For more than 800 years, prehistoric people in southern Britain had used the exposed site on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire —today known as Stonehenge — as a place for their rituals. Over those eight centuries two circular banks of earth had been built and two incomplete circles of stones had been erected.
But in about 2000 BC, the most challenging task was still ahead. It was then that workers began the job of erecting the largest structures of Stonehenge — the five trilithons forming a horseshoe at the centre of the circle. Each consists of two 50 ton upright stones around 20ft (6m) high with a 7 ton stone resting across the top.
To set the first upright in the ground, the men dug a pit 8ft (2.4m) deep with one sloping side. They shifted the soil using deer antlers as picks and ox shoulder blades as shovels. Then they hauled the first 50 ton stone into position on wooden rollers, so that one end hung over the sloping wall of the pit. Dozens of men struggled to raise the other end of the stone. They levered it up with long wooden poles, and pushed logs underneath to support it and provide a fulcrum for the poles. As more and more logs were jammed under the stone, it began to tilt, until at last it slid off the logs and down the sloping side of the pit. The huge stone must have thudded with tremendous force into the opposite side of the hole, which had been lined with wooden stakes to prevent it collapsing.
Ropes made from strips of animal hide and plant fibre was used to haul the stone upright. These ropes were not of uniform strength and probably broke quite often, so to prevent the stone crashing back down, it was supported with wooden props fitted into rope ‘collars’ lashed round its top. As soon as the stone was upright, workers packed soil, logs and stones round the base. On the flat tops of the uprights, the stonemasons had left small protruding knobs These were for fitting into a hollow ground out of the lintel (the crosspiece), to create a mortise-and-tenon joint. Raising a 7 ton lintel some 20ft (6m) to onto its pair of uprights was probably the most dangerous and demanding job in building Stonehenge. Most likely, each lintel was raised on a bed of logs, each end of the lintel being levered up alternately while logs were pushed under it.
In this way, a wooden tower was built up under a lintel until it was level with the top of the upright stones and could be levered into position. At least 250 logs, each 6m long, would have been needed for the tower’s construction.
Picture Credit : Google
