The Enigma of Stonehenge

Jonathan Cape Ltd. Very Good/Very Good. 1980. First Edition. Hard Cover. Landscape 4to 0224016180 Dust jacket complete except price clipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. 128 pages clean and tight. Dimensions: 25.7 x 20.6 x 3.8 cm. The mute, enigmatic stones in Wiltshire reveal as much about those who have tried to fathom their secrets as about those who constructed them. If we can now say with twentieth-century archaeological certainty that the first wooden phase of Stonehenge was begun by Neolithic settlers in 2800 B.C., we can also say that well into the eighteenth century, elixirs made of ground bits of Stonehenge were a popular folk medicine. If the seventeenth century saw the dawn of serious archaeology, it found Inigo Jones as certain that Stonehenge was Roman as was Dr Charleton that it was Danish, while Aubrey and Stukeley proffered a theory that caught on for two centuries (and still draws white-robed believers to the site at the midsummer solstice). For them Stonehenge was a Temple of the Druids. Stonehenge has long held sway over the archaeologist, the mystic, the astronomer and the poet, and a large part of its fascination for the individual observer is that it still evokes such a wide range of feeling and thought. In the photographs of Barry Brukoff and the words of John Fowles, Stonehenge is explored from every curious angle: the stone monument woven with light and sky lays down its challenge to our knowledge and our imagination as it has to generations before us. There is the intellectual miracle that the builders may have detected the moon's long cycle 2000 years before the Greeks; the work miracle of transporting the huge stones; the mystery of why the architecture of Stonehenge is unique of its kind; and countless other puzzles. .