Letters From London - Letter 12 - Stonehenge
"Stonehenge was never discovered, it was always there."
The story thus far: Letters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. And for first timers, the bibliomancy.
“It used to keep me awake at night as a child, everything we didn’t know about this place.”
Their tour guide says this near the end of the trip to Stonehenge, but this detail stays with him for months afterward. The guide is now a cheerful white woman, her hair colored in rippling waves of pink, yellow and orange, with a beautiful voice—listening to her is like listening to a chatty audiobook about the history of England and the United Kingdom. She is also their driver on the private bus, like a singer who accompanies herself on the keyboard. There is something beautiful to him about the idea of her beginning as a sleepless child, wanting to know what Stonehenge was. “It’s the reason I got into archeology,” she says.
They will head first to Stonehenge, then to “a secret place,” which turns out to be the town of Lacock, and then they make a final stop at Avebury, a town located inside a stone circle like the Stonehenge circle. There’s at least a thousand of these stone circles in Great Britian, though Stonehenge is arguably the most famous and the most important.
On the way out of London, she drops information casually about what they are passing, ranging from sites of historical importance to where Princess Diana died to the setting of the Ted Lasso series, a show he has tried hard to ignore for some reason, but now he decides he should watch it. Maybe. At the time of the trip—December—he has not watched much of any television at all, as if it is like an American sport, though he knows British television is in fact made and consumed in considerable amounts. But British him, British Professor Contessa as it were, doesn’t watch tv much. He eats muesli every day, he drinks flat whites instead of drip coffee, and he is out too much to watch television shows.
When he is back in America, he will of course watch British shows with something like nostalgia.
Other details he recalls: she tells them her job before being a guide at Stonehenge. She taught students at schools about prehistoric history, and she would show up to teach dressed as a Cavewoman with a club. This should of course be a television show and he tells her so. She laughs to think of it.
Her patter is soon meant to prepare them before their arrival. Facts about the place are described. The stones are a mystery of a kind—not from the area, taken there across great fields of soft ground, the earth made of chalk underneath. The method for their being moved is unknown and it seems also impossible that they were set in their current arrangement, which involves some very precise maneuvering that would be agonizing to consider with contemporary tools. A community of people believe UFOs of course set these into place, which upsets her, as she says, because it denies us our amazing humanity. That humans can do amazing things.
He finds this unexpectedly cheering.
Some of these UFO believers take turns waiting in their cars around the site, believing the UFOs will come back. He cannot decide if this is depressingly lonely, or if it is a way of surfing loneliness. Or if it would be, well, fun.
Humans can do amazing things.
“What’s your favorite theory,” he asks.
She makes a joke about the giant intelligent cats theory, which when he asks, turns out to be of her own invention, and then she says, “I’m partial to Merlin and the giants,” she says, which is not at all what he imagined was next. The Merlin story is that he stole the stones from Ireland, where they had been set in place by giants and were known as the Giant’s Dance. And that he did this using a mix of magic, manpower and a few boats as well. She then describes a colleague who after much research has ascertained where a certain group of the stones have come from, in Wales. “The Merlin story isn’t technically true, then, but it points toward the truth.”
He nods, taking this in. It seems a little at odds with the “humans can do amazing things” principle on the surface and yet he does like this idea of pointing towards the truth, even as the image it conjures has an old pleasure for him. As a boy he was always partial to Merlin, of all of the characters from Arthurian legend.
“Stonehenge was not discovered,” she says, “it was always there.”
“So… the people who lived around it in this area, they forgot about what it was for?”
“That’s right,” she says.
This is incredible to him, and yet it makes a kind of sense he can’t shake. If he had to do this over again, he would bring the students here first instead of last, on the trip’s last weekend.
*
Not to be judgmental of those ancient Brits, but it seems hard to forget Stonehenge. He cannot forget it, for example. Especially the strange hum he felt, the closer he got, like he used to feel as he approached the electric cow fence around his grandfather’s pastures back in Maine, growing up. Even thinking about it summons a tone in his mind, which he supposes is the music of the place.
Not everyone feels it but many do.
She issues a warning about the crows who surround the stones and are famously protective of it. They allow no other birds near the stones and seem likely to attack the humans too, if they step past the rope boundaries. They are not to feed the crows or otherwise interact with them, but of course, a student draws too near to a large one sitting just opposite the first turn in the path and is snapped at. They do seem to be watching them all, patrolling the grass. He’s never seen anything like it.
The stones themselves, also. How long has he imagined this? Ever since playing Dungeons & Dragons as a boy, pretending to be a Druid, taking books out of the library like The Golden Bough and imagining the power of being able to whistle up a wind, or even to ride it. His nickname in grade school on his street was Nature Boy, because he liked to be alone in the woods.
The trees wouldn’t call him a chink, of course. But he did like them for other reasons.
He and Dustin walk the perimeter, taking photos of the kind everyone is taking.
They go to the gift shop. Everyone is eating lunch. They get some decent if forgettable gift shop food. There’s more to see but there’s no time. They buy souvenirs—some t-shirts, fridge magnets, a calendar—and off they go.
*
Lacock is there next stop, a town so picturesque that if you live there you are required to abide by certain rules regarding the town’s use as a setting for film and television. Anytime someone wants a historical fiction British backdrop, this would be the place. The village is at the edge of the Cotswolds, touched by that region’s limestone fed beauty, and it seems uncannily familiar and this is because it is. He has seen it many times, in Pride and Prejudice, in the Harry Potter films, in Downton Abbey. They take a quick stroll of the uncanny town, and he notices there seem to be lots of people selling home baked goods on faith, a sort of leave some money in a basket system, or for the more modern, pay via Venmo—a QR code visible through the plastic baggies. But there are also some very good bakeries. And then, as if manifesting a punchline to the tour guide’s earlier joke about giant sentient cats and Stonehenge, he turns a corner and finds someone has a topiary hedge of an enormous cat, something he has never seen before, and he is seized with the desire to create one back at home in Vermont.
“Do you know anything about your neighbor’s giant topiary cat,” he asks the bartender in the pub next door to the topiary.
“Haven’t seen it,” the bartender says.
“It’s right outside the entrance,” he says.
“Can’t help you,” the bartender says, this time a little as if it this is something he’s imagined, a tourist’s hallucination. He has so many questions—who could miss it? But he lets it go.
*
Avebury is beautiful, a picturesque English town with these lines of what look like enormous stone ghosts emerging from the fields and yards. The stones start appearing along the road almost like a signal the town is near. The bus pulls over near the town’s edge, disembarking into a pub parking lot. Their guide gives them a quick lay of the land description and off they go, walking into the fields, where the stones are just there, unprotected. She describes a church that seems mysteriously made from the same stone as the stones in the circle, near where some of the stones are missing. She is a little sympathetic, given the need for building materials. When they find the church about thirty minutes later, it is very clear where the missing stones went.
The henge here is considered the world’s largest. It is roughly a contemporary of Stonehenge, which dates to 3100 B. C.
There is no electric hum here, like there was with Stonehenge. There are no prowling patrols of crows. But he soon sees other visitors along the paths, and he also sees that they are hugging the stones. One woman even performs a kind of backwards flip as if the stone she’s chosen is watching her. He and Dustin and the students laugh at this, which is like an omen that they are next because soon he also is hugging the stones, just about all of them get in for a stone hug.
This is somehow a fitting last gesture before they get on the bus and head back to London. It is the second weekend of December, and they have one last weekend to pack before returning to America.
I love these letters so much. I'm an American who lives in the UK and it's nice to hear from someone else from back home what they think about being over here.
This is so lovely! I've never really felt a pull to go to Stonehenge, but now I think I might.