ORAL PRESENTATION- STONEHENGE

From crop circles that appear mysteriously over-night all over the
country, such as the Cherhill White Horse, the endless number of
ghost stories and hunted places, to a vast variety of different
monoliths such as Stonehenge, Swinside, Wiltshire or Callanish.
England is truly a magical and mysterious place, with hundreds of
years of history subrounded by a surreal atmosphere. No, I’m not
here to talk about conspiracy theories or alien abductions, I’m going
to talk about Stonehenge, which despite being real, has a
background story that might be hard to believe.
Stonehenge is a prehistoric stone monument, older than the
Pyramids of Giza. It is placed on Salisbury plain in Wiltshire, near
the Avon River. According to researchers the actual Stonehenge is
just 25% of the original monument, meaning that the stones that still
remain in the plain were the centre of a much larger structure, that
was subrounded by multiple concentric circles.
Nowadays, it is difficult to imagine how this circle of stones was
formed, fortunately there are a lot of recreations that can help us get
an overall view of the complex.
First of all, they created a circular ditch with two entrances, each
lined up with the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of
the winter solstice, this is the so-called henge structure. Inside of
this structure, there is the outer ring, made of 60 sarsen stones, 30
of them stood up right and the other 30 laid horizontally on top,
these are called lintel stones. The biggest stones on Stonehenge
are the trilithons, formed by two vertical Sarsens joined by one lintel.
There are five of them and they are situated inside of a blue stones
circle.
These blue stones circle is formed by 56 holes circling the field
inside the circle of sarsen stones, called the Aubrey Circle, these
holes used to be filled with smaller blue stones. This kind of stones
were also used to form a horseshoe within the trilithons. And finally,
there is the altar stone in the middle of the monument.
Archaeologists believe that this great neolithic stone circle has stood
on the plains of England for no less than five thousand years, and its
construction was spread across one thousand years. It is situated in
the middle of the densest complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age
monuments in England, where we can also find Woodhenge and
Superhenge, including several hundred burial mounds.
Everything we know about this strange construction has been
discovered by archaeologists because, as the monument is so old,
we don’t have any written record of its construction or original
purpose.
At the time, we almost certainly know when and where was
Stonehenge constructed, but we still have some unanswered
questions, such as: Why was it constructed, how was it constructed
or who were the people who constructed it.
To answer the first question there are a lot of different assumptions
about what Stonehenge could have been used for. From a cemetery
to a landing ship for alien spacecraft. However, researchers have
recently discovered the actual application of this circle of stones.
Even though the idea of Stonehenge being simply a place of
worship and a burial ground is pretty extended, it has been
demonstrated that it was actually a calendar.
Stonehenge’s real purpose was to serve as a solar calendar based
on a year of 365.25 days, with each of the stones of the large sarsen
circle representing a day within a month. It’s a perpetual calendar
that recalibrates every solstice with the same pair of stones each
year.
There are many significant alignments between the Sun, the Moon
and Stonehenge, but the most striking can only be seen in the
sunrise of the summer solstice, where the sun rises from behind the
hill stone precisely aligned with the avenue and perfectly framed
between what is left of the grand trilithon.
The second question is, until this day, still unknown. Considering
that the stones that were used to build Stonehenge were taken from
140 miles to the West away from Salisbury. How could have some
prehistoric men been able to transport those megalithic blocks that
far away when the wheel was not even invented at that time?
The predominant theory is that the builders used tree trunks to role
the blue stones from Wales to Stonehenge, first transferring them
onto rafts and floating them along the Welsh coast and then up the
river Avon to Salisbury. However, this theory is not possible, as the
wooden rollers would probably not resist the 25 tons of each stone
brought to Salisbury.
However they did it, it must have been so important for them to take
these particular stones to Stonehenge. And that is a mystery
because that does not happen anywhere else at stone circles in the
country, they only come from stone that is found locally. So, why is
Stonehenge special?
The last question we have unsolved nowadays is: Who were these
people? Where do they come from or what were they thinking?
These pending issues indicate that we know very little about our
ancestors and the mysteries they have left behind. And that leave us
with the question: how much do we truly know about our past and
the people we once were?