Stonehenge and its Environs forum 134 room
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I thought it was rubbish. All that stuff about 'healing'. Pah! I suspect that a huge proportion of the population at that time had chronic injuries and disease of one kind or another.

Anyone who has visited any part of the world where access to the kind of health care we enjoy is either limited or non-existent knows that chronic injuries and disease are still common and everyday among vast swathes of those populations.

Yes, people chip off bits of stone from sacred monuments, but that doesn't account for the many chips of bluestone found in the pit. If you were chipping bits off the stones you'd take them away with you not let them fall.

It was all conjecture based on *nothing*.

Very disappointed.

I'd have to agree, and add -
1. There was no mention of all the local graves that we'd heard had bluestones in.
2. The only one that had a few flakes in was in the ditch - hardly a surprise since there were thousands in the central area,

On the hand, if you ignore the chippings, it's quite plausible the place attracted long distance pilgrims who believed it would heal them (inter alia). Lourdes attracts more people from far away all over Europe than other purely "religious" sites.

That's just conjecture as well, but at least it fits very comfortably with how people act even today. Taking chips away yet leaving thousands doesn't. I give you the Dutch and Croatian metal detectorists that have been hard at work in English fields this very weekend as an illustration. They'll snaffle everything they find, not leave some.

See how I did that?! ;)

Agreed.

I got the impression that they'd thought of the healing idea before they did anything else and tried to make everything fit in to that.

Quite disappointing really.