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Stonehenge

Stonehenge lintel holes

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slumpystones S
slumpystones Jan 3, 2007 23:04:28
Replying to nigelswift

nigelswift wrote:
I doubt the structure of the chalk blocks at the top of the mound would take the weight.

I think that's true. Plus, there is no evidence of holes. But its a fantasy I'm very reluctant to abandon as Stonehenge is currently ill-placed and out of scale, lost in the landscape, and Silbury is currently a very unsatisfying ungainly lump, screaming to be complete. Yet both would achieve aesthetic perfection if unified...

Silbury incomplete ? Hmmm, an interesting concept, faced with the sheer size of it, that you'd get all the way to the beginning of the hard bit and give up.

Or maybe it was a union issue ?

"Drag them things up there? You got to be jokin' mate - we're on time-an-'alf as it is, we'd want at least another bluestone chip each before we start, and then there's yer oxen - don't climb up 'ills that well, them oxen. Okay on a slope, but up that thing ? Now if you'd said all this at the beginning, we wouldn't have used chalk for a start, and we'd 'ave have made it 'alf as 'igh and twice as wide..."

N nigelswift
nigelswift Jan 4, 2007 10:45:50
Replying to slumpystones

Silbury incomplete ? Hmmm, an interesting concept...

Well, of course the top could have been sliced off subsequently for some reason, but assuming that isn't so then I'd say yes, definitely incomplete. Why? Because it just looks that way - quite offensive in fact, like a snail bereft of its shell. Its not a huge assumption to think that the builders probably shared our sense of what looks right, ergo...

L Littlestone
Littlestone Jan 4, 2007 11:02:26
Replying to slumpystones

Silbury incomplete ? Hmmm, an interesting concept, faced with the sheer size of it, that you'd get all the way to the beginning of the hard bit and give up.
Unless I'm mistaken, Nigel is saying that Silbury was once complete, with a Stonehenge-like structure (or Stonehenge itself?) on the top; he'll correct me if I'm wrong about that but it's certainly how I imagine Silbury may have once looked. Silbury's original height has almost certainly been reduced somewhat and that might account for the lack of evidence of a structure once being there.