I was watching that programme ‘Secrets of Stonehenge’ the other night although I did miss the first 15 minutes as I thought it was just a repeat of the Time Team Special ‘The Secrets of Stonehenge’. I came in at the point where they were shifting heavy weights along the perfectly formed flat grooved out track-way on stone balls and suggesting that was how the huge megaliths of Stonehenge and Avebury were transported…something we’ve discussed before on a separate thread as I recall. Setting aside the nigh on impossible task of finding a route that was going to avoid ups and downs and negotiating boulders, gulleys or whatever other obstacles turned up along the way for this system to work properly, it got me thinking.
Taking the view which seems popular, that the bulk of the Avebury stones came from the Downs, then ones assumes if you are going to go to the trouble of making this ‘track-way’ to transport the stones, then it would be rather like laying down a railway in similarity. So where would it have started and what route would it have taken is a question I’ve not heard asked before? A popular belief would be that you would remove the track you had just rolled over and place it in front of the one you were currently on but due to the nature of the terrain you would be literally designing each one to fit into the one place, so yes, you would end up with a railway because each section would be so different to the others!! So if that was the case and you were using this track-way for years on end, why have we not detected its route because its path would have had to be cleared and I would have thought still visible?