Stonehenge is perhaps the most famous monument in England, built, we now know, around 4,500 BC. That was about the same time as the Great Pyramid at Giza. All right, it’s not quite in that league, but it remains a huge, haunting edifice. How did those massive upright stones get their horizontal lintels? Geoffrey of Monmouth thought Merlin transported them, and his guess is probably as good as ours.
Stonehenge keeps its mysteries, but there is a good deal that modern scholarship can tell us about it, and about the world in which it was made – a surprisingly connected world. Back then you could walk across what we now call Dogger to and from the Continent, enabling the passage of men, beliefs, wild animals, stone, artefacts and skills. It’s this world that the British Museum’s new exhibition The World of Stonehenge explores. Sadly it can’t transport the monument into the Great Court - though there are evocative reproductions - but it does bring us artefacts and remains from our remote ancestors from across Europe to help us grasp something of their beliefs and practices.
