The (First) Book That I Read about Stonehenge After Visiting Stonehenge

Here's my latest Goodreads review, with some blog-only bonus content!

Stonehenge: Making Sense of a Prehistoric Mystery by Mike Parker Pearson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked up this book after a visit to Stonehenge, wanting a deep dive that was also accessible to me with my novice, non-science background. I won’t say that absolutely none of the book was over my head, but overall it was exactly what I wanted. Pearson does go into a lot of depth, but he defines all his terms, provides a lot of background, includes numerous diagrams and other illustrations, and overall builds geographic, cultural, and historical context as he writes about the history, archaeology, and perceptions over time of Stonehenge.

I see now that Pearson has written several other books, all of which look more in-depth than this one, so I think I made a good choice for a first text on Stonehenge (other than The History of the Kings of Britain, of course, which clearly explains the origin of Stonehenge in its present location). I’m looking forward to reading Pearson’s other books and following the references that I flagged in this book. I’ve already followed up on one mention, Star Carr, and found myself signing up for a four-week MOOC about the site!

If you don't make a gingerbread model of something, do you even love it?!?

I found the writing about the construction of Stonehenge harder to wade through--so many cremations and pits and barrows and earthworks and putting the stones here and moving them there and adding some more and digging more holes, etc.!--but the conjecture about who made them, why they were made, and what else they were thinking and doing at those times was vivid and easier for me to follow. I was very interested in the brief reference Pearson made to possible execution burials from 400-800; I’ve just finished reading The Sutton Hoo Story: Encounters with Early England, in which he also discusses likely execution burials at the mounds. His theory is that the executed were deliberately buried there because it was an unconsecrated, “pagan” location, which would also make sense for Stonehenge.

Another interesting (to me) conversation between Sutton Hoo and Stonehenge is their different histories of excavation. Although Sutton Hoo had several robberies, resulting in the probable loss of most of its physical artifacts, it’s lucky that its first official excavation wasn’t until the 1800s, and most of the damage that excavation did was having all the ship rivets they uncovered melted down and turned into horseshoes. But Stonehenge, Pearson makes clear, has suffered endless excavations--the first official one was led by King James I!--and therefore who knows what potential discoveries have been lost.

I think I might most enjoy learning about historical depictions and ongoing cultural utilization of Stonehenge, so I’m very glad that Pearson included a history of these in his final chapter. His mention of the Lucas de Heere watercolor (there’s an excellent digital copy of this image on Wikipedia) led me down a rabbit hole of looking up other historical artworks that feature Stonehenge. Now I have quite a mental collection of Stonehenge and quasi-Stonehenge art!

Pearson’s single paragraph on the 1985 Battle of the Beanfield led me down another rabbit hole, and I highly recommend finding the short 1991 documentary, “Operation Solstice,” on YouTube to learn more about it. I was surprised to see how relatively raucous and populated current Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge are, compared to how careful and regimented typical English Heritage-run visits to the site are, and now I’m wondering if there’s a connection between these “New Age travellers” who made up the “Peace Convoy” and current attendees of the Solstice celebrations. Did the free festival people finally get to come back, or are these all-new hippies?

Pearson also covers the history of scientific interpretations of Stonehenge, and I think that these are also fascinating. The more probably wrong they are, the better! Good old Stukeley, theorizing that Stonehenge was a temple for Iron Age druids.

This probably could be the sole book that you read about Stonehenge, and you’d come away with enough understanding of it to make a trip there even more enjoyable, or to monopolize the conversation at your next party, but if you’re very interested in Stonehenge, I think you’re really going to like this as a jumping-off point. Thanks to Pearson’s bibliography and in-text references I’ve got several more books and articles on my reading list now!

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Day 4 in England: Mudlarks and Southwark

The day's agenda:

• 8:30 mudlarking tour with Thames Explorer Trust
• walk across Millennium Bridge
• Borough Market
• Southwark Cathedral
• Tate Modern
• original location of The Globe

Probably the most unhinged thing that I did while planning our trip was make this map. It consists of EVERYTHING that I want to do in England. Like... EVERYTHING. All the forts along Hadrian's Wall. Every castle. Every museum. Isaac Newton's apple tree. All the barrows and standing stones that Google could tell me about (I've since purchased a giant map of the sites of Ancient Britain that will come in handy for my next trip!). All the thrift stores and bakeries and curry stands. 

So when I was planning out our days, if we had a specific place that we were definitely going to be on a specific day, like our tickets to Six or our special tour of Stonehenge, I could then look on my map and easily see all the stuff I wanted to see near that area, or stuff that would be on the way to or from that place. 

That's how our mudlarking excursion on this day would lead right into spending the rest of the day in Southwark: they're neighbors!

Mudlarking is now officially one of the best things that I've done in my LIFE. For a two-week trip, England now holds quite a lot of my most favorite memories!

This two-hour mudlarking tour with Thames Explorer Trust was fortunate in timing, early enough that after it was over we still had nearly the entire day to spend in Southwark; it was less fortunate in regards to the fact that I, personally, got absolutely pig-filthy while larking around in the mud, and had to spend the rest of the day looking at Jackson Pollock paintings and buying fancy doughnuts in pants with muddy knees.

Our tour met at the Millennium Bridge obelisk, where the tour guide took us through the history of England from Neolithic times, showing us mudlarked finds to illustrate her history. We saw Neolithic artifacts, bones, pipes, fossils, and pottery from the Roman, Medieval, Tudor, Elizabethan and more more modern periods, all of which helped us know what to look out for when did our own mudlarking. Bartmann jugs from Germany are tan with a speckled brown glaze, even if you don't get part of a face. Clay pipe stems are older the thicker they are, and they used to be essentially disposable so there are literally millions of them on the banks now. Medieval pottery is also quite thick, and often--but not always--has a green glaze. Roman roof tiles could have evidence of charring from the Great Fire, or, rarely, could have the imprint of an animal's paw. Willowware, my favorite, began in the Victorian period but never stopped being produced so could be quite modern. 

We were in the location of the former Trig Lane, an area that has been in heavy commercial use since at least Roman times. In the 70s an excavation uncovered an entire Medieval quayside that proved its popularity for small boats... which probably explains the thousands of pipe stems on the shore! Tobacco was expensive but clay pipes were cheaply made, so often the pipes were considered single-use, packed with just a bit of tobacco and discarded when done. Pubs would have pipes for patrons to use, and it was considered sanitary to nip the tip of the pipe stem off with every use so that your lips wouldn't touch where someone else's lips had been. 

Here are some of the pipe stems I found:

Look how narrow! A wire was pushed through the hand-rolled clay to create this channel.

The "best" finds are the longest pipe stems, or ideally a complete pipe with an intact bowl. Later pipes had maker's stamps that can be used to date them. The teenagers with their sharp teenager eyes found some pipes with partial bowls, but I was ecstatic with every single utterly basic pipe stem fragment that I found. 

Below, I've got a fragment of a Bartmann jug, a bit of pipe stem, a piece of Willowware, two pieces of Medieval pottery with the green glaze, and a piece whose provenance I can't recall, but I do remember our guide showing me that it's the lip of a vessel, with a gap through the middle where the edge of the clay was folded under:

The college student has some lovely bits of Medieval pottery... and a sheep's tooth!

There were a LOT of animal bones on the foreshore, speaking to the area's history--where better to slaughter animals than a riverbank, where the blood can just wash away? The teenager immediately dove right in and settled into making decorative piles of bones. She thoughtfully even brought the nicest ones to me to admire!

You can sometimes find cut marks in the bones, because of COURSE the best part of a bone is the delicious marrow inside!

To show you the treasures that we were walking on, I zoomed in on this photo in Photoshop and circled every artifact I could see. Most are pipe stems, of course, but I also saw part of a pipe bowl, a piece of a Bartmann jug, more Willowware, some pottery I can't identify but that has embellishment... and, of course, consider that I barely know what I'm looking at, so what other treasures did I miss!

This is why the advice given by serious mudlarkers is to settle down and spend time closely examining one small area. I was WAY too excited to do that, and was pretty much in roomba-mode the entire time. 

More finds!

Some Roman and some Willowware, along with a couple of pieces I don't know.

Here's our tour guide helping the college student identify some of her finds:

One time, she picked an object out of my hand and threw it down the shore. "Asbestos," she said.

Another time, she told me that what I had thought was a marble was actually a MUSKET BALL!!! It was too good for me so she kept it, and I didn't realize until hours later that I hadn't even taken a photo of it! So guess who bitched for the ENTIRE rest of the England trip about the time our tour guide stole my musket ball and I didn't even take a photo? 

She also handed out this ID guide for us to use. No musket balls, but it did help quite a bit with the pottery:

We mudlarked our way steadily east--

I love the Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern in the background!

--until we came to our turnaround point, Queenhithe, where you can see this Anglo-Saxon dock at low tide:

You're not allowed to mudlark in that area, so we started mudlarking our way back again:

I did not keep track of time AT ALL, and finally our guide had to tell us that we were the last people left on the shore, and the tide was coming in quickly. Oops!

After climbing back up the Trig Lane Stairs, we took a quick peek at St. Paul's Cathedral--

--then walked across the Millennium Bridge to Southwark:

I was most excited about seeing Southwark Cathedral, but my family of hungry raccoons was most excited about Borough Market!

Here's a couple who went to Borough Market on a day that was a LOT less crowded than the day we went...

I'm super jealous of them, because we barely had space to move of our own volition in Borough Market! In each aisle there was a crowd going one way and a crowd going the opposite way, and you just sort of nudged yourself into one of the crowds and let it carry you along. 

We still ate, though! We bought a loaf of bread--

--pain au chocolat--

--more bread--

--veggie pies--

--and the teenager even found the specific doughnut place that's gone viral on Tiktok:

Sitting on the filthy ground in a parking lot, with our backs to some construction fencing... you know, as you do!

And then FINALLY, when even the most crowd-tolerant of us had grown frustrated and claustrophobic, we went to look at Southwark Cathedral!

Statue of Minerva in the foreground

I didn't go inside even though I'd have liked to have seen John Gower's tomb, but I DID spend quite a lot of time pretending to start my Canterbury pilgrimage from here:

Shall we ride donkeys to Canterbury together? We can entertain ourselves by telling tales!

On a previous trip to England, Matt and I had LOVED the Tate Modern, so we were both excited to see it again. I think we were all really worn out from the mudlarking and the traipsing through Borough Market, though, because none of us were really into it on this trip. We wandered a bit and saw some famous artists--

--but the only thing I was really revved up about seeing was this genuine Gee's Bend quilt!!!

I don't think I've ever seen one in real life before! Aolar Mosely pieced and quilted the above log cabin quilt, and her daughter, Mary Lee Bendolph, pieced and quilted the basket weave quilt, below:

I love how the techniques are similar enough to speak to each other, but the look is so different. 

You can graduate the homeschooler from the homeschool, but you cannot graduate the homeschooler from sitting herself down at the preschool art table every place she sees one:

For a change, we didn't close this museum down--instead, we went to the Marks and Spencer Simply Food for more noms--Cadbury Popping Jellies! Chocolate-covered ginger Borders! Rekorderlig Strawberry-Lime ciders! Haribo Tangtastics!--then sat and people-watched and passed judgment on the traffic while we ate popsicles. I don't know why I kept getting the Twister because I didn't really like it, but it kept looking so delicious on the package!

We were all more than ready to take the bus back home, but fortunately the last stop on my wish list was just down the steps from the bus stop, across the street from a construction site, and on the other side of a locked gate...

It's Shakespeare!

This private courtyard between two apartment buildings is the original site of Shakespeare's Globe. We'd walked past the reconstructed Globe, just a few blocks to the Northwest, a few times that day. I'd looked into getting us tickets for a performance, because Matt and I saw Hamlet there 20+ years ago and it was EPIC, but I didn't think the kids would like the current show and that would spoil the whole concept of Shakespeare for them.

Right now they're doing A Midsummer Night's Dream, which the kids would have freaking LOVED. Grr!!!

Aww, look at us clinging to the bars like old-fashioned zoo monkeys. We wanted IN!!!

This day felt sooo long, and I was frankly also VERY excited about our bus, because it was the same bus that stops right by our AirBnb, which means NO transfers!!! It was a 45-minute trip, sure, but with no transfers we could plop ourselves down on the top level of our double-decker bus and sightsee (or, let's be real here, nap) the whole way back.

Here's our trip so far!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!