Tim Adams writes:

Among the many treasures in the British Museum’s forthcoming Stonehenge exhibition is a collection of carved and polished spherical stones, each about the size of a cricket ball. The stones are 5,000 years old and have mostly been found singly in Scotland. The most famous of the 400 or so discoveries is a beautiful polished black sphere from Towie, Aberdeenshire, with three bulbous surfaces, tactile as a miniature Henry Moore. The sphere is carved with precise geometric whorls and spirals. In common with the much weightier neolithic monuments that the Stonehenge exhibition celebrates, the longer you look at the stones, the more mysterious they seem: what and why and how?

If the answers to those questions remain unknowable, one thing that the balls – and the culture that prized them – make clear is their creators were people of enormous curiosity and skill, prepared to invest untold hours in making a perfect object, because they could. They were connoisseurs of stone.

I was thinking about the ancient magic of those finds, and their more spectacular counterparts, while driving across Salisbury Plain early one morning last week in the company of Neil Wilkin, the curator of the British Museum’s World of Stonehenge show. With a trace of moon still evident, a thin mist lying in the valleys, and the morning light just beginning to ink in the curves of hills, this landscape can hardly have changed – the A303 and firing ranges apart – since the bluestone and sarsen boulders of the monument were first raised. The 300 sq miles of Salisbury Plain is the largest area of chalk grassland in northern Europe. Its rolling flatness and enormous skies demand some verticality, like the surface of the moon demanded a flag; Stonehenge is, among other things, a monument that gives a sharp sense of identity to the landscape around it.

It is, as images ingrained on our collective retina insist, also a place made for sunrise (probably, in terms of its celebrated alignment with the arc of the sun at winter and summer solstice, literally so). On the morning we visited, in common with more than one million mornings before, the silhouettes of the oldest stones came more alive in the light and glow of a wintry dawn, borrowing the pinks and golds of the horizon. In this period of managed access to the site, to be in among the megaliths, in the absence of tourist crowds, felt like a lifetime privilege; in the quiet of the breaking morning, the building feels as it must always have felt, like an awesome natural receptacle for the new day, a singular earthly welcome to the returning sun. It is designed to experience rather than to share: from within the double circle you can capture parts of the ruin, without ever getting the whole in your camera frame. “Why are there so many doors?” the writer John Fowles once heard a schoolboy ask. As the Stonehenge show will illuminate, those doors open up the time and space beyond the monument in multiple different ways. [Continue reading…]