to bails you out present opinion is that the trilthons are in imitation of carpentry joints

If You want the absolute truth..

Then....

Nobody has a clue...

Tony

hmmmm .... "why" .... er ... good question. Dunno!

I thought it was to turn a run of the mill bluestone threshing machine into a state of the art Salisbury wind driven grinding machine ;)

Or did someone else already come up with this idea?

Ayup & welcome! We all started somewhere!

There are loads of theories, but as others have said, nobody don't knows - especially why it's the only one. (There have been claims that a cuppla others had at least one 'lintel'-type arrangement but as far as I know, the evidence was pretty non-existent).

There are loads of theories of what Stonehenge was for, and many of those involve the lintels. They range from the very plausible (for example, to create a lightbox arrangement for the sun and/or moon at the solstices) to the (to most people) completely ridiculous (I'm not getting into those!!!) and every point inbetween (for example, that it had a roof).

Have a google of it! ;^)

love

Moth

Hi sleeptowin.
As you'll have gathered, no-one knows the answer but my theory is that it wasn't the only one but all the others were wood and rotted away.

If you look at the lintels you'll see they each have 2 different classic carpentry joints in 4 different positions, AND they're curved. Ideal for a small wooden structure with tight joints but a bit mad for huge and very hard stones. Also, a pointless design because unlike in wood there was no way the joints could be made tight fitting or have dowels inserted. It looks like a show-off piece rather than a well-designed one.

The cromlechs are roofed, don't forget - just differently. The stone doorways of Stonehenge echo some bits of Egyptian architecture of a similar age. This suggests that the architects were aware of what the Egyptians were doing and copied it (slightly).