Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/199

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CROMLECHS
191

the passing traveller, and mysterious enough to puzzle the antiquary.

Within a circular earthwork, 300 feet in diameter, was a circle of trilithons, 100 feet in diameter, formed of thirty hewn monoliths sarsens), each pair supporting large lintels, about nine feet within this circle, and concentric with it, was another circle, consisting of forty smaller stones of an imported material known as "blue stones." Inside this "blue stone" circle were five groups of huge trilithons, arranged in a horseshoe shape, each consisting of two monoliths bearing an impost. Inside of the latter was a second horseshoe arrangement (originally consisting of nineteen "blue stones"), the centre of which contained a large slab of micaceous sandstone, called the Altar Stone.

The open spaces of these horseshoe arrangements faced towards the rising sun at the summer solstice, and, in line with its prolonged axis in the circumference of the outer earthen rampart, there is the so-called Sun-stone, or "Friar's Heel." The Sarsen monoliths in the outer circle measured 12 feet 7 inches in height, but the "blue stones" were only about 8 feet high.

Dr. Gowland, who superintended some recent excavations in course of replacing one of the fallen monoliths, came to the conclusion that Stonehenge was a temple dedicated to sun-worship, and assigns its erection to the end of the Neolithic period (2000–1800 b.c.), on the ground that no bronze