Stonehenge

Now that I’m home from the hospital and recuperating nicely, time to catch up on what we were doing for the few weeks leading up to my operation.

My friend Sarah (who I met in Kenya and subsequently worked with in DC) came out for a visit, so I was able to explore some new parts of England with her. She wanted to go to Stonehenge, a place I had yet to visit, so I was happy to join her for this day-trip from London.

We woke up early and took the train from London’s Waterloo station to Salisbury, about a 2 hour ride. Once we arrived in Salisbury, we paid to take have one of the touristy buses take us out to Stonehenge itself. The mystical monument is only about 25 minutes from the town of Salisbury, but a taxi will charge you £35 for the round-trip ride and doesn’t include the informative and mood-setting dialogue that the £17 tourist bus gave us, so I would definitely recommend the bus choice.

On the way to Stonehenge (“The most impressive stone circle in the world” according to the tour), we learned important information like the fact that it is super old, nobody knows why the hell it exists or who built it, and that its probably not as mystical as all the rumors and folk lore make it out to be. There is little information on Stonehenge not because of its mystical nature, but because its just too old for us to hazard a guess as to its use. I have to say, I was a little disappointed in this aspect of Stonehenge. I would have been much more impressed if they would have just played up to the fantastical rumors. Instead of “early people of England built this stone circle a long ass time ago probably for some boring purpose like a calendar,” I would have liked to have heard “we don’t know why this stone circle is here- it was probably aliens or some kind of druid human-sacrifice altar.” It may be historically inaccurate, but it would have been much more worth the £6 entry fee I paid.

I was also a little disappointed by the scale of Stonehenge. I mean, sure, those rocks are big. I mean, I couldn’t move them and according to our tour the biggest one weights as much as 25 elephants, but they didn’t actually look all that impressive in person. Maybe its because you can’t get that close to them (the circle is fenced off), but pictures I had seen of Stonehenge made them seem much bigger.

The thing I WAS impressed with from Stonehenge is the fact that the stones from the inner circle came from the mountains of Wales- 250 miles away. They managed to move stone pillars weighing nearly 6 tons 250 miles without the use of modern machinery. Historians are still not sure how they did it.

After we finished our tour of Stonehenge, we headed back to Salisbury to explore the town a bit. I would call it a fairly typical British town. One item of note is that the Salisbury Cathedral houses one of the few original copies of the Magna Carta.

So, would I go back to Stonehenge? No, probably not. In the end, it was just kind of underwhelming. I’m glad I saw it once, but that’s definitely all you need. If you have an extra day in London or if you’re driving by Salisbury anyways, it might be worth your trip, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for it. There are much better day trips from London that I would recommend first.