Stonehenge with Ken Follett

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A few years back, for instance, it was revealed that the great sarsen stones that define Stonehenge, each weighing about twenty five to thirty tons, came from the Marlborough Downs, roughly fifteen miles away. But how exactly these Stone Age people went about transporting those massive blocks remains debated. Living in a world long before written history, it is amazing to think about who these people were. Builders of Stonehenge.

How did they view the world around them? What drove them to undertake such a project? To transport these massive stones over twenty kilometers and set them up at Stonehenge? How might they have done it?

It's this mysterious world that is the setting for the newest historical novel by one of Britain's most cherished writers, Ken Fodder. Now a few weeks back, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ken all about this novel, Circle of Days, shining a light on the people themselves, the Stone Age men and women who made and used Stonehenge. Welcome to the ancients. Ken, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today.

and in a sense all of it is speculation, but some of it's m soundly based, and some of it is in the book. A little of it is my imagination.

Because there were no metal tools, as you mentioned, there's no metal at all. So their only cutting implement was a flint. That was used to cut down trees. because that was all they had. It was used to cut anything they wanted to cut, the joint of meat or crops or anything. So for me, that was like the first thing that gave me the clue to life in the Stone Age.

because we find these flints. They're two a penny. I mean I wouldn't have one on my desk if they were seriously rare. But there are different qualities of flint. And the best flint is found underground. This is one of the things I first learned about researching this book.

The best flint is underground. The kind of flint that you can find just lying around in the fields and so on. I live in Hertfordshire, there's quite a lot of flint in Hertfordshire. In fact the barn attached to my house is built of flint. But that flint is not really good enough for tools. And the best flint is found underground, so there are flint marks.

And in England you can visit them. There's a place called Grimes Graves, which is a historical site, and you can go down the Flynn Mine, and it's very like a coal mine. The coal mines of course did actually go down a heck of a long way, about thirty feet down. You can go about thirty feet down. And then there's a layer of this very beautiful black flint. That they chopped up. And it's much better to sharpen. If you take a flint from the field and try and sharpen it, it'll quite often break.

But the flint from underground is much easier to work. So this is just like a coal mine. There's a shark And then tunnels radiating out. from the shaft at the bottom. And this was the only industry in the Stone Age. And these flints were terrifically valuable. They tell us a bit about the Stone Age. Because look These guys, the guys who dug the shafts and mined the flints, you can't eat the flints. So they must have traded them.

for what they needed to live, food and clothing and leather for their shoes and so on. That tells us that there was some kind of organized trade in the Stone Age, something that we might not necessarily have known otherwise.

This is a time long before the written word comes to Britain. That part of it is much more invisible. But the archaeology, places like Grimesgraves and so on can give us amazing insights into things like as you say, a stone age industry centered around that wonder material of the time, Flint, which was used for so much and so many different tasks.

Because, as I'm sure you know, and when archaeologists dig down in what's called a midden, which is actually full of Stone Age poo. It uh it's not actually stinky, it's just like Earth. It doesn't have any bacteria left because it's been there for four thousand five hundred years.

But they can examine it and obviously it shows them what food was eaten. So we know, for example, that they were carnivores. They ate a lot of pork and quite a lot of beef and lamb, and that's why I think But there must have been a lot of grazing in the stoner.

And I set circle of days around not just at Stonehenge, but all around Stonehenge. Because the thing about Stonehenge is that the soil is not very good for cultivation. And even today there are not many farms. On Salisbury Plain, there are not many farms. one or two particularly in the river valleys, where the soil is better, but for most of the soils to be plain, you can't farm it and so it was grassland.

You could certainly keep cattle and sheep. You can keep pigs anywhere, of course. They seem to find food anywhere they are, but actual grazing animals. So of course that sort of fits, doesn't it? Because you've got a vast plane. It's something like three hundred square miles, Soresbury Plain. room for a jolly good herd of cattle and sheep and so on, and at one end of it, this monument that must have been built by people who were so well off for pork and lamb that they actually had time

to erect this enormous monument. Of course that's one of the questions is how they had time. I think the answer is because they were pretty well off. Then of course there's the question, if they had a bit of spare time You know, you could have uh gone for a swim or or gone for a walk with your girlfriend, but they decided to do something that must have seemed pretty near impossible.

Because we've got the farmland in the river valleys and we've got the grassland for grazing. And if you look at Salisbury Plain, even today there's still quite a lot of woodland there. And that's interesting because a certain amount of drama comes out of the fact that one of these groups is doomed. Okay. In the world today there are very, very few hunter-gatherers left. This was not the best way of life. They lasted a long time, but they have almost died out.

But then you've got the graziers, the herders, and on the other hand, the farmers. And you know, traditionally There has always been tension. between farmers and graziers. But graziers consider that the whole world is there. The grass is there.

And so I could put my cattle there and the farmers like I'm planting seeds on that piece of land, say the farmers. And we all know about this because it was that was the real tension in the Wild West. We've seen these movies about conflict between the ranchers. and the farmers. And I think something like that must always go on where those two groups are living close together. And so from the point of view of a storyteller like me, if there's conflict, there's a story to tell.

Even to people who, you know, who work with animals, one cow can look a bit like another, and how to prove that it was yours now later in human history? ways were devised of putting your mark on livestock to show that it was yours. And nowadays, for example, you quite often see a symbol painted in red paint on a sheet.

fleece. That's to indicate who that sheep belongs to. And with cattle, of course, they can be branded, which is to put a mark on them on the hide with a hot iron. And they didn't have any iron. This is the Stone Age. So they can't brand the cattle and they didn't really have any paint. They used a little bit of ochre as a dye, but you know, you would have needed gallons of paint to identify uh, you know, thousands of Livestock. So it seemed to me that they must have been communally owned.

And that, of course, no, you look at the way people make their living and stay alive, and that tells you a bit about what culture they must have. So they must have had something of a sharing culture, if they were herdsmen. And of course the farmers did not have to have that.

As it's easy to demark, you know, this is my cornfield and my pasture and so on. Farmers sometimes have some things in common, but generally speaking they know what's theirs. So there are probably two different cultures there.

And archaeologists are very clever people, and they find these post holes and they'll find four at the corners of a rectangle, or maybe six. and then no more for a few feet. So they say, okay, this was a house, they say. Now, I think that's pretty smart of them, and if there are six post holes that are in a rectangle, Then it's a bigger house. Most of the Stone Age settlements show really quite small houses with something like four posts.

So we guess that the rest of the house, probably the walls, were wattle and daub, which is the simplest way to build a wall. The wattle is flexible branches from trees, which can be bent a little bit. and can be interwoven to make a big patch. And the daub is the mud that you stick on this and in the holes, which serves first of all to keep it all stuck together and secondly

to keep the drafts out. So there's nothing left of those. So those are the houses. They're pretty small. They might have had mattresses probably made of leather stuffed with straw. I say made of leather, because although they've probably had weaving, and I've learned recently that there are some Stone Age loom weights or at least objects that look like loom weights and seem to be dated to the Stone Age.

But weaving at that level is very arduous and takes a long time. So th you wouldn't have much of it. And so leather would have been their preferred fabric,'cause they had plenty of that. If they had two thousand cows, you know. So they probably did have something other than the bare floor to lie down on. But they didn't have many possessions. If you look around your house

I mean you've got cupboards and bookshelves and fridges and drawers and you might even have a garden shed with tools in it. We've got millions of possessions and they probably didn't have very many in the stuff. a cooking pot, which of course would have been pottery rather than metal, and bowls and cups perhaps. And that would have been about it. So they didn't need very big houses.

And they're gathering around and that sharing of knowledge between them and just trying to reimagine what it might have been like, the kind of the telling of stories.

what they believed in, what they believed the world was like beyond the plane as well. You know, that sense of mystery that surely was there for these people and those things that they might well have believed in, whether it was linked to the land that they were farming, or the animals that they were herding that were central to their ways of life as well, or the mysterious world that lay much further beyond the extent of the Great Plain, of Salisbury Plain, for instance.

long before they were ever written down. So it seemed to me quite likely that in the Stone Age this tradition might well have begun Part of the reason why early stories like the Iliad and Gilgamesh, part of the reason why they're poems, is that makes it easier to remember them. Ac mae'n credu, mae'n credu, mae'n credu, mae'n credu, mae'n credu.

that the earliest stories were in that form. They were poems that some people learned. Of course it was a folk art, because everybody who decided to become a poet would change and improve the story. The only kind of really popular folk art nowadays is dirty jokes. If you think about a dirty joke, you hear one, you think it's funny. When you tell it to somebody else, you improve it, don't you?

Or you change it. Or if you're not very good, then you you make it worse, but you try to make it better. So that's a real folk art. There are no professional practitioners. Every practitioner just alters it in any way he sees fit. So I guess that in the Stone Age, there must have been some kind of troubadours who had good memories. It probably was a father to son thing, or perhaps mother to daughter. They'd no reason why they should have been men in the Stone Age.

and it was passed down your parents told these stories. You heard the story so often, practically every night you sat next to your parent and heard this. So that after a few years you'd know it. And when he died you could carry on the business, as it were. And the other thing about that is the only way they can to transmit knowledge from generation to generation was in this way. It couldn't be written down.

And there was, as far as we know, no organised body of knowledge. It must have all been learned by rote for somebody to repeat. And it seems to me very likely that that was the way of passing knowledge down from generation to generation. Knowledge and of course superstition. I mean stories about

ghosts and gods, I mean we don't know what they had, but they'll be something of that kind, zombies or fairies, or elves and gnomes. You can make it up because it's very strong tradition that we still have, don't These fairy tales and these stories of the supernatural, it's very strong in our imaginations now. Why do they make zombie films? It's because people love that sort of

But that's actually not the beginning of Stonehenge's story. I mean, what do we actually know about Stonehenge before that point, more than 4,500 years ago?

They're not as big as the triliths, and they're not shaped at all. They're just whacking great stones. How do we know they came from this quarry in Wales? archaeologists can match any stone to where it was in the quarry. That seems kind of miraculous to me, but they do that with great confidence. And so in a sense there's another story to be told about the outer circle, because there's also the question of how did they get there from Wales and why?

Well, you know, the Welsh people just trying to get rid of it or selling it, I don't know. But that outer circle that's a thousand years older is like quite a lot of other stone monuments. in Britain which is it's not shape. Now Stonehenge is the stones are very carefully shaped. They didn't come out of the ground like that.

They're smoothed and they're rectangular and the corners are square. And if you go to other monuments, even other monuments on Salisbury Plain, there are big stones there, but they haven't been shaped like that. Then you've got to remember that what we're looking at today when we go to Stonehenge is a ruin. But originally it was a very tidy design. seventy five stones. There were thirty pairs in a circle, each with a lintel on top, and it was a very neat looking

monument. And this is what the archaeologists have deduced from their digs around there. You know, they dig and they find where other stones, stones other than the ones that are there now, they found where they were in the ground. So Stonehenge is different from any other stone monument in the world in its sophistication and complexity.

But alongside those blue stones, that earlier monument, there would have been wooden structures there too.

we could build something that's going to be there at the end of time. Don't know if they had the concept of the end of time, but they probably had some feeling of that kind. So yes, I think and it's obviously not my theory, it's an archaeological theory. that there was a wooden monument at Stonehenge before there was a stone monument.

But it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say they were and they are absolutely huge. I mean that's why we get that very weird spiritual feeling at Stonehenge when you stand next to those And they are just so massive. It's a bit like when you look at an elephant. Do you know what I mean?

Whenever there's a place where people gather in great numbers, a market grows up. That's observed all over the place. In England, markets always grew up where the cathedrals were built. People come. They come to your town to look at the church and then they want to buy something. And so I think that must have operated in the Stone Age. And we do occasionally, archaeologists do find things like tools or pieces of very unusual carved stone that they are pretty sure come from a thousand miles away.

And that indicates that there must have been some traffic. along long distances in the Stone Age. And so it seems to me that Stonehenge was probably the most impressive religious monument in Europe at the time. And I think people would probably come a long way to see it.

And so that market would have been very valuable to the people who actually lived around Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. So there's a as well as the religious motivation, there seems to me very likely there was a commercial motivation. People will come from hundreds of miles to see this monument and of course the market is held on midsummer day, which is when the largest number of visitors will be there.

I've talked about how frintminers had to exchange their goods. But it's quite likely that there were specialists in things like making shoes. and pottery particularly, pottery very useful. And as well as the flint miners, there were people called flint knappers who had the art of shaping them. Phil Harding showed me how to nap a flint. You have to hit it with a stone.

Another stone, no, it's one stone hitting another, but there's a way to do it that just makes the flint flake until you've got a sharp edge. And he showed me how to do it and I tried it and of course I was a complete duffer at it. It r requires a certain amount of skill. So there were probably people who acquired the rough flint. from the miners and then shaped them until they were nice sharp knives.

that could easily have been there with all these people bartering and so on. And so do you think that is the context in which they then decide to enlarge this great structure with the fetching of these massive stones, the Sarsen stones?

And there is a theory, and it's by no means proved, but I thought it was quite a plausible explanation, which is that the stones helped them. The stones formed a calendar. There are thirty pairs of uprights. They could have been the days in a month. You know, and you can imagine, on Midsummer Day, okay, you put something down by the first stone, and then the next day you move it. And you know, that's a perfectly reasonable way of keeping a calendar in the Stone Age.

It seems to me that they must have done something like that. And that Stonehenge was certainly the most permanent thing in the country, actually. Because, you know, not a it wasn't just a ring of stones, as I mentioned before, it's a ring of very carefully shaped and placed stones. And it'll stay like that. And it it hasn't quite stayed like that till the twentieth century, but it stayed for thousands of years.

Which would have been a big thing, you know, because if it can be altered as a wooden one can, then you get into trouble, aren't you? Somebody's gonna take one of the pillars and use it to start a fire or something.

And they were lying on the ground but somewhat buried in the mud, so they had to clear away the earth all around, and then the next thing to do would have been to get them upright. This must have been pretty difficult. These things weigh twenty five tons. All these people have got is pieces of wood So you must have got an awful lot of people trying to shove bits of wood into the earth underneath the stone and then use those bits of wood as levers to lift the thing up.

And then when you get it upright. You're gonna be awfully careful that it doesn't fall down the other side'cause you have to do it all over again. So it would have to be done very carefully. Now lifting the side of it up, you can imagine just about Lifting it upright the other way, which would have been necessary because of the way it had to travel, if it's thirty feet long, then to get it upright, you've got to be more than thirty feet high.

And if there doesn't happen to be a handy tree, a very big tree, right by this, what are you going to do? There's an archaeological museum down south just beyond Guildford. And I was there and they had a small monolith. It was only about twelve feet high. And nearby on a piece of waste ground I saw an A frame. And I said, What's that for? And they said to me, Well, we used the A frame to lift the monolith upright, on end, as it were, not on its side.

And of course I realised that was the way they must have done it. Nowadays you do it with a crane, wouldn't you? And no problem, you know. But that must have been how they did it in the Stonehenge, because with an A frame, you could tie a rope to the to the stone and drape it over the A frame which is higher than the stone. And then pulled down on it. Now you don't have to get above the stone to lift it.

So no carts. You couldn't even have a cart. So it had to be like a kind of sled. And archaeologists nowadays like to do experiments. And so uh two or three times they've got a group of people together to try and do this, to tie ropes around something very, very heavy. twenty five tons and pull it. And one of the discoveries they made is that you need about two hundred people to do this. So that was a very good marker for me, because that gave me an idea of how many people are needed.

To bring the stone from westwards to Stonehenge. Some of the journey would have been very difficult. In muddy ground, swampy ground. Uphill must have been murder. Two hundred people could pull it on the level, but what happens when you've got a hill? And I think I saw a picture of hunter gatherer types somewhere in the far east.

Might have been Indonesia, and they were moving big stones, not as big as Stonehenge. They were moving them, and what they had done is out of tree trunks and tree branches cut in half, they'd made a sort of corduroy road, and that made the pulling easier.

Now, for the thirty miles from Westwoods to Stonehenge, if they'd w tried to make a thirty mile road, it would have taken all the trees on Stonehenge and more besides. So that wasn't possible. So my idea was that they probably did it for the difficult bit.

that they could manage without completely denuding their habitat. And to be honest, I found myself making stuff like this up from him I mean the corduroy road wasn't really my imagination, it was me seeing something that was done in the twentieth century on the other side of the world and saying, It must have been something like that. But the interesting thing about that is, Tristan, that I was doing what they must have been doing. Because they'd never done this before either.

And so they must have gone to Westwood and looked at as though that's the one we want. Well, how the heck we gonna lift that up? Right. What we need is some levers. Certainly the first time they did it, the whole process must have been one of inventing new things every day.

Moving that massive stone in the first place.

And of course, a lot of the people doing this would have been quite young, adolescents and people in their twenties,'cause there's people are strong at that age. But what fun it must have been. And think of the goings-on overnight, because this would take more than a day. Think of the goings-on over overnight. There would be boys and girls and there would be romances.

And they would sing they would be singing and feasting'cause they had to be fed, and they had to be fed well to do this work. So it would have been like a festival, and perhaps you would have gone there in something of the spirit in which you you might go to a club in London. You're gonna have a good time and who knows, you might meet somebody and fall in love. And

To when it does finally reach the sight of stone henge, Ken, that final making them upright and putting them in place and making them look as they did in their kind of their final dressed form.

Just what it could have been like, what it could have meant to them, how the process may well have unfolded to then see the monument that so many of us recognize, that so many of us love today.

fantastic project that they're involved in is something that happens, as it were, on top of all the usual dramas of every day. There's also, because I think Stone, there must have been some kind of crisis. that also catalyzed the beginning, the construction of Stonehenge, I decided that there might have been a drought.

Now that would be very difficult for herdsmen if the plains dried up and the grass turned yellow and And that's a much more mundane kind of crisis, but I think it might have sort of spurred them on to do something to try and make their lives more stable.

If you want to listen to more episodes about Stonehenge, well we have quite a few in the archive. We have one episode all about Neolithic Stonehenge, what the archaeology has revealed so far with Dr. Sue Greene. That episode is just called Stonehenge. We have also released an episode to align with a previous British Museum exhibition that explored the world of Stonehenge, what we know about the cultures, the people who lived in Western Europe.

at the time that Stonehenge was used, and that episode is called The World of Stonehenge. We'll put a link to that in the show notes too. Now if you have been enjoying the Ancients, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well we'd really appreciate that.

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