The Enigma of Stonehenge

London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. Very Good/Very Good. 1980. First Edition. Hard Cover. Obl 4to 0224016180 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Brown cloth with bright gilt titling on spine.No ownership marks. Numerous colour and b/w photographs.128 pages clean and tight. 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. John Fowles holds that even if we may now scientifically dismiss Stukeley's blinding certainty that Stonehenge was built by the Druids who were the priests of one of the last tribes of Israel, his folly holds the key to all that has subsequently become of Stonehenge in the communal imagination: its symbolic appeal, its Britishness, its refusal to be buried in scientific certainty, its power to haunt us with its insoluble questions. Barry Brukoff's photographs capture this presence and poetry. They evoke feelingly what Fowles calls the two Stonehenges: `the one in stone and the one in the mind'. JOHN FOWLES is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman and Daniel Martin. He has also written the collection of novellas entitled The Ebony Tower and has set out his ideas on life, inspired chiefly by the 5th century B.C. philosopher Heraclitus, in a book called The Aristos. His book Shipwreck is based on the photographs of a family of islanders called the Gibsons who for over a hundred years recorded the sea disasters off the coast of the Scillies, and together with photographer Fay Godwin, he produced the extraordinary study, Islands. BARRY BRUKOFF studied painting, sculpture and design at the Chicago Art Institute. For the last ten years he has worked in San Francisco as an interior designer, furniture designer, photographer and painter and he is President of his own design firm. A one-man show of his paintings and photographs was held in San Francisco in 1978 and exhibitions scheduled for 198o include those at the Photographers' Gallery in London and Nikon House, Rockefeller Center in New York. .