Stonehenge Car Park Post Holes forum 3 room
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Could start with the landscape, in the beginning there was nothing, then someone came along and created a monument,(wood or stone)making a place in space. Once something has been created it takes on ancestral form in the minds of later people..Neolithic longbarrows focus their attention on the dead - their creators. What you see round Stonehenge, Avebury, Knowlton Henges and the Mendips are great sacred or ritual landscapes. People gathering, bringing their dead, slowly this landscape gathers its history and its forms and shape - cursuses, standing stones, circles, longbarrows and round barrows; the focus of religion may change (its not all to do with alignments on sun,moon and mountain) but the evidence is always littered in the landscape. Pryor calls it Land of the Living and Land of the Dead - two landscapes, one practical the other symbolic. Modern man has lost the ability to live in this symbolic world of nature, our knowledge of what the word sun or moon means is tarnished by the technical and scientific evidence of today; their viewpoint would have been totally different..... so their would have been linking factors between the great post holes in the carpark and Stonehenge itself, its just difficult I suppose to find a continuing pattern of evidence of settlement. Why for instance did the bluestones come from Preseli Mountains, someone suggested it was a sort of DIY stone circle transported because the stone was particularly magical but they could have been brought by the clan or tribe who originated in Wales.. wittering as usual...

>> then someone came along and created a monument,(wood or stone)making a place in space.


Did 'places in space' not exist before man made them? Surely, long before man decided to mark a place, Nature had marked so many already. Great hills; rocky outcrops; waterfalls. All magical, all special and without man's intervention.

Then, before cirles of stone or treetrunks were first erected there were the forest clearings, some natural, some man-made. The sacred grove survived into the first millenium in the UK (or so Claudius et al tell us.) Woodhenges were surely weak facsimiles of the original groves, built in areas that were perhaps treeless, or perhaps built to make humanity's first attempt at taking control from Nature. No longer were Nature's temples good enough. Now temples were needed where man wanted them, maybe through practicallity, maybe because of a significant solar/celestial event that needed to be marked or honoured.