Freya in her car seat, ready to go off on another adventure

On Thursday we packed the baby and all her gear into the car and took off for Wiltshire and Stonehenge. It’s a place I’ve wanted to visit for most of my life, but I’m kind of glad I waited this long. Recent archaeological research has uncovered so much more about the monument and its surroundings.

The National Heritage of England has also just finished building an entirely new visitor center/museum complex about a mile from the stones themselves, and they’re in the process of removing an older visitor center and car park that was placed way too close and clearly inadequate to increasing crowds.

The new center was badly needed. On a sunny day in August, the crowd was huge. The main part of the car park, which could probably handle 200-300 automobiles, was already full, but we were directed to a secondary area that was clearly not far removed from its roots as a sheep pasture. As we unloaded from the car, they were opening up another overflow parking area that looked like the sheep has just been shooed off it to make room for automobiles. Fortunately we’d bought tickets online which allowed us to bypass the long line for the ticket booth.

Stonehenge from the A303. I took this through the car window, which is why it’s so blurry.

Finally we got through the entrance area and hopped on one of the shuttles from the visitor center to the actual site.  This would actually be our second sighting of the monument, since it’s clearly visible from the A303, a main east-west road that runs along right beside it. An unfortunate coincidence of the road narrowing from four lanes to two and the sudden, startling appearance of the stones ensures that traffic backs up for quite a distance as you approach.

But when the shuttle bus lets you off near the monument, the stones are barely visible. You follow a paved path over a slight hill and the monoliths rise into view above you.

I’ve seen pictures of Stonehenge all my life and was prepared to be underwhelmed. It’s nothing but a bunch of big rocks after all. It didn’t happen.

Stonehenge, like The Grand Canyon and a few other places I haven’t yet been to, is one of those places that just has to be experienced. No words, no pictures can capture the size, the grandeur, the sheer visceral impact of those gigantic stones sitting upright on the rolling hills of the Wiltshire Plains. You don’t even need to consider how a Neolithic people could have managed to move some of those behemoths over 150 miles without benefit of motorized transportation to be awed.

The shuttle bus from the visitor center to the monument.

You just stare at it, soak in it, let it speak to you in its own language. It’s not just the size. There’s something hypnotizing about the concentric arrangement of the outer circle, with its ring of capstones, and the inner horseshoe.  Fortunately there’s just enough of it left to make pretty clear what it must have looked like in its prime.

It still sits out on a mostly deserted (except for the crowds around the stone circle, held back from actual contact with it by a low fence), rolling plain amidst extensive sheep pastures. It’s not hard to put yourself in the place of those early peoples and think about what it must have been like to journey over the plains, through trees, across streams, and then arrive at a monument that is still overwhelmingly impressive today, even half in ruins, in an age of skyscrapers reaching almost beyond human vision.

The museum at the Visitor Center is fascinating as well, though somewhat anti-climactic after viewing the monument itself. The most interesting feature to me was the facial reconstruction of a man they’d found buried at the site. We tend to think of those Neolithic people as looking cruder that us, somehow, more like Neanderthals, in fact. But in truth, put that man who was buried thousands of years ago into modern clothes and give him modern grooming and you’d wouldn’t blink twice if you passed him on the street.

More pictures from Stonehenge:

Viewed from the north.

Viewed from the east

The guys

Freya is less than impressed.

South view