Author’s Note

For an object as old and as famous as Stonehenge is, surprisingly little is known about it. Certainly nothing is known of its meaning and value to the peoples who made it, over a period of a thousand years, first digging up the ground to build a circular embankment, then, in fits and starts, digging holes, into which they sometimes set stones. We have a good idea of where the stones stood; we know pretty much where they came from; we can explain how Neolithic farmers, without the wheel, without beasts of burden, without practical metal tools, could do the work. Yet even in these simple physical facts there is much doubt.

So, scoured of meaning, Stonehenge takes whatever we bring to it and gives us back ourselves. Religious people take it for a temple; astronomers use it as an observatory. In the nineteenth century a railroad man even wanted to turn it into a train station. Being a storyteller, I see it as a piece of story, in an age when stories were the greatest power that people could bring to deal with the whirling universe around them, an era that is on us still.