However, Stonehenge means more questions than answers...
Which race created Stonehenge? Why, when and where have they gone? Why there are so incredibly few remains found from them? We know that it was used as a Druid temple, but the stones of Stonehenge had been standing two thousand years by then and were probably already in ruins. Somebody else had to invent and build it. The Megalithic People, as the unknown race is called, didn't leave us almost anything except mysterious erected stones. Though not knowing how to write they had to have large abstract knowledge of prehistoric mathematics, geometry, astronomy and maybe also geodesy - it is proved that whole system wouldn't have worked in any other latitude. The scientists presume that the constructors' lore was enshrined in a series of interminable verses, which a novice might take up to twenty years to learn by heart...
And it's only the first part of the mystery. The second bunch of unanswered questions pops into your mind when you realize the huge size and unbelievable weight of used stones and their transport.. The fantastic theories and myths solve the problem using extraterrestrials or Cyclopes. Or - or the Devil, as one of local legends says:
"Stonehenge was built by the Devil in a single night. He flew backwards and forwards between Ireland and Salisbury Plain carrying the stones one by one and setting them in place. As he worked, he laughed to himself: "That will make people think. They'll never know how the stones came here!" But a friar was hiding in a ditch nearby. He surprised the Devil, who threw a stone which hit the friar on the heel."
I'm not sure the friar survived it since the Heel Stone is much taller than I am, and weighing at least twenty tonnes - it marked the original approach to Stonehenge. But as the geologists discovered, the stones weren't brought from Ireland. Eighty stones of certain kind (bluestones) were brought from 240 miles (385km) distant Preseli Mountains in Wales and used as lintels; each weighing seven tonnes. In Marlborough Downs, which is about 20 miles (30km) far from Stonehenge, were mined another eighty stones of other kind (sarsens) and other weight - each was weighing about twenty-five tonnes. Thirty of them were erected and thirty lintels were put onto them in main circle which has 100ft (30m) in diameter. The heart of the monument - the five sarsen trilithons, also from Marlborough, are weighing each up to forty-five tonnes!
Professor R.J.C.