A commanding voice rang out across Salisbury Plain – ‘PULL!’ – and in the next moment dozens of bodies were moving as one. Heels dug into the muddy ground; hands grasped tightly onto ropes; chests, shoulders, and arms strained in a mighty effort – and slowly, but with increasing momentum, the great limestone monolith began to move.
Specially sourced from a quarry in Purbeck, Dorset, the stone formed the focus of an experimental archaeology project that took place at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre over a chilly March weekend. At four tonnes (equivalent to four family-sized cars) it was small fry compared to some elements of Stonehenge – laser scan estimates suggest that while the smaller sarsen lintels weigh 3.8-6.4 tonnes, the inner horseshoe lintels are 12-18 tonnes, and the largest of the sarsens come to nearly 40 tonnes – but the prospect of moving this modern monolith was not undaunting.
This was not the first project to explore how the stones of Stonehenge could have been transported: Richard Atkinson carried out trials on a related theme in the 1950s, while UCL students experimented with shifting a stone on a wooden sledge in 2016 (CA 318, ‘Sherds’). But this most-recent initiative, undertaken as part of the Stonehenge 100 celebrations (commemorating the centenary of Cecil Chubb giving the monument to the nation in 1918; see end box), set out to explore a specific aspect of the monument’s life.
