them over the water,
00:15:33over the land, and built Stonehenge.
00:15:38And that's one of the Arthurian stories that include Merlin as part of the
00:15:43pioneering force of this group that actually created this ancient monument
00:15:48that we have in England right now.
00:15:52Because Stonehenge is, on the face of it, inexplicable,
00:15:57people attribute otherworldly means for its construction and use.
00:16:04So they start being giants, then it's magicians, then it's Romans,
00:16:08because they're sophisticated, and Greeks,
00:16:10and each society starts inventing a new myth.
00:16:14So by the 1960s, we get it's a computer,
00:16:18and then by the 1970s, we get it's built by aliens.
00:16:22Modern archaeologists think building Stonehenge was a question of manpower
00:16:27and ingenuity, rather than magic or alien technology.
00:16:31But the enduring mysteries around this extraordinary place
00:16:35attract over a million visitors every year.
00:16:39For some, it's a place of sacred pilgrimage.
00:16:48It's just before 5.30am on March 20th,
00:16:52and the last revelers of the night
00:16:54and the morning's first early risers are getting ready.
00:16:58Hail and welcome!
00:17:00Hail and welcome!
00:17:02Every year at the same time, several hundred people gather here
00:17:06from all walks of life.
00:17:08May there be peace throughout the whole world.
00:17:11Druids, pagans and free spirits.
00:17:15They're here to take part in a sacred ritual.
00:17:21We invoke our light of light.
00:17:24Be thou a bright flame before us.
00:17:28Today is the spring equinox,
00:17:31a sacred time of the year in the pagan calendar.
00:17:34When day and night are equal and life is in balance.
00:17:45The atmosphere is warm and friendly.
00:17:48Everyone has their own special reasons for being here.
00:17:52And I am the crow queen, yeah?
00:17:55I've gone for the, like, morrigan vibe, the goddess of crows.
00:18:02I rescue crows.
00:18:05Coming here today, I just wanted to immerse myself in that spirit
00:18:09and that unity and that dancing and that vibe and the drum
00:18:13where the heart connects to the earth
00:18:15and to see the people with barefoot and get involved in that.
00:18:21Stonehenge, to me, is an ancient place where there's healing.
00:18:25You can come here and you can just feel the energy.
00:18:30And the energy goes out north, south, east and west.
00:18:34And there is something about coming together and being a unity as one.
00:18:40I feel connected to every being around, not just human beings.
00:18:46I am connected to the soil and the earth and the mycelium
00:18:50and the fungus and all the lichens that are on the rocks
00:18:53and all the fungus that interconnect all of us.
00:18:58Some of the first historical references to the Druids
00:19:02were made by Roman invader Julius Caesar
00:19:06several thousands of years after Stonehenge's creation.
00:19:13Writing in the 1st century AD,
00:19:15Caesar describes the Druids as a secretive elite
00:19:19who shun the written word and indulge in human suffering.
00:19:24But there is no historical evidence
00:19:26that Druids existed at the time Stonehenge was built.
00:19:33Even if they weren't responsible for its creation,
00:19:36Druids still believe Stonehenge's purpose is as a place of worship.
00:19:42Druidic celebrations have continued here
00:19:45since the turn of the 20th century.
00:19:48Now, of course, there have been times
00:19:50when, unfortunately, Druidry was prescribed
00:19:53and it is not wise to call yourself that, nor is it,
00:19:57but then every so often it comes alive again.
00:20:00And I think it's definitely a continuation of that lineage
00:20:05in respect that people come here and, you know,
00:20:08they're taking part in a process
00:20:10that people have been doing for thousands and thousands of years.
00:20:13And this seems to be a particularly good period
00:20:16for rekindling of that primal essence, if you like.
00:20:30When Stonehenge was constructed in 2,500 BC,
00:20:34it was more than 5,000 years after the creation of the Druids.
00:20:40It was more than 5,000 years after the hunter-gatherers of Blickmead
00:20:46who first left their mark here.
00:20:49But the farmers who added the great stone circle
00:20:53retained a fascination for the skies above, particularly the sun.
00:21:02There's lots of things about Stonehenge that we don't know.
00:21:05Some of the things that we do know are about the sun
00:21:09and, of course, these things are facts,
00:21:12that the stones are aligned with the midsummer sunrise,
00:21:17the midwinter sunset,
00:21:19and those two key points of the year
00:21:23are ones that we know were important to them.
00:21:27Today, the summer solstice regularly attracts 10,000 or more people
00:21:32to witness the sunrise on the longest day of the year.
00:21:36I regard it as almost a life's mission to get there to see this.
00:21:41Some people like me go there for research purposes
00:21:43or just to look at it because it's a magnificent achievement.
00:21:46Other people go there for ritual purposes.
00:21:49Some people go there because it's a big old party at the solstice,
00:21:52which is great.
00:21:53It's almost like a circle of life.
00:21:55It has this connection with our relationship with the sun,
00:21:59our relationship with the passing of time,
00:22:02and Stonehenge is reflecting that relationship
00:22:04between the sun, the years that pass,
00:22:07and ultimately, building out a stone,
00:22:09it lasts pretty much forever, unlike us.
00:22:14Archaeologists have sometimes wrongly said,
00:22:16oh, well, the solstice is, it's all about the agricultural year.
00:22:20No, it's not.
00:22:21You don't plant and harvest
00:22:24at those particular times of midwinter and midsummer.
00:22:28What is important is, of course,
00:22:31the times of greatest and least light from the sun.
00:22:40What actually happens on the summer solstice?
00:22:44How does the sun interact with the monument?
00:22:48The first of the stones to be touched by the rays of the midsummer sun
00:22:52stands more than 75 metres from the centre of the circle
00:22:56and seems to act like an entrance marker to the site.
00:23:02And behind me is a single stone known as the heel stone,
00:23:06which marks the rising of the midsummer sun.
00:23:11So the sun comes up the side of the heel stone
00:23:14and shines right through into the centre of the stone circle.
00:23:19The path of the rising sun next strikes the slaughter stone,
00:23:24so named by over-imaginative early archaeologists.
00:23:29Some of them thought it might have been a druid's altar for sacrifices,
00:23:33but it wasn't.
00:23:35We're pretty sure it stood upright and it had a partner stone here,
00:23:39but it's called the slaughter stone
00:23:41because the iron pan and the rock makes the puddles look red.
00:23:47Passing into the entranceway,
00:23:49the sun's rays then enter the central horseshoe
00:23:52where the remains of the famous trilithon stand.
00:23:59It's an epic sight.
00:24:03Although most people don't notice,
00:24:05subtle movements of the earth over time
00:24:08mean the rising sun and the stones don't quite align any more.
00:24:15Fabio Silva is what's called a skyscape archaeologist.
00:24:19He combines astronomy with archaeology
00:24:23to try and peer back through time.
00:24:26The importance of the sky for the prehistoric people who built Stonehenge
00:24:31is hugely underappreciated right now,
00:24:34in huge part because people are disconnected from the sky,
00:24:38and we need to realise that in the past things were very different.
00:24:42People in prehistory wouldn't have needed mathematics to do these things.
00:24:46They just needed to live and look up at the sky
00:24:49and use very simple technology
00:24:51to achieve the wonderful feats of engineering
00:24:54that they've clearly achieved.
00:24:56So what did the Stonehenge summer solstice look like
00:25:004,500 years ago?
00:25:03Thanks to 21st-century digital techniques,
00:25:06it's possible to witness it once more.
00:25:09What we're doing now is the sort of thing that we do in skyscape archaeology.
00:25:13We've been to Stonehenge, we took panoramic photographs,
00:25:17and then, with the benefit of astronomical software,
00:25:21we can reconstruct the skies in the past.
00:25:24So what we're doing is we're going back in time.
00:25:27So now we are in the centre of Stonehenge,
00:25:30looking out towards the hillstone
00:25:33on Midsummer's Day around 2,500 BC
00:25:36in order to experience the Midsummer sunrise,
00:25:39which is going to appear and be framed by this window.
00:25:45It's going to appear on the left and climb across the sky,
00:25:50being perfectly framed by the whole window
00:25:54and continuing on its journey.
00:25:59Stonehenge's accuracy in capturing the alignments of the sun
00:26:03is an incredible feat of engineering.
00:26:08But where did the idea of building stone circles
00:26:11to connect with the skies and the ancestors begin?
00:26:20MUSIC PLAYS
00:26:27Using stone to mark special places and burials
00:26:31goes back over 1,000 years before Stonehenge was built.
00:26:38But the first direct connection to a monument
00:26:41that may have inspired Stonehenge
00:26:44can be found over 400 kilometres away
00:26:47in the Boyne Valley of Ireland.
00:26:52Here lies the spectacular tomb of Newgrange.
00:26:57Newgrange is a mega monument.
00:27:00It's a gigantic passage tomb
00:27:03with a huge cairn that is 80 metres across.
00:27:08That's 279 feet across.
00:27:11It will have involved thousands of people
00:27:15bringing tonnes and tonnes of material to it.
00:27:19They were importing heavy stones from far and wide
00:27:24to make the most magnificent monument to honour their dead.
00:27:31Constructed six centuries before Stonehenge,
00:27:34the tomb is spectacular.
00:27:37Beautifully decorated with meticulously crafted stonework
00:27:40and distinct spiral carvings.
00:27:44Every winter solstice, something incredible happens.
00:27:50The really amazing thing about Newgrange, for me,
00:27:54is that there's this unique structure,
00:27:57a light box or a roof box,
00:28:00which has its own separate passageway
00:28:03into the burial chamber at the centre of the mound
00:28:07in a kind of Steven Spielberg kind of moment.
00:28:11During the winter solstice period,
00:28:13for a relatively short few minutes,
00:28:17when the winter sun rises, it then shines through,
00:28:21it creates this huge, beautiful light
00:28:25and everything is illuminated in the centre.
00:28:28It's absolutely marvellous.
00:28:31It's thought the tomb was built for the local rulers,
00:28:36who claimed to be god kings.
00:28:39If you imagine them justifying their power,
00:28:42they could say, yes, we are the elite
00:28:45because we are able to control the movement of the sun.
00:28:49We can make the sun shine into our passage tomb
00:28:53and light up, reinvigorate the spirits of our ancestors.
00:28:58This perceived power over the sun
00:29:01would become a central feature of Stonehenge.
00:29:05Even though 600 years odd separate Newgrange
00:29:10and the midwinter solstice celebrations there
00:29:14from the midwinter solstice celebrations at Stonehenge
00:29:18when they built the Sarsen monument there,
00:29:21nevertheless, they're doing the same thing.
00:29:25They are marking the shortest day of the year
00:29:28in a very theatrical way.
00:29:30There's this really deep, redolent echo.
00:29:36The final part of the puzzle
00:29:38that explains the possible influences behind Stonehenge
00:29:42is to be found in the far north
00:29:45on a group of islands shrouded in myth and mystery.
00:29:49Orkney, off the northern coast of Scotland.
00:29:55Today, the Orkney Islands are often regarded as remote
00:30:00and its landscape inhospitable.
00:30:02But 700 years before Stonehenge,
00:30:05cattle herding had made the island
00:30:08a centre of culture and influence.
00:30:11By 3,200 BC, in Orkney, there certainly was an elite.
00:30:16Their way of life, their farming way of life
00:30:19gave them enough surplus to be able to
00:30:23get large numbers of people to build monuments.
00:30:27Around that time, they built what's now
00:30:30the best-preserved stone settlement in Europe,
00:30:33Skara Brae.
00:30:35First uncovered by a storm in 1850,
00:30:39archaeologists were amazed that everything from the walls to beds
00:30:44and what seemed to be dresses were made of stone.
00:30:48But there was a good reason for that.
00:30:51Why they started building in stone was probably
00:30:54because there were so few trees on Orkney.
00:30:57Wood was a precious resource
00:31:00and much of it was reserved for making boats.
00:31:04Simple timber boats that enabled the elite to travel.
00:31:09Some ambitious members of the...
00:31:13These kind of prosperous cowboys, I like to call them,
00:31:16were able to find out that something very special
00:31:19was happening in Ireland.
00:31:23Undertaking the perilous voyage to Newgrange
00:31:26in a small boat without a sail was no small feat.
00:31:31But for the prestige-hungry rulers of Orkney,
00:31:34the rewards were great.
00:31:37The Boyne Valley was a centre for pilgrimage.
00:31:40People came from far and wide to witness
00:31:43the midwinter solstice celebrations that happened there.
00:31:47And so these ambitious guys from Orkney,
00:31:50they wanted a little bit of that action as well,
00:31:53so they decided to recreate Newgrange
00:31:56by building a passage tomb at Maze Howe.
00:31:59And in particular, what they brought back
00:32:02was the idea of building a passage tomb
00:32:05that would be orientated on the midwinter solstice.
00:32:08Maze Howe in Orkney was finished around 3000 BC
00:32:13but it's what these prosperous cowboys also built about this time
00:32:18that would change the megalithic landscape.
00:32:22The Stones of Stenness.
00:32:25Only a few ancient blocks now remain,
00:32:28but this circle and the surrounding henge
00:32:31were built 400 years before Stonehenge.
00:32:35And crucially, like the tombs at Newgrange and Maze Howe,
00:32:40the Stones of Stenness appear to be aligned with the solstices.
00:32:44There has been a lot of debate
00:32:46about where stone circles originated in Britain,
00:32:49and indeed Ireland as well,
00:32:51and it can be quite a heated debate at some times.
00:32:55But certainly as far as the north of Britain was concerned,
00:32:59the Stones of Stenness were the inspiration
00:33:02for stone circles elsewhere.
00:33:05Over the next few centuries,
00:33:07over the next few centuries,
00:33:09hundreds more stone circles and henges would spread out from Orkney.
00:33:15There are lots and lots of stone circles around Britain,
00:33:18there's more than 1,000 of them,
00:33:20and Stonehenge is almost the very last one that's ever made.
00:33:28This circle was undoubtedly the greatest.
00:33:32Stonehenge stands over 700km from Orkney
00:33:36and over 400 from Newgrange,
00:33:38but archaeologists have found plenty of evidence of their influence here.
00:33:44The similarity in the pottery styles,
00:33:47the similarity in the house constructions,
00:33:52the fact that probably the earliest of the classic henges
00:33:57seems to have started in Orkney first.
00:34:02Replicas of some of the finds
00:34:04are on display in the reconstructed houses
00:34:07at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre.
00:34:09So we've recreated a lot of that material here in this space
00:34:13to show kind of day-to-day how people would have gone about living.
00:34:16And you can see here some of the beautiful pots
00:34:19that have these lovely geometric designs
00:34:21that, you know, there's an artistic language
00:34:23that starts in places like Newgrange and Orkney
00:34:26and goes all the way to Stonehenge.
00:34:28They're really kind of stylish, you could say.
00:34:30You'd happily have a pot like this, right?
00:34:40At the archaeological site of Darrington Walls,
00:34:43where the people who built Stonehenge lived,
00:34:46there are further clues to the ancient celebrations
00:34:49that were taking place at the solstices.
00:34:53Clues that involved mass slaughter.
00:34:57I think we can say from the age patterns of the teeth of the animals
00:35:03that actually the vast majority of them
00:35:06were being killed in the autumn and winter months.
00:35:11So either side, really, of the midwinter solstice.
00:35:17Excavations suggest as many as 1,000 animals,
00:35:21especially pigs, were slaughtered for annual midwinter feasting.
00:35:26And many of them were delicacies.
00:35:29The wonderful work that's been done
00:35:31have shown that the pigs were given special diets,
00:35:34so maybe they gave them plenty of apples,
00:35:36so they actually had dental decay because their diet was so sweet.
00:35:41They were making their pigs even more delicious
00:35:44when they then ate them at their feasts.
00:35:49The feasts at Darrington Walls were attended by thousands of people
00:35:53from hundreds of kilometres in every direction,
00:35:56maybe even as far as Orkney.
00:35:59We can work out from the strontium isotopes
00:36:02of the animals they were eating, the pigs and the cattle,
00:36:06that these were being brought great distances
00:36:09from many different parts of Britain.
00:36:11This is something that we can see again and again,
00:36:14and it's a motif, if you like, that links these communities
00:36:18over many, many generations and over hundreds of kilometres.
00:36:22It's a kind of uniting thing in our big, big narrative, in our story.
00:36:27Unlike today, when Stonehenge is renowned
00:36:30for its celebrations of the summer solstice,
00:36:33in 2500 BC, people visited the circle around the winter solstice,
00:36:39often before or after huge feasts held at nearby Darrington Walls.
00:36:46Now, what happens at winter in the sky?
00:36:50The sun is dying.
00:36:53The sun is at its lowest.
00:36:56The days are shortest.
00:36:58The temperatures are very low, and it's pretty miserable.
00:37:01But what happens after midwinter?
00:37:03The sun comes back to life.
00:37:05The days start to get longer.
00:37:07Eventually it gets warmer.
00:37:09Nature springs back to life.
00:37:11So what we have is the notion of death and afterlife.
00:37:15Now, like the dying sun comes back to life,
00:37:18maybe the dead were also seen as, or meant to,
00:37:22come back to life in some form of afterlife.
00:37:25Whatever rituals occurred during these festivals
00:37:29will never truly be known.
00:37:31But thanks to painstaking archaeology,
00:37:34we can solve some of the mysteries of how this monument was built.
00:37:42At the Stonehenge Visitor Centre,
00:37:45a scale model helps reveal these secrets.
00:37:48What's really interesting is there's layers of history in this landscape,
00:37:52and it's a place that people are coming back to for actually thousands of years.
00:37:56And the earliest version actually goes back about 5,000 years ago,
00:38:00and you can see we get the outer bank and ditch,
00:38:03which still exists on site today,
00:38:05but you can see here there's no big stones in the middle.
00:38:08We just have these 56 holes that were used for cremation burials.
00:38:12So when we talk about Stonehenge, what was it for?
00:38:15What is Stonehenge for?
00:38:17We know that actually it was a cemetery.
00:38:22About 500 years after the original sort of earthwork
00:38:26or ditch and bank was built,
00:38:29we get the big stones coming to site.
00:38:31So finally we get Stonehenge kind of as we know it today.
00:38:34You get the massive Saracen stones.
00:38:37Now these stones come from the Westwoods, which is about 20 miles away.
00:38:42It's a type of hard sandstone,
00:38:45and they're creating this engineered monument
00:38:47at the centre of this pre-existing ring and ditch.
00:38:50So it's kind of like they're coming back,
00:38:52they know that this is a place that was really important to their ancestors,
00:38:56a place where they had cremation burials, it was a cemetery,
00:38:59and they're almost like picking it up, you know?
00:39:01They're really going for it.
00:39:03The question is continually asked.
00:39:06Who brought these stones to Salisbury Plains?
00:39:09How did they get here?
00:39:11Archaeologists think constructing the site
00:39:13was achieved by incredible human effort.
00:39:17What Darrington Walls' settlement has given us
00:39:20is an idea about the organisational practices,
00:39:25how you get 4,000 people mobilised
00:39:29to put up that extraordinary monument at Stonehenge.
00:39:33One of my researchers has sat down and worked out
00:39:36the kinds of effort involved,
00:39:38and his conclusion is that we're looking at
00:39:42about 3.5 million person-hours.
00:39:46It's a huge amount of effort, enormous work,
00:39:50and one of the most important kind of building projects
00:39:54that we know of in the whole of the ancient world.
00:39:58The huge feat of moving even the smaller 2-to-5-tonne bluestones
00:40:02without modern technology seems impossible,
00:40:05but a new theory explains how this could have been done.
00:40:10From experiments that we've done,
00:40:12if the grass is dry and long in the summer,
00:40:16as soon as you've got it moving and that grass bends over,
00:40:20the sledge slips really easily along it.
00:40:24Once you've got it going, it's off.
00:40:26Walking pace, no problem.
00:40:30The other aspect is it doesn't just have to be people pulling the stones.
00:40:34We know that by this point in time,
00:40:37people in the Neolithic were using cattle for traction,
00:40:42so you could actually have teams of cattle pulling the stones
00:40:47when it all got a bit boring and was no longer quite as much fun
00:40:51as it was when they started.
00:40:54What is even more astounding
00:40:56is how people moved the larger sarsen stones from 25km away.
00:41:03It's thought as many as 200 were needed,
00:41:06but they may have had some help.
00:41:08The heaviest ones are over 20 tonnes.
00:41:10These people didn't have metal technology,
00:41:13but they would have had rope technology, they had timber,
00:41:16and it was always thought that they might have been using
00:41:19And it was always thought that they might have been brought on rollers.
00:41:22But there have been many experiments done,
00:41:25experimental archaeology exercises,
00:41:27of trying to drag the stones along the grind,
00:41:30and we're wondering now whether they might have laid trackways.
00:41:34Stone Age farmers may have had innovative solutions,
00:41:37but there's no evidence they had cranes.
00:41:40How do they lift 20-tonne blocks seven metres into the air?
00:41:46We don't think they could have wedged them up.
00:41:48There are about 30 of them,
00:41:50and they weigh over 20 tonnes, 25 some of them.
00:41:54It's still a bit of a mystery, but from experimental archaeology,
00:41:58I think that we've decided that they probably built up ramps
00:42:02and then pushed the lintels into place.
00:42:06Another mystery that leaves many baffled
00:42:08is how all the stone blocks were then joined together.
00:42:12They didn't use mortar of any sort,
00:42:14so what we've got is on the top of the huge uprights,
00:42:17there are what we would call tenon joints in carpentry,
00:42:21but they're just sort of like knobs on the top,
00:42:24and then the lintels have got corresponding gaps or holes,
00:42:29so the lintels are fixed on to the huge uprights,
00:42:33and then the amazing thing is that the lintels
00:42:36are all sort of toggled together as well,
00:42:39like early Lego or something, but it all fits together.
00:42:42Almost every stone was meticulously worked
00:42:45to create a truly breathtaking monument.
00:42:48Right now, when you go to Stonehenge, everything looks a bit grey,
00:42:52but the monument, when it was built,
00:42:54it would have been, like, pretty blingy, in your face, like, spectacular,
00:42:58because, first of all, this outer ditch,
00:43:01we have an underlying chalk geology,
00:43:03so it would have been white against the green of the landscape,
00:43:06but then also the sarsens, when you first cut them and work them,
00:43:10they're actually bright white and sparkly, and actually the front,
00:43:14the place where people would have been entering the monument,
00:43:17is the most finely worked, and then the bluestones,
00:43:20some of them have these crystal inclusions,
00:43:22so they also would have looked bright blue and sparkly,
00:43:25so it would have been an incredibly impressive monument.
00:43:28It would have been something that no-one would have seen at this time,
00:43:31so it would have blown people's minds.
00:43:35It took over 5,000 years for Stonehenge to evolve
00:43:39from a totem pole to a brilliant white circle of stone.
00:43:43That's more time than separates us from its Neolithic builders.
00:43:50Many more mysteries remain,
00:43:52but some questions are as timeless as the stones themselves.
00:43:57If I just had a time machine, if I could just go back,
00:44:00just find out why, who was making them do it in the first place.
00:44:04Was it devotion to some king?
00:44:07Was it just pure science?
00:44:09They just wanted to prove that they understood this.
00:44:12It is the perfect example of what can be achieved
00:44:16with a group of people with a common purpose,
00:44:19working together to make an indelible mark on the planet Earth,
00:44:24and that absolutely fascinates me.
00:44:26I think we're looking at joining and bringing together people,
00:44:31earth and landscape and rocks and heaven,
00:44:36all into a single, unified symbol.
00:44:41Stonehenge
00:44:58Over the many millennia of his existence,
00:45:01Stonehenge has been many things to many different people.
00:45:06Thousands of years ago,
00:45:08the mysterious plains saw hunting battles with giant beasts.
00:45:21And in the 20th century, the stones inspired equally dramatic events,
00:45:26particularly in the 1970s.
00:45:36So Stonehenge Free Festival is like no other festival you've been to before.
00:45:40The idea, the premise is that everything is free.
00:45:43So if I was to bring some beer,
00:45:45we'd hope someone else would bring some bread and then we would trade.
00:45:48It was effectively this idea of we all live together, we have a great time.
00:45:52It starts with this wonderful innocence and the music that surrounds it
00:45:56and the whole culture. It's fascinating.
00:45:59At the naive age of 19,
00:46:02I came out from London, where I was at university,
00:46:06to go to the Stonehenge Free Festival.
00:46:10I had no idea what to expect
00:46:12and what I experienced was a really peaceful, gentle atmosphere
00:46:19where people were just helping each other.
00:46:21And the motto, I think, of the festival was,
00:46:23bring what you expect to find.
00:46:26But as the number of festival-goers multiplied, so did the problems.
00:46:32It's said that in 1984, 100,000 people were camped in the fields
00:46:36surrounding Stonehenge for up to a month.
00:46:38Vast amounts of vehicles, big tops, pyramid stages.
00:46:42It becomes a behemoth. It's almost uncontrollable.
00:46:48What had started as a joyful and anarchic celebration
00:46:52was rapidly morphing into something altogether more dangerous.
00:46:56Things get really, really ugly at the Free Festival.
00:46:59It's very, very sad.
00:47:01There's drug dealers from different areas.
00:47:03There's people who die in tent fires.
00:47:05There's petrol bombs being thrown about.
00:47:07There's stabbings, there's muggings.
00:47:09There's all these awful things that are happening.
00:47:11And the darker side of this lawless event
00:47:14was really beginning to rear its head.
00:47:17As tension started to build,
00:47:19the stage was set for one of the largest peacetime confrontations
00:47:23in modern British history.
00:47:26The next year, a convoy labelled as New Age Travellers
00:47:30headed to Stonehenge, determined to set up the Free Festival.
00:47:37I was an accident ambulance man in London for six years
00:47:41and thought that with that training
00:47:43that I had something to offer this community.
00:47:47The Traveller's alternative lifestyle, a nomadic existence,
00:47:51was making them enemies,
00:47:53and a series of roadblocks stood in their way.
00:47:57Certain newspapers refer to us as New Age Travellers, hippies,
00:48:02and general wastes on the public purse.
00:48:0511km from the Stone Circle,
00:48:08the long convoy of vehicles drew to an abrupt halt.
00:48:12When I got out of the vehicle,
00:48:14suddenly I heard screams and gunshots.
00:48:18When I got out of the vehicle,
00:48:20suddenly I heard screams and glass breaking,
00:48:23and I looked up and see a squadron of policemen
00:48:27running down breaking windscreens with their truncheons.
00:48:34People behind me, myself and my family,
00:48:37decided to get in the vehicle
00:48:40and take a shot right into the field to try and escape this violence.
00:48:44The 600 Travellers had been intercepted by twice that number of police.
00:48:51What happened in the nearby bean field they broke into
00:48:54has become infamous.
00:48:57So this is the site of the Battle of the Bean Field,
00:49:02which took place on 1st June 1985.
00:49:06I was at home with my father.
00:49:09I was a schoolboy.
00:49:11I was in my first year studying A-levels,
00:49:14and the first we knew of this event was when a helicopter flew over.
00:49:20I'd explained of my ambulance work,
00:49:23and that was one of the first things that I was doing,
00:49:26first aid to very many people as a result of this first altercation.
00:49:31As vehicles parked up in the field,
00:49:34police gave the Travellers an ultimatum to leave.
00:49:37There's a massive stand-off, this quiet, this moment of nothing happening,
00:49:42and then it turns so nasty.
00:49:45It becomes quite literally one of the largest mass arrests in modern British history.
00:49:50There was much driving around in circles, zigzags, trying to avoid police.
00:49:55Some vehicles were set on fire,
00:49:57and they went from this lower field into the bean field
00:50:01because everybody had seen what was already occurring.
00:50:05It was a bit of a shock to us.
00:50:07Of course, there was a slight feeling amongst us,
00:50:10I don't want to take sides on this,
00:50:12that we're caught in the crossfire.
00:50:15I saw many people getting injured.
00:50:17There wasn't anybody that escaped the field.
00:50:20There were dozens of injuries across both sides.
00:50:23537 Travellers were arrested,
00:50:26though all charges were eventually dropped.
00:50:29These people were arrested and attacked to teach them a lesson,
00:50:33and if only people had personal experience of people,
00:50:37they would find them to be proper citizens
00:50:39and not the folk devils that they were described as in the British press.
00:50:43I think that both sides are partially to blame for what had happened.
00:50:50I think the police are always under a great deal of pressure,
00:50:55and they're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't.
00:50:58Some Travellers eventually won compensation for what happened that day.
00:51:03But the Stonehenge Free Festival had come to a chaotic and violent end.
00:51:08The Battle of Beanfield represents
00:51:10one of the darkest episodes in British history.
00:51:12It's an awful episode.
00:51:13It's a moment we should all really know about
00:51:15and perhaps be a bit ashamed.
00:51:17It's not a good story with a happy ending.
00:51:21After what happened at the Beanfield,
00:51:23Stonehenge was ruled off-limits to everybody on the solstice.
00:51:29I, like a number of bikers, were attracted to the Free Festival.
00:51:34We'd meet up at Stonehenge
00:51:36and we'd all bring our stories from around the country,
00:51:39much like the ancients would have done
00:51:43coming here to Stonehenge in Neolithic times.
00:51:49And it was great, and then all of a sudden
00:51:51they got it into their minds to stop it and outlaw it,
00:51:55and that's when I took up the challenge.
00:51:58In 1986, this spiritual call to arms
00:52:01would transform a former soldier turned biker
00:52:04into Britain's most famous mythical monarch, King Arthur.
00:52:11The legendary once and future king had returned.
00:52:16I changed my name to Arthur Luther Pendragon in 1986
00:52:22and it was the 11th of June, 1986.
00:52:26The 11th of June the following year was a full moon.
00:52:30I went to Glastonbury Tor, said a prayer to the goddess
00:52:34and asked that I be reunited with the sword Excalibur
00:52:37by the next full moon.
00:52:39By the next full moon, I had a sword, it's called Excalibur,
00:52:43and I became King Arthur.
00:52:46Today, Arthur is a senior Druid pagan priest
00:52:49and the chief of the loyal Arthurian war band of Druids.
00:52:56But in 1986, Arthur would become Britain's chief trespasser,
00:53:01beginning a long, and some would say illustrious,
00:53:05quest to allow open access to Stonehenge once more.
00:53:10For 11 years, I kept getting arrested
00:53:13because they had an exclusion zone in and around Stonehenge
00:53:16that said you couldn't get within five miles of Stonehenge
00:53:20over a three-day period.
00:53:22Well, you know, that's like running you out of town.
00:53:25They couldn't do that. That wasn't legal.
00:53:27And I took that to the European court.
00:53:31Taking his crusade to Strasbourg,
00:53:33the once and future king was now joined by a future British prime minister.
00:53:40The young barrister who assisted me in taking it to the European court
00:53:45was named Keir Starmer...
00:53:49..when he was a young civil rights attorney.
00:53:55As a result of the court case,
00:53:57the authorities stopped trying to keep people out of Stonehenge
00:54:01during solstices and equinoxes.
00:54:05We got back in in 99, and we're still getting in now.
00:54:09So I felt vindicated.
00:54:11The only time I feel that I'm in the right place at the right time
00:54:16is when I'm in centre circle,
00:54:19celebrating a solstice or an equinox.
00:54:23And that's when I know I'm at peace with the world.
00:54:33The mysterious monument of Stonehenge
00:54:35has always proved to be a symbol of peace.
00:54:38The mysterious monument of Stonehenge
00:54:41has always proved an inspiration to those captivated by its power.
00:54:46It even cast its spell on one of England's most famous sons,
00:54:51proven by the 17th-century graffiti
00:54:55that is still visible after more than 300 years,
00:54:58if you know where to look.
00:55:02We have one very famous piece of graffiti in particular,
00:55:06which I probably should have known better,
00:55:08but anyway, he's just here behind us.
00:55:12There's a cross on here for Christopher,
00:55:15and W-R-E-N.
00:55:18So this is the great architect, Sir Christopher Wren.
00:55:22So impressed was Wren,
00:55:24it may have even provided inspiration for his greatest work.
00:55:28Christopher Wren wanted to mimic the dimensions of Stonehenge itself.
00:55:32So if you look at the dome of St Paul's,
00:55:34you'll see the dimensions are the same as Stonehenge.
00:55:36So even monuments like St Paul's Cathedral,
00:55:38right in the centre of London, has got this direct link.
00:55:43As well as copying the diameter of Stonehenge,
00:55:47Wren also lined his famous dome with columns
00:55:50that resembled a circle of stones,
00:55:52creating what he believed was a form of sacred geometry.
00:55:59But Wren wasn't the only English gentleman
00:56:01to spend time marvelling at the stones.
00:56:05Another visitor, desperate to uncover their secrets,
00:56:08inspired a religious movement that's still with us today.
00:56:13By the time we get to the mid-18th century,
00:56:17William Stokely, who's originally a doctor,
00:56:21latterly an Anglican priest,
00:56:24he's got a fascination for ancient landscapes.
00:56:29And he draws all these things in such a way that we can rely on them,
00:56:34and he's excellent.
00:56:36He then gets completely bitten by the bug of the ancients,
00:56:41working on an idea that it's a Druid temple,
00:56:45and he truly embraces it, and he writes a book,
00:56:49and that's what really fires the idea of Druids and Stonehenge
00:56:54in the public imagination that we're living with right to this day.
00:56:59William Stokely was also a pioneer in archaeology.
00:57:04He's the first person who understands and explains
00:57:09that it's aligned to the summer solstice sunrise.
00:57:13He's the first person to notice the ceremonial avenue,
00:57:16and he's the first person to notice this mysterious monument called the Cursus,
00:57:21which is 1,000 years earlier than the big stone phase at Stonehenge,
00:57:26and runs roughly east-west, north of Stonehenge, in the landscape.
00:57:31The Cursus was created around 3,500 BC,
00:57:351,000 years before Stonehenge as we know it,
00:57:39and long before the many burial mounds that now dot this sacred landscape.
00:57:47Yet, despite several centuries of investigation,
00:57:52it remains one of the enduring mysteries in the Stonehenge landscape.
00:57:58So the Cursus is quite an enigmatic monument in some ways.
00:58:04It's about three kilometres long.
00:58:07It's two banks and ditch, more or less parallel,
00:58:11the gap between them being about 100 metres.
00:58:15So it's like a really, really long rectangle.
00:58:19They went to the effort of digging the soil down to the bedrock,
00:58:23which in this part of Britain is chalk.
00:58:26And if that was left exposed, as we believe it may have been,
00:58:32you can imagine a stretch of land glistening white
00:58:37that was completely stripped to this chalk bedrock.
00:58:42According to some UFO enthusiasts,
00:58:45this long, thin rectangle must have an extraterrestrial connection.
00:58:51People have suggested that the Cursus is an alien landing strip.
00:58:57Visitors to solstices and equinoxes
00:59:00frequently report strange lights in the sky.
00:59:04There's a weird coincidence about where Stonehenge is,
00:59:07and that's about four miles from Boscombe Down Airfield,
00:59:11which is essentially Britain's Area 51.
00:59:14It's where a lot of the experimental aircraft were test flown,
00:59:17and so strange lights in the sky
00:59:20seen in the vicinity of that have been going on for decades.
00:59:25And people have attributed them to aliens.
00:59:28When they've been stood right next to me at solstice,
00:59:31look at the aliens!
00:59:33That's military flares, I'm afraid.
00:59:36The idea that you need aliens to build Stonehenge is laughable.
00:59:41Humans can do this.
00:59:43We undervalue them, and we shouldn't.
00:59:47Most archaeologists think the Cursus was probably
00:59:50for some sort of ceremonial or ritual purpose.
00:59:54But the very latest astronomical research suggests
00:59:57that the Cursus may have a celestial connection after all.
01:00:04The white strip of the Cursus may have represented the Milky Way.
01:00:08And what we have with the Milky Way
01:00:11is we have a stretch of the sky
01:00:14where there's a higher concentration of stars.
01:00:17It is the most obvious thing you see in a dark sky.
01:00:22The ancient Greeks named it the Milky Way
01:00:26because it resembles a strip of white milk in the heavens.
01:00:30The Cursus was exactly the same thing.
01:00:33It's a strip of white chalk on the land.
01:00:37When the Cursus was built, around 3500 BC,
01:00:41at certain moments in the year and at certain moments in the night,
01:00:46the Milky Way would be exactly in a position
01:00:49that aligns with the Cursus.
01:00:51So if you were standing anywhere along the Cursus,
01:00:54you would see the white strip of chalk going into the horizon
01:00:59and then continuing on into the sky as the Milky Way.
01:01:04But what significance might this have had
01:01:07for the ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge?
01:01:12Some Native American groups recognised the Milky Way
01:01:16as what they called the River of Souls.
01:01:19It's possible that there was a similar conception.
01:01:22It was the pathway the souls of the dead would take
01:01:26as they ascend to the heavens.
01:01:29The idea of using the stars to connect with the dead
01:01:32is repeated when Stonehenge reaches its height in 2500 BC,
01:01:38except by then it is the rising and setting of our sun.
01:01:50These celestial alignments are far from the only secrets
01:01:54that have long remained locked in the stones.
01:01:57Only in the 21st century has a riddle of where many of the stones came from
01:02:03finally been solved.
01:02:18The blue stones sit within the circle of the much bigger sarsen stones.
01:02:24While the sarsens are local,
01:02:27the blue stones don't match any known rock type for hundreds of kilometres.
01:02:34Richard Bevins is an earth scientist
01:02:37who has been leading the investigation into the blue stones' origin
01:02:41for around a decade and a half.
01:02:44That doesn't look natural.
01:02:47That looks worked by humans.
01:02:52But the quest to find the source of the blue stones
01:02:56began at least 140 years ago.
01:02:59Well, the thing about the blue stones is that in the 1880s,
01:03:03and even slightly earlier perhaps,
01:03:05those early investigators realised that those stones,
01:03:09the blue stones at Stonehenge, didn't come from that area.
01:03:13By the 1920s, geologists identified the likely source
01:03:18by exploring the Preseli Mountains of Wales,
01:03:21around 300 kilometres away from Stonehenge.
01:03:26Here, there are numerous outcrops of blue stone rock.
01:03:30But pinpointing the exact source was an almost impossible task.
01:03:36Nevertheless, in 2009, Richard began searching.
01:03:44One of the many sights that caught his eye
01:03:47was the blue stone outcrop at Crag Grosevellen.
01:03:51Well, this is an enormous slab of rock.
01:03:55And from the orientation of the layering in it,
01:03:59we know that it would have come off the face
01:04:02at 90 degrees to its current position, up against that face.
01:04:08Did it fall off naturally,
01:04:10or was it prized off the face of the outcrop?
01:04:17Could this be the source of the blue stone at Stonehenge?
01:04:22This was just one of hundreds of sites that Richard had taken samples from.
01:04:26Each needed to be checked in the lab.
01:04:29And with so many to analyse,
01:04:32the ones from Crag Grosevellen almost got overlooked.
01:04:37I realised that I'd collected here,
01:04:39but never actually processed the samples.
01:04:42I hastily got the samples prepared,
01:04:45and, lo and behold, three of the stones
01:04:48matched this outcrop here at Crag Grosevellen.
01:04:51Obviously, that discovery was extremely exciting,
01:04:54but at the same time slightly nerve-wracking,
01:04:57because you could say you're putting your professional career on the line.
01:05:02Incredibly, the test checked out.
01:05:06The stone samples from Crag Grosevellen
01:05:09were an exact match for blue stones at Stonehenge.
01:05:16And it seemed that humans had worked this rock face.
01:05:24What we've got here is this very strong joint in the rock.
01:05:30And that is at 90 degrees to this surface
01:05:33running along the face of the outcrop.
01:05:38And it's because of this tendency for the rock to open up
01:05:43along that surface, you could wedge out a pillar.
01:05:48And, in fact...
01:05:51..maybe one was extracted there.
01:05:58To prove beyond doubt this was the source,
01:06:01there needed to be evidence there had been a quarry here
01:06:04at the time of Stonehenge.
01:06:07In 2011, Richard was joined by an archaeological team
01:06:12led by Mike Parker Pearson.
01:06:16As soon as they began excavating at Crag Grosevellen,
01:06:20they uncovered evidence of prehistoric use.
01:06:24This was in all likelihood the quarry
01:06:27where Stonehenge's famous blue stones originated.
01:06:31I think one of the really excellent aspects of the work
01:06:35has been the integration of archaeology with geology.
01:06:40Because, of course, they've enabled us, really, to test our theory.
01:06:46It's fascinating to think that this area was worked
01:06:52by Neolithic people.
01:06:55It's quite tingling, particularly if you come here on your own.
01:06:59It's a very ethereal place.
01:07:02It's almost haunting.
01:07:09A surprising discovery suggested
01:07:11that the ancient people who quarried the blue stones
01:07:14also considered them to be so sacred
01:07:17that removing any more became taboo.
01:07:21Once they'd finished quarrying, they actually dug a ditch,
01:07:26filled it with large blocks of stones
01:07:29to make it an impassable barrier.
01:07:32So I think they're actually blocking it off.
01:07:36They're saying,
01:07:38no more shall be brought from this quarry.
01:07:41All very intriguing.
01:07:44In a twist that some might consider truly incredible,
01:07:48pinpointing the location of the blue stones in western Wales
01:07:52prompted archaeologists to reconsider a legendary tale.
01:07:56Geoffrey of Monmouth's story that King Arthur's father
01:08:00stole the stones from Ireland at the behest of King Arthur
01:08:05was one of the most important discoveries of the century.
01:08:09King Arthur's father stole the stones from Ireland
01:08:13at the behest of Merlin.
01:08:16Might this myth have some basis in fact?
01:08:20Archaeologists have wondered for over 100 years
01:08:23whether there might be a tiniest grain of truth
01:08:27in Geoffrey of Monmouth's story
01:08:30that Merlin brought the stones from Ireland.
01:08:33Now, of course, Wales isn't Ireland,
01:08:36but what's interesting is that at the time that Geoffrey was writing,
01:08:41that part of Wales, Preseli, Pembrokeshire,
01:08:44was considered to be part of Ireland.
01:08:48If Geoffrey is writing this down in the 12th century AD,
01:08:54then he's potentially writing down an oral tradition
01:09:00that is perhaps 4,000 years old.
01:09:04That doesn't mean that the rest of his story is by any means true,
01:09:08whether Merlin brought the stones,
01:09:10whether they were supposed to be healing stones or whatever,
01:09:14but it does fit in.
01:09:20Without Merlin to transport them using magic,
01:09:23moving up to 80 stones weighing 2 to 5 tonnes each
01:09:27around 300 kilometres
01:09:29might have taken hundreds of people months, even years.
01:09:35What was the motive driving the people from Wales
01:09:38to move their sacred bluestones all the way to Stonehenge?
01:09:43It's possible that people migrated out of South Wales
01:09:48bringing symbols, iconic emblems of who they were,
01:09:53but I think there's something more key, and I think it's about unity,
01:09:58that what Stonehenge was doing,
01:10:01like any other Neolithic monument,
01:10:04was building unity from quite distant parts of Britain.
01:10:12Was this monument a symbol to unify different people,
01:10:15clans or religious beliefs?
01:10:20Modern Druids believe it might have served
01:10:22as an ancient seat of government.
01:10:25I think Stonehenge is very important in the fabric of Britain
01:10:29because it was the first place where large religious
01:10:33and spiritual gatherings were held
01:10:35and that these also had a specific influence
01:10:40on the tribes and the people of the day.
01:10:46The bluestones arrived at Stonehenge
01:10:48long before the circle of giant sarsen stones
01:10:51we are familiar with today.
01:10:55In the visitor's centre, a series of reconstructions
01:10:58illustrates the major changes that have taken place at Stonehenge,
01:11:02right back to its earliest phase, 5,000 years ago.
01:11:07Now, archaeologists, of course, are debating about this,
01:11:10but one theory is that the bluestones might have arrived at this time.
01:11:14And these posts we think might have been the bluestones
01:11:17and we know also the cremated remains,
01:11:20so the people found in these holes,
01:11:22they might have also come from the West.
01:11:24So people might have been bringing their ancestors
01:11:28really early on to this monument from quite far away.
01:11:32After about 500 years, we get the big stones coming to site
01:11:36and they're also taking the bluestones
01:11:38and they're bringing them inside the circle for the first time.
01:11:41So we still see they integrate elements of the earlier monument
01:11:45into this newly engineered monument.
01:11:48So you get this sense that the bluestones were maybe
01:11:51the really holy stones.
01:11:55Sat in the centre of the horseshoe
01:11:57is possibly the most sacred stone of all,
01:12:00the altar stone.
01:12:02Underneath these ones that have fallen on top of it
01:12:06is what we know as the altar stone.
01:12:09It doesn't look that different from all the others,
01:12:12but geologists tell us that the altar stone is a very ancient rock
01:12:16and it's almost like the Earth's crust.
01:12:19So there's been quite a lot of interest in the altar stone lately.
01:12:244,500 years ago, the altar stone marked the exact spot
01:12:29the sun sank beneath the horizon during the midwinter sunset.
01:12:34It had long been assumed to be a bluestone from Wales,
01:12:38but in 2021, Richard Bevins and his team investigated it
01:12:42using a device called an XRF.
01:12:46So this is a portable X-ray fluorescence analyser.
01:12:50If you look underneath, it can be used out in the field as a gun.
01:12:53One of the things the students really like about this,
01:12:55it's very similar to the tricorder in Star Trek
01:12:58where you arrive on a new planet and within a few seconds
01:13:00you can get an idea of the chemical make-up of the planet.
01:13:03Well, it does exactly that.
01:13:05So barium is there, Ian?
01:13:07It is there, yes. 0.11% is about 1,100 ppm.
01:13:11Using an XRF is like doing a geological DNA test
01:13:16and the results from the altar stone reveal something surprising.
01:13:20It's very different from the other bluestones
01:13:23in its size, in its rock type, where it sits within the monument.
01:13:28And so that really drew us to looking in more detail at the altar stone
01:13:33and see what that had to tell us.
01:13:37Just as one mystery had been solved, another had suddenly appeared.
01:13:42So the altar stone is really, it's very exciting to work on
01:13:46because it's enigmatic.
01:13:48When did it arrive? Where from?
01:13:52Who, how was it transported to the site?
01:13:56It's always been put into the bluestone mix,
01:14:00but actually, to put it bluntly, it stands out like a sore thumb.
01:14:06The hunt was on to solve the mystery of the origins
01:14:09of Stonehenge's iconic megaliths
01:14:12that played such a key role in solstice celebrations.
01:14:16The extraordinary findings would turn our understanding
01:14:20of prehistoric Britain upside down.
01:14:33For the people who built Stonehenge around 4,500 years ago,
01:14:37the monument was probably intended more for the midwinter sunset
01:14:41than the midsummer sunrise.
01:14:43But does that mean they celebrated midsummer festivities somewhere else?
01:14:55In 1925, an accidental discovery revealed where that might have been.
01:15:02It's nearly 100 years ago that a pilot, flying overhead,
01:15:06saw marks in the crop.
01:15:09Excavations soon followed and they discovered
01:15:12that the marks had been made by the holes
01:15:15where there had been huge timber posts put up
01:15:18and that these had formed a great timber circle.
01:15:22This startling circle of 168 concrete markers
01:15:26represents the timber posts, or totem poles,
01:15:30that stood here at the time of Stonehenge.
01:15:34So, unfortunately, the timber component doesn't survive in the modern day
01:15:39because the timber would have rotted away,
01:15:41but we think they must have been just as skilled in timber work
01:15:44as they would have been with stones.
01:15:48Woodhenge is around three kilometres from Stonehenge.
01:15:52It was a part of the settlement of Darrington Walls
01:15:56where the people who added the iconic sarsens
01:15:59to the great stone circle lived.
01:16:03Archaeologists believe it was here, among the living,
01:16:07that the Midsummer Solstice was celebrated.
01:16:11By contrast, Stonehenge, as an ancient burial site,
01:16:15was a place for midwinter.
01:16:18That really set up an understanding
01:16:21that stone was perceived as the eternal medium of the ancestors,
01:16:27whereas wood was temporary,
01:16:30reflecting the temporary lives of the people that built Stonehenge.
01:16:36In a way, Stonehenge would have been stuck out on its own,
01:16:40away from the real centre of where everything was going on.
01:16:47The people who built Stonehenge
01:16:49are thought to have abandoned their traditional solstice celebrations
01:16:53and their settlement at Darrington Walls
01:16:56in the years after the great circle was completed.
01:17:01However, new evidence has revealed that before they left,
01:17:05they embarked on one final building project.
01:17:09In 2018, geologists began a series of land surveys at Darrington Walls
01:17:15that were to reveal a whole hidden dimension
01:17:18to this monumental landscape.
01:17:21To map an area like Stonehenge,
01:17:23we need to think about it in...
01:17:25..not in the way that we look at it with our eyes,
01:17:28but almost as a way that physics can look at it with different senses.
01:17:33And so, using geophysics,
01:17:35it's almost like, you know, we've got some sort of magic glasses
01:17:39that allows us to see, in a different way, what's under the earth.
01:17:45Gathering imagery from the air, they made an incredible discovery.
01:17:50There were 20 circular shapes
01:17:52forming what looked like two partial halves
01:17:56of a giant ring surrounding the site.
01:18:00It does not join up to a complete circle.
01:18:03Some of the areas where we'd expect to see the features
01:18:06have been built on, have been modified by humans,
01:18:09and we can't see the signature.
01:18:11We can't physically run our measurements
01:18:13where there's a house today, or a road's been built.
01:18:16So, let me show you some of these geophysical results to start with,
01:18:19and we'll start here from this broad picture of what's going on.
01:18:23So, as I tip this landscape model,
01:18:27now we've got the aerial photograph
01:18:29lying on top of the contours of the land,
01:18:32so the up and down humps and bumps of the land.
01:18:36You can see at the centre here,
01:18:38this is the site of Durrington Walls itself, the circular walls,
01:18:42and now I'm going to zoom myself in.
01:18:44And as we're zooming in, you can see a line in colour here,
01:18:48and this is actually a cross-section to the earth.
01:18:51So, I'm going to tip this now, and we're going to look,
01:18:53rather than looking as a bird's-eye view down on this,
01:18:56we're going to look as a worm crawling through the landscape.
01:19:01What you'll see on here is,
01:19:03every time we've got one of these surface features,
01:19:06you can see the colour changing in the section beneath it.
01:19:10The blue represents an electrically conductive centre core to that,
01:19:16compared to the chalk.
01:19:19You see a very clear, almost like cut into the earth,
01:19:24and that's exactly what has happened.
01:19:26They have cut into the earth here for this feature.
01:19:31Each of the 20 pits was roughly 5m deep and 10m wide.
01:19:37Digging them would have involved excavating
01:19:40around 8,000 cubic metres of earth,
01:19:43equivalent to more than three Olympic swimming pools.
01:19:46But who dug them, and when?
01:19:52It was time to take the next step and drill into the ground
01:19:56for samples of the earth deep within.
01:19:59You know, the geophysics, there's nice colour plots of it,
01:20:03but we need ground truth.
01:20:07Taking cores is no simple task.
01:20:10They must be packaged and sealed without being exposed to daylight.
01:20:17The result is a cross-section of the different materials in the pits.
01:20:22There are layers of chalk, feldspar and clay.
01:20:27But one mineral holds the magical key
01:20:30to unlocking the secret of when these pits were dug.
01:20:33Quartz.
01:20:35Quartz is extremely useful because we can use quartz to tell
01:20:39when sediment or soil was last exposed to daylight.
01:20:44Tiny samples are removed from the core in special red light,
01:20:48which won't spoil the result.
01:20:53They are then put through a series of filters and washes
01:20:57to remove all the impurities.
01:21:00That's our pure quartz.
01:21:03It's a painstaking job.
01:21:06It takes up to a week for a set of ten samples.
01:21:10The next stage is to dispense that quartz to disk.
01:21:18The samples are put into an optical stimulated luminescence machine,
01:21:23or OSL.
01:21:25Which can tell the scientists when the quartz was buried
01:21:29by measuring the last time it was exposed to daylight.
01:21:34It's like capturing a trapped ray of sun from long ago.
01:21:39And we found that the sediment at the base of the four cores we've studied
01:21:44all dates to about 2100 to 2400 BC.
01:21:50The dates suggest the circle of gigantic pits
01:21:53was built by the people who lived at Durrington Walls.
01:21:57Probably not long after,
01:21:59they put up the great Sarton stones at Stonehenge.
01:22:04What the pits were for remains a mystery.
01:22:07But it was their last great construction project.
01:22:12The pits were built by the people who lived at Durrington Walls.
01:22:16It was their last great construction project.
01:22:21After thousands of years, their way of life was about to come to an end.
01:22:27I think that the society that built Stonehenge
01:22:30did it in reaction to an existential threat
01:22:33to their belief systems, their society, their way of life.
01:22:37And the existential threat was the arrival of the metal-bearing culture
01:22:42from Europe.
01:22:44And it suggests that the whole question of unity
01:22:48must have been severely under pressure.
01:22:53So you can imagine that that might have been the very inspiration
01:22:57for building this monument of unity,
01:23:00but just at the moment that it was about to fall apart.
01:23:06It may have been in response to this looming crisis
01:23:09that the builders of Stonehenge crowned their moment
01:23:12with a mysterious addition.
01:23:16The altar stone.
01:23:24Using cutting-edge technology,
01:23:26the geologists had produced a distinctive chemical signature
01:23:30of its rock type and were searching for a match,
01:23:33starting with where they found bluestones in Wales.
01:23:38After nearly 60 samples collected,
01:23:41we had just completely drawn a blank.
01:23:45So that made us realise that maybe we're not looking in the right place.
01:23:50And our conclusion was that now is time to broaden our horizons.
01:23:58They identified target areas in the UK
01:24:01and, working with an international team in 2024,
01:24:05they struck geological gold.
01:24:08We've got some preliminary results which look very exciting,
01:24:13which could have serious implications.
01:24:17The mineral ages of the altar stone
01:24:20matched ancient rocks found in the upper reaches of Britain.
01:24:24This places it over 700km away
01:24:27in a region that includes the remote islands of Orkney.
01:24:32The new discovery about the altar stone is truly thrilling.
01:24:38If it is really the case, as it could well be,
01:24:41that sandstone quarried in Orkney
01:24:45was taken all the way down Britain
01:24:48and then placed in Stonehenge to be in a focal point,
01:24:52then that is just mind-blowing.
01:24:55And the thing to remember about the altar stone,
01:24:58it's a very elegant and fragile piece.
01:25:02It's over five metres long, at least five tonnes in weight,
01:25:07and to bring that any kind of distance without it breaking
01:25:12has to have been a remarkable achievement.
01:25:16Why move a stone over 700km from north-east Scotland?
01:25:21The answer may be because the Orkney Islands are where it's thought
01:25:26the first stone circle in prehistoric Britain was built,
01:25:30centuries earlier, the Stones of Stenness.
01:25:35Close by is the Ring of Brodgar, which may give us a further clue,
01:25:40because it was built around the time of Stonehenge,
01:25:44using stones brought from different communities all over the islands.
01:25:50Is it a sort of a macro-scale version of what we see at Ring of Brodgar,
01:25:54where people were bringing in stones from several different areas,
01:25:58from quite long distances away within Orkney?
01:26:01Well, it could be, but the difference in distance travelled is so enormous
01:26:07that we have to kind of take a deep breath and say, wow.
01:26:12And you have to wonder what that must have meant,
01:26:16and we have various possibilities.
01:26:19It's a token of triumph, a trophy-taking,
01:26:24that if you're actually making alliances,
01:26:28you're actually giving things from one group to another,
01:26:33and this really, for me, confirms the idea that Stonehenge
01:26:38was a monument to the unity of the ancestors of Britain.
01:26:43And that's another big piece of the jigsaw falling into place.
01:26:52To an outsider, it might appear that in 2,500 BC, Stonehenge was at its height.
01:27:00But could it be that Stonehenge, along with Woodhenge,
01:27:04the great pits around Durrington Walls
01:27:08and the arrival of the Altar Stone from the area around Orkney
01:27:12were all part of a desperate bid to ward off an invasion?
01:27:20The Stone Age culture that had built these monuments
01:27:24was about to disappear forever.
01:27:28My guess is that the Altar Stone was right at the centre of the monument
01:27:32at that point.
01:27:34This is its greatest hour,
01:27:37and yet we know that their world was about to change dramatically,
01:27:44because this is right at the moment of contact
01:27:48with people who are coming from continental Europe.
01:27:55It was the dawn of the Bronze Age, and the new people brought horses,
01:27:59the wheel and the secrets of making metal.
01:28:03Within 400 years of their arrival, 16 generations,
01:28:08less than 10% of the genetic make-up of people of Britain
01:28:14derived from the Neolithic farmers within Britain.
01:28:18So it's a near-total population replacement.
01:28:24But the new arrivals were left awestruck
01:28:27by the splendour and mystery of this circle of stone
01:28:31that continues to fascinate us today.
01:28:35From the timber posts used by hunter-gatherers more than 10,000 years ago,
01:28:40and the cursus that may have mapped the stars above,
01:28:45to the circle of sacred bluestones brought from Wales,
01:28:49the great interlocking sarsens that mark the solstices with breathtaking precision,
01:28:56and the altar stone that may have been carried 700 kilometres to form its centrepiece.
01:29:03Stonehenge remains one of the most enigmatic and enduring structures on Earth.
01:29:10We can only guess what other ancient mysteries still remain locked in the stones.