Nearly 100 henges survive today scattered as far apart as Cornwall and the Orkney Isles. Above all though it is Wessex that henges are to be found including the two most famous of Stonehenge and Avebury. Visitors to Stonehenge always want to know when it was built but it is only in recent year that we have been able to give a date that is near to the actual construction. John Aubrey in the 17th Century ascribed it to the ancient Britons who lived here before the Roman Invasion of 43 AD ; others attributed it to the Danes who followed the Romans; William Stukely in the 18th century got carried away with the idea of druids and started the misconception which is still in much evidence today. The first to establish the correct period was Professor William Gowland who, in 1901, excavated the base of a leaning stone so carefully that he was able to conclude that Stonehenge was in fact built in the transition period between stone and bronze.
When Stonehenge passed into public ownership in 1918 the Society of Antiquarians supported a long campaign of excavations by Colonel William Hawley from 1919 to 1926. Unfortunately Hawley's patient but unthinking digging, only described in the briefest of published summaries meant that a great deal of information had been lost forever. In the late 1940's Professor Richard Atkinson began work on Stonehenge and his first target was to attempt to recapture some of the information that had been lost by Hawley. In 1963 Atkinson was proud to announce that he had indeed managed to clearly understand the sequence of construction of the temple. Stonehenge he concluded was, far from being built at one time, the result of drastic remodelling over a period of 1700 years, straddling the transition from stone age to bronze age.
As a result of the Roman Propoganda against the celtic druids, human sacrifice was taken for granted as actually having happened. And it was through excavation of sites such as Stonhenge that this was indeed proved to be the case. In the open space at the centre of woodhenge, an interesting site with open access just 3Km north-east of Stonehenge, was found a shallow grave of a 3 1/2 year old girl, facing the entrance and the rising sun. Her skull was split in two by an axe.
The late Professor Alexander Thom spent a great deal of his time trying to prove that many of the Temples were built to study solar and lunar astronomy. So well did megalithic man know the stars movements, he concluded, that he could predict which full or new moon would give rise to an eclipse of the sun or moon. Having studied Stonhenge though he could find no distant markers of landmarks which would be required for such a reading of the skies and so he concluded that Stonhenge was more than likely a ceremonial temple rather than being used for accurate observation. Many prominent archaeologists in the 1960's and 70's challenged this theory but as yet no-one has been able to prove otherwise and indeed recent research shows that Stonhenge began as a lunar temple but was later modified for worship of the sun.
