Stonehenge By Jacquetta Hawkes

One of my favourite authors is Jacquetta Hawkes, an archaeologist who not only loved the ancient world but described it with extraordinary imagination, here she writes of Stonehenge...

The traveller who wishes to approach Stonehenge most fittingly should keep along this road, crossing the little river Till at Winterbourne Stoke. As he reaches the quiet crossroads on the summit, he will be on the edge of one of the greatest, and certainly the richest, congregation of burial mounds in all Britain. Here was a kind of vast scattered cemetery on ground hallowed by its proximity to the renowned sanctuary. Barrows cluster round Stonehenge on all sides - 300 0f them - but here to the west is the greatest concentration and the area most sequestered from the blighting military activities of Amesbury........
When the ritual and whatever it accompaniment may have been of masks, effigies and offerings have vanished so long ago, when there is no stir left of emotion and the ghosts which emotion keeps alive, when the verypeople responsible for raising these mounds have been overwhelmed, absorbed and forgotten, then their detailed study can become lifeless enough.
Better perhaps to look at them with knowledge but with knowledge unexpressed, these round barrows that are like the floating bubbles of events drowned in time.
Away to the right of the road the bubbles ride the downs in lines and clusters. First on Normanton Down immediately above Stonehenge where some of the richest burials of the Wessex invaders have been uncovered, then further away the great conglomerations of Wilsford and Lake. So we approach Britain's most famous prehistoric monument through crowding satellites attracted towards it by the magnetism of its own holiness......
...... Stonehenge is concentrated into a very small space and as a result it seems to have grown upwards. Partly because of this concentration colour plays a great part in the architectural quality of the sanctuary. The huge blocks of sarsen are a pale silver grey and in many lights they stand out with a strange pallor against the duler tones of the downs, an effect seen with heightened intensity in Constable's marvellous painting of the stones enveloped in storm-clouds.
.......We may feel that publicity has destroyed the spirit of this too famous building; yet once among the stones all but the most stubborn resistant moods must surrender to their power.
The massive, roughly squared blocks of sarsen seem to possess a forceful presence which asserts itself within the human consciousness. Their silver grey colour fills the eye but now shows itself to be variegated with dark lichens and with the shadow of the grotesque fissures and hollows worn by centuries of rain and frost.....

Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales - Jacquetta Hawkes 1951