Stonehenge

Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that. ~ Bill Bryson

Stonehenge is a Neolithic and Bronze Age monument located near Amesbury in the English county of Wiltshire,

Quotes

I don't like the place at all. It's all wrong. An imposition on the Landscape... ~ Terry Pratchett

• I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, "Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!" Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.
  • Bill Bryson, in Notes from a Small Island (1995)

• When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to effect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposition nor ornament, has anything admirable; but those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work. Nay, the rudeness of the work increases this cause of grandeur, as it excludes the idea of art and contrivance; for dexterity produces another sort of effect, which is different enough from this.
  • Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) §12 : Difficulty

• Much of what has been written about Stonehenge is derivative, second-rate or plain wrong.
  • Christopher Chippindale, in Stonehenge Complete (1983)

• Hello, Stonehenge! Who takes the Pandorica, takes the universe!
  • Eleventh incarnation of the Doctor, in "The Pandorica Opens" episode of the Doctor Who television series.

• Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves-or desires.
  • Jacquetta Hawkes, in God in the Machine, Antiquity 41 (1967), p. 174

• I don't like the place at all. It's all wrong. An imposition on the Landscape. I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.
  • Terry Pratchett, at alt.fan.pratchett (8 June 1997)

• Stonehenge, where the demons dwell
  Where the banshees live and they do live well
  Stonehenge, where a man's a man
  And the children dance to the pipes of Pan.
  • Spinal Tap, in This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

• Our Soveraign here above the rest might stand;
  And here be chose again to rule the Land.
  These Ruines sheltered once His Sacred Head,
  Then when from Wor'ster's fatal Field He fled;
  Watch'd by the Genius of this Royal place,
  And mighty Visions of the Danish Race,
  HisRefuge then was for a Temple shown:
  But, He restor'd, 'tis now become a Throne.
  
  • John Dryden, From Chorea gigantum, or, The most famous antiquity of Great-Britan [sic], vulgarly called Stone-Heng, standing on Salisbury Plain, restored to the Danes by Walter Charleton

External links

• Stonehenge at English Heritage
• Stonehenge Landscape
• Ancient Places TV: HD Video of Stonehenge Excavations of 2008
• Stonehenge Today and Yesterday by Frank Stevens
• BBC : The History of Stonehenge
• Stonehenge, a Temple Restor'd to the British Druids by William Stukeley
• Stonehenge, and Other British Monuments Astronomically Considered by Norman Lockyer