Note 2212 — STONEHENGE

Nineteenth Century, June, 1903, p. 1009. I cannot deny myself the pleasure of quoting Mr. Hinks’s criticism of Sir Norman Lockyer’s argument. ‘The authors [Sir Norman and Mr. Penrose] are trying,’ he says, ‘to find the place of a prehistoric sunrise by assuming that the avenue pointed to it. They measured the direction of the avenue, and found that the measures agreed so very nearly with the Ordnance Survey measure of the direction of their mark—presumably on the highest point—at Sidbury camp, that they adopted the latter measure rather than their own; in other words, they agreed that the avenue is directed very exactly to Sidbury. Henceforward one cannot leave Sidbury out of the argument.... There are two courses open to us. On the one hand we may suppose that the avenue was drawn to lead over the down to Sidbury camp, and had no intentional relation to the place of sunrise. On the other hand we may suppose that Sidbury is in the sunrise line not by accident but by design; that it forms an integral part of the solar temple of Stonehenge. And since the camp occupies the summit of a steep and isolated hill, while Stonehenge lies on a wide and gently sloping down, it is plain that the camp end of the Stonehenge-Sidbury line must have been fixed first, and the site of the temple determined by prolonging the line sunrise-Sidbury till it struck a suitable place on the down. There is nothing impossible in this; the question is, Can it be said to be so probable that one is justified in fixing a date for Stonehenge from the direction of the line so drawn? Which is the greater improbability, that the Stonehenge-sunrise line was laid out so that it passed over the peak of Sidbury hill ... so nearly invisible from Stonehenge by reason of an intervening down that Sir Norman Lockyer thought that the latter formed the local horizon, and makes no mention of having seen Sidbury over its top ... or that the line of an avenue setting out from Stonehenge happens to point to the place where the sun rose at a date which is perhaps as likely as any other for the foundation of the building...?

‘If preference be given to the first alternative, and we assume that Stonehenge really was so placed that Sidbury marked the point where the sun rose on midsummer morning, the question still remains, Was it done so accurately that it is worth measuring accurately now, and drawing from the measures an exact statement of date? It may well be objected that in our climate Sidbury is probably not visible from Stonehenge at sunrise once in twenty years, and that the likelihood of a long delay in drawing out the plan of so great a work would very soon have induced the builders to adopt a line near enough for their purposes though not for ours.... And lastly there is the grave difficulty that everything depends upon guessing right what is to be considered the critical phase of the sunrise or sunset,’ &c.