Mysteries
Peter Levi
My nice old-fashioned publisher tells me there are so many books about Britain at present that none of them sell many copies. But my other, whizzish, diabolical publisher says the market is hungry, and Americans consume these books in infinite quantities. It is a frighten- ing thought. Part of the pleasure of really
knowing any part of Britain used to be privacy. Stonehenge is an exception. It is like the problem of the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The obvious uselessness, gratuitous bulk and its extreme- ly slow collapse until it was set in concrete, have defied the conjectures of generations.
In Search of Unknown Britain is a wor- thy though not quite an admirable book: it
is a little fuzzy at the edges. It must have been much more fun to write than it is to read. It ambles through all the dark area of British pre-history and history down to the Normans and illustrates them from arch- aeological sites chosen for being unfre- quented. It is scarcely illustrated, and the reader who is really keen on Jarlshof in the Shetlands or Cam Euny in Cornwall or Llantwit could do better with other reference books. The photographs here are comfortingly gloomy and the maps cheer- ingly useless. It is nice that publishers are
still producing books like this, and I hope it will get a prize. The illustration of a Roman latrine on page 100 opens a wide field for conjecture.
A New View over Atlantis is a new ver- sion of an old, trendy publication. It is more of a bad idea, and worse. It illustrates the British dark with the Great Pyramid, numerology with numbers reading as letters and vice-versa, buried treasure, Cabalism, Unidentified Flying Objects, druids, dowsers, aboriginal songs, Auden, American Indian mounds, Old Straight Tracks, Anglo-Catholic exorcisms, astral lights and something called orgone forces. The Chinese Dragon Force is just like ours. The cows know the stones and rub on them. And consider the magical qualities of the carpark at Wantage! Well out of this humus came several successful children's films, for one of which the fellows of All Souls — or was it Brasenose? — hired the local cinema for a special morning showing.
Stonehenge Complete is another matter. It is not quite complete, and how could it be? But within the limits of nearly 300 pages, efficiently written and admirably il- lustrated, it offers a full history of what has been said and written about Stonehenge, and a few pages about the various findings of archaeology. It is a sensational catalogue of follies, recounted with dry irony. The Normans called them 'les pierres pendues', and they have been the hanging stones in more senses than one. The archaeologists discovered not only smashed wine glasses and the ashes of modern druids illegally buried, but the bones and padlock of a man hanged in chains. The stones, when we first hear of them, were believed to have been brought by giants out of Africa to Ireland, and moved by Merlin with magic powers for an English war memorial.
The truth about Stonehenge is as strange as the fictions and as complicated. The famous Welsh bluestones belonged to an earlier monument elsewhere on the plain; at Stonehenge they were being reused. The stone mauls that were made to shape the great sarsen stones, which were buried later as wedges to prop them up, weighed 40 and
60 pounds. At least one of the viewing points supposed to have aided the use of Stonehenge for astronomic and lunar calculations turns out to be far older than the monument itself, so part, at least, of that theory collapses. The circle of 56 holes, like post-holes inside the boundary bank of Stonehenge, which are called the Aubrey Holes since John Aubrey noticed them, have no clear purpose. They come under Grinsell's definition of a Ritual Hole as 'any pit found by archaeologists, the pur- pose of which is not evident to them'. The Victorians in their relation with Stonehenge, as in so much else, retain an enviable dignity with their ridiculousness. They played cricket and coursed grey' hounds there. Village outings went with traps and early bicycles. Prince Leopold held a picnic. They wrote a mass of poems about 'these stones upright; Thy surpliced priests with mistletoe bedight, With open mouths to catch the morning air' and 'Fierce harpings fit to rouse the slumbering bold'. I am sorry, by the way, that Mr Chippindale has missed Thomas Warton, who wrote an excellent Stonehenge poem and that he allows too little space to Words- worth. Punch suggested that the Stonehenge trilithons might conceal the mystic origins of cricket and Churchill had himself photographed there in 1944 during some tank trials. I do see it is legitimate and more tempting to record social history, at least where this involves no neglect of such scientific diagrams as 'the confused deposits usual in Aubrey Holes.' Some of the archaeologists who have worked at Stonehenge in this century appear to have been as idiosyncratic as the Great Bustard. The Aubrey Holes are their fitting memorial.'
Mr Chippindale takes what I would call a stern, Cambridge view of some of their calculations, but about their formidable personalities he is almost too reticent. Old Thomm, who so alarmed everyone by measuring everything whatsoever with Scot- tish rectitude and engineering experience, and by producing Breton analogies and astronomic consequences wreathed in im- penetrable mathematics, to the fury of Cambridge, was the most formidably con' vincing scholar I have ever met. He won me over in an evening, purring and growling and puffing his pipe. I am shocked to hear that not even he was quite right. And I wonder whether Stuart Piggott's Mycenean dagger carved on a sarsen can really be dismissed as easily as the purists maintain• Of course, how the dagger got to Britain, who carved it and why is a dark problem• By Stonehenge standards, the Myceneans came late in the day. But at least Mr Chip- pindale ought, to have been more respectful to Hecataeus, dismissed in a footnote. He lived in the sixth or fifth century BC, not the fourth. All he knew about Britain was that it lay beyond France, and in the centre of it stood a circular sanctuary of Apollo. There are some 4,000 prehistoric stone monuments in Britain, many of them cir- cular. But there is only one Stonehenge.
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