The World Heritage site of Stonehenge is the botched work of cowboy builders who never even completed it, according to paganism historian Professor Ronald Hutton speaking at the Chalke Valley History Festival.
He claimed the acclaimed stone circle on Salisbury Plain was as much “a triumph as a catastrophe” created by a group of people “insane enough to want to try the experiment of working enormous stones as if they were wood”.
He described Stonehenge “a unique and possibly failed experiment” and added: “They pulled it off but they had some bad times along the way.
“When they put up one of those great sandstone blocks in the outer circle, it slipped when it was being put in its hole, fell over and broke in half.
“If you were a decent bunch of builders what you’d do then is, after a great deal of screaming and complaining, chuck the two broken bits away and bring another one intact and do it properly.
“They didn’t. They put one broken bit on top of the other broken bit, jammed a lintel on top and hoped they’d stay together. They didn’t, they fell over quite soon after.
“So these people are working under pressure, they don’t have the resources or the time to get another stone. This is the heart of the disaster that Stonehenge ended up being.
“Because of shoddy or high-pressure, efficiency-gaining, new Stone Age engineering, we have lost the great engineering feat of Stonehenge.”
Nevertheless, Professor Hutton, from Bristol University, admitted that Stonehenge was in fact a triumph “because the darned thing’s still there and it’s the most famous prehistoric monument in the entire world”.
And he revealed another error by the builders resulted in the alignment of stones to the winter solstice being lost.
They had built a trilithon – two large upright stones with a smaller one lying across the top – which was meant to capture the mid-winter sunrise in the same way as the mid-summer sunrise, which is aligned to the avenue that leads into Stonehenge so it is perfectly framed by stones.
One of the upright stones was not rooted securely enough and fell.
“At some time, that stone skidded out,” he pointed out. “It fell head-long across the altar stone, knocking the altar stone to the ground and breaking in half itself. That massive lintel tumbled down and still lies where it fell. They never tried to fix it.
“So Stonehenge was built by cowboys. It is on the one hand one of the greatest building successes in the story of the human race and from another point of view one of the greatest catastrophes.”