As my companions and I paused to savour our first distant view of Stonehenge, the clouds parted and the famous trilithons took on a golden hue as they were touched by the afternoon sun. It was an almost comically filmic moment – and at the same time it felt entirely fitting, marking our final, triumphant march towards the monument.
Professor Keith Ray (Cardiff University), Professor Julian Thomas (University of Manchester), and I had set out on foot from Netheravon that morning, but for Keith the journey to Stonehenge had been rather longer. Over the course of the previous three weeks he had walked some 222 miles, beginning in the Preseli Hills, where some of the Stonehenge bluestones were quarried thousands of years ago (see CA 311, 345, and 366), and making his way to Salisbury Plain, where they stand today. Chris Catling explores this undertaking in greater detail in the preceding article (see here); Julian and I had joined Keith on the final day of his endeavours, as his route entered the Avon Valley.
I felt very lucky to be one of the 20 ‘co-walkers’ invited to take part – and luckier still to be doing so during good weather and on easy terrain. As we set out, Keith shared stories of rather more challenging stretches tackled earlier in the trip, when he traversed Wales and the Cotswolds – tales of horizontal hail, threats of hypothermia, and punishing topography. By contrast, we enjoyed a sunny Sunday taking a flattish path along roads, across fields, and through shady strips of woodland. Birdsong like bubbling water was punctuated by the occasional hoarse cry of a pheasant and, at one point, a distant staccato rattle that I badly wanted to be a woodpecker but was never able to confirm. We encountered very few other walkers during our travels, though our path was occasionally crossed by squirrels, and we did meet a pair of horses who were entirely indifferent to our presence in their field.
Keith and Julian were perfect travelling companions, offering genial company and a wealth of expert insights into the area’s archaeology that this non-prehistorian was delighted to absorb. Pausing by the fast-flowing river near Durrington, we considered how different our view would have been millennia earlier, when the landscape was flooded and punctuated by beaver dams; it would have dramatically changed again in the medieval period, thanks to the creation of many mills and leats. As we passed the Stonehenge Inn (which had quite the reputation in the 1970s, I was told) and then the mighty banks of Durrington Walls, more personal anecdotes were also shared. As we drew nearer to Stonehenge itself, Julian pointed out now-anonymously grassy spots where he had excavated in the past, and described getting sunburnt and snow-blind from the glare of the chalk.
Circle in a spiral
In the spirit of this exchange of knowledge, Keith had devised the idea of ‘walking seminars’, assigning each co-walker a theme for discussion during the trip. Mine was ‘circle’, and while I’m not sure I offered many ground-breaking insights on this topic, it did provide useful leverage to wheedle a pause as we passed the concentric rings of Woodhenge, which I had never visited before. Although we were overdue our lunchbreak, my companions generously conceded, guiding me through the monument’s various features and pointing out a poignant memorial marking the location of a prehistoric child’s burial.
I have visited many individual excavations on Salisbury Plain, and Stonehenge itself a number of times, but I had never before wandered in the wider landscape around the monument. During our travels, I was excited to see familiar place-names from the pages of CA, such as the military settlements at Larkhill (home to a causewayed enclosure and a First World War practice battlefield – see CA 326 and 328) and Bulford, with its magnificently quirky hill-figure depicting a kiwi, created by homeward-bound members of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in 1919 (CA 342). While consulting Keith’s OS map close to Ablington, I also realised how close we were to Barrow Clump, whose Bronze Age burial mound and Anglo-Saxon cemetery we covered in CA 306 and 338. Thanks to this most recent walk, though, I now have a much better understanding of how all these sites fit together – of the interconnectedness of the Stonehenge landscape.
And so – with a nod to my ‘circle’ theme – this story draws to a close at the point it began: with a trio of travellers standing on King Barrow Ridge, with our backs to a series of huge burial mounds half-shrouded in trees, looking out towards our intended destination. Making a decisive turn down to join the path of the Avenue – a route lined by welcoming throngs of sheep – we kept our eyes on Stonehenge until the monument suddenly slipped out of view, hidden by an upward turn in the terrain. After this point, however, the Avenue kinked and the stones became visible once more – was there a prehistoric significance in this play of visibility and invisibility, and the forced change of direction, we wondered, and might something have once stood there to mark this point in any would-be visitor’s journey?
Unlike these prehistoric predecessors, our own travels came to an abrupt halt when we met the modern fence-line that borders Stonehenge today. Thankfully, English Heritage (in whose care the site lies) were expecting us, and a friendly member of staff guided us along the boundary to a gate – a few bonus steps added to the end of Keith’s epic journey, we joked. Once inside the protected site, we blended into the crowd of other people who had made their own journeys to visit the stones. Pausing in the shadow of the Heel Stone, a 36-tonne sarsen boulder that leans towards Stonehenge, we too turned our faces to the ancient monument – and to the bluestones at its heart that had inspired Keith’s trip, now successfully concluded.
All images: C Hilts