Over at National Geographic's "All Terrain" blog, Tom Zeller has a neat post up about his recent visit to Stonehenge:
It was a spirited evening at the Woodbridge Inn pub that adjoins the field where the Stonehenge Riverside Project has erected, just north of Upavon, its tent city staging area–a veritable Woodstock of campsites housing over 130 students, archaeologists, assorted volunteers and other academics of varying stripes. (…)
Stonehenge really is something to behold. Whatever the site's purpose–and this has been a matter of wide, and wild, speculation–the sheer size of the stones (the heaviest are estimated to weigh-in at about 45 tons) and the distance from which they came (the larger stones were brought from Marlborough Downs, about 19 miles away; the smaller Bluestones from the Preseli Mountains of Wales–some 240 miles off) conjure a frightening, slow, and surely sometimes painful dedication to purpose, considering the lack of modern hydraulics.
