ABOUT FACTS NET Ancient

Yes it is true, one of the best kept secrets is that all this stuff we hear about Stonehenge and why it is built a certain way and why some stone face one way and other stones face another, may be wrong. Why would this be? Because we rebuilt Stonehenge What you never knew that? Well don't feel bad, it is hardly mentioned anywhere. The darn thing was reassembled in the fashion that the archaeologists thought it was in originally. I put special emphases on the word thought.

Tourists at Stonehenge

The rebuilding didn't take place all at once. It seems to have started in 1901 and lasted for almost 60 years. Boy these people were good, it sort of reminds me of people saying that a large group could never keep a secret or that the government is too big to keep secrets. Yet here we are, a group of people are rearranging some of the most famous rocks in history and only a select few people seem to know anything about it. Some archeologists are so outraged that they don't even consider the site ancient anymore. Who can blame them, I find it hard to think of it that way myself. I guess I would feel different if they had found plans and I knew that everything was put back the way it was intended, but putting things the way you think they were meant to be really stinks and ruins the spirit of the entire site.

Isn't it something, people travel thousands of miles to see Stonehenge. They think that they are looking at ancient ruins as they would be if they went to a place like Egypt and saw the pyramids or Sphinx but instead they are looking at something that may have been built in their lifetime and is sort of masquerading as ancient. It's like buying a souvenir replica of Stonehenge, its new but looks old. A famous archeologist admitted that almost everything we see at the site has had something done to it.

So why was this done? Why take a great and ancient ruin like Stonehenge and rebuild it? I guess the government felt that it would make a better tourist attraction if it was more complete. I am only guessing here, but they must have thought that fallen stones were not very interesting and large stones piled on top of standing stones would attract many more people. After all this would certainly make people wonder how our ancient ancestors got those huge stone on top of those other stones, at the least. I used to wonder that, but now I feel sort of foolish and wonder if those stones were really set up that way at all. Now I know that at least some of these large stones were put on top of each other by a powerful crane. Not such a great feat after all. I wonder if some government archeologists are laughing as people pay over their hard earned money for souvenirs of the area or buy books about Stonehenge?

I can not help but feel that Stonehenge should be put back the way it was. Of course I have no say in the matter and I am not even British so you can imagine where they would tell me to go if I ever suggested this. Hey guys, put Stonehenge back the way it was. Drop dead Yank! If the English Heritage, which runs the site, thought that they were doing the right thing by rebuilding it, then why did they begin to leave this information out of their guide book in the 1970s?

Stonehenge is not the only stone circle that was rebuilt, Avebury Stone Circle is another and who knows how many more have faced the crane and steam rollers?

A very neat wall, now we know why.

Now when someone says to you, "I wonder how those ancient people got those heavy rocks up to the top of Stonehenge?", the answer may be, they didn't! But I guess this isn't entirely fair either. There is a painting from 1835 of Stonehenge that shows at least one huge stone atop of two others. It is a John Constables painting. It also shows many of the standing stones are either fallen or leaning dangerously at large angles to the ground. I would like to propose this, what if the ancient people had some large stones leaning on purpose for reasons we know nothing about, wouldn't we have ruined the intent of the circle?

Most of the stones are now set in concrete, something that was just recently done.