Five stunning stone circles (besides Stonehenge)

by Sean McLachlan on


Every year thousands of tourists flock to Stonehenge, the iconic stone circle on Salisbury Plain, England. While so much attention is focused on this site, especially with the recent discovery of another monument near Stonehenge, people often forget there’s more than a thousand stone circles in the British Isles and Continental Europe. Built during the Neolithic starting about 5,000 years ago, these sites are beautiful and have gathered a lot of strange folklore over the centuries, like the mistaken belief that they were built by Druids or giants. Here are five of the best.

The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney Isles, Scotland
The windswept Orkney Isles north of Scotland are covered in prehistoric remains. The Ring of Brodgar, seen above in this photo courtesy of Beth Loft, is built of thin, tall stones on a narrow isthmus between two lochs. Its architects obviously had an eye for dramatic setting. It dates to between 2500 and 2000 BC, a boom time for monumental building in the Orkneys. It’s the northernmost stone circle in the British Isles and also the third largest at 104 meters (341 ft) in diameter. Like many major circles it’s part of a network of sites, with tombs and single standing stones scattered in the area around it. Legend has it that the Vikings were so impressed with the Ring of Brodgar when they arrived in the ninth century AD that they worshiped their gods here. Some Viking Runes carved into the stones may support this theory.

Avebury, England
Bigger than Stonehenge, the site of Avebury just 17 miles north of Stonehenge consists of a massive stone circle 331.6 meters (1,088 ft) in diameter with two avenues of stones leading to a pair of smaller stone circles. Construction began around 2900 BC, roughly the same time as its neighbor. Other monuments, such as the mysterious artificial mound of Silbury Hill and the West Kennet Long barrow, an ancient tomb, are an easy walk away. During the Middle Ages the locals got religion and decided this pagan monument needed to go. They knocked over several stones until one fell over and crushed one of the vandals. Everyone thought this was just a legend until modern archaeologists dug up a fallen stone and found the skeleton of a man underneath with some 14th century coins in his pocket!

%Gallery-98480%Rollright Stones, England
This stone circle makes a fun day hike from Oxford. Most stone circles are pretty small. This one is only 33 meters (108 feet) in diameter but has some interesting details. One stone has a hole through which you can see a tall monolith called the King Stone in a nearby field. A nearby dolmen (a small roofed tomb of stone) is called the Whispering Knights. Legend says the circle and these two outlying monuments are a king and his knights who were turned to stone by a witch. Actually the circle and monolith were built by prehistoric people between 2500 to 2000 BC. The Whispering Knights date to about 3500 BC. In prehistoric times, the presence of one monument encouraged people to build more.

Drombeg Stone Circle, Ireland
Drombeg Stone Circle in County Cork is a tight little collection of stones 9 meters (30 feet) in diameter. It’s of a type known as a recumbent stone circle because the largest stone lies on its side flanked by two smaller ones. This was deliberate; the stone didn’t fall down. What this means is anyone’s guess, although the local claim that it’s a “Druid’s Altar” is fanciful because the circle dates to the Bronze Age, about 2000 BC, and the druids were priests of the Celts, who didn’t appear on the scene until around 300 BC. Radiocarbon dating on a burial found in the center of the circle yielded a date between 150 BC and 130 AD. Just like at the Ring of Brodgar, later people were attracted to the site. While Drombeg didn’t start out as a Druid’s altar, maybe it ended up as one!

The Stone Circles of Senegambia, Senegal and The Gambia
Stone circles in Africa? Yep, these monuments aren’t as grandiose as the ones in Europe but they’re equally mysterious. There are about a thousand of them in a region of central Senegal and Gambia, meaning there’s about as many stone circles here as in all of Europe. The stones are as tall as 2.5 meters (8 ft.), although some are only a foot or so high. They mark burials dating from the 3rd century BC to the 16th century AD. There’s a large concentration of them at Wassu, Gambia. Locals put small stones on top of them as a sign of respect. Not much is known about these stone circles but they are beginning to attract attention from the archaeological community. A certain Gadling blogger may be visiting them next year, so stay tuned.

Mysterious monument found next to Stonehenge

by Sean McLachlan on

Britain’s most interesting monument just got a whole lot more interesting.

Archaeologists using subsurface imaging have discovered evidence of a circle of wooden posts about the same size as Stonehenge and just 900 meters (2,950 feet) away from it.

The Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project plans to map features hidden under the surface in an area totaling 14 square kilometers (8.7 sq miles) around the famous monument. The mysterious feature was found only two weeks into the three-year survey.

The team picked up traces of postholes, where heavy wooden poles had once been sunk into the earth. The soil in these holes is of a different density than the undisturbed soil around them and show up on the subsurface imaging. The ring of posts appears to have had two openings opposite one another and was encircled by a ring of pits a meter wide. Archaeologists say it was built about 2,500 BC, about the same time that the builders of Stonehenge switched from using timber to using stone.

Project leader Professor Vince Gaffney of the University of Birmingham said, “When you see that as an archaeologist, you just look at it and think, ‘that’s a henge monument’ – it’s a timber equivalent to Stonehenge. The monument is one of the most studied monuments on Earth but this demonstrates that there is still much more to be found. The presumption was this was just an empty field – now you’ve got a major ceremonial monument looking at Stonehenge”.

The BBC has an interview with Prof. Gaffney and a computer reconstruction of the monument here. His team’s discovery comes just weeks after the start of excavations at Marden Henge, a stone circle ten times bigger than Stonehenge. It’s shaping up to be a good summer for archaeologists!


Image courtesy user Nachosan via Gadling’s flickr pool.

More Egyptian pyramids to open to the public

by Sean McLachlan on


Visitors to Egypt have always flocked to the pyramids of Giza and Saqqara. Many people don’t realize, however, that these are only the most famous of more than a hundred pyramids in the country. In fact, there’s a whole “pyramid field” to the west of Cairo that includes Giza, Saqqara, and numerous other groupings across a long swath of desert. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities is now opening some of them to visitors for the first time.

At Dahshur, more than a dozen pyramids give an interesting lesson in pyramid construction. The largest of these were built in the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2613 to 2494 BC) just prior to those at Giza. The founder of this dynasty, the Pharaoh Sneferu, was quite the pyramid builder. His first attempt was at Meidum, 100 km (62 miles) south of Cairo. It collapsed, and he moved his workmen to Dahshur for his next try.

This was the famous Bent Pyramid, pictured above in a photo from Jon Bodsworth’s excellent collection at the Egypt Archive. Check out the gallery below for more of his work. The architects started building the pyramid at a 55 degree angle, but when the structure showed signs of weakness they chickened out and built the rest at a more stable angle of 43 degrees. This gives the pyramid unique appearance. The pyramid’s two interior passages will open for the first time to visitors in December. A third passage leads 25 meters (82 ft) to a nearby smaller pyramid of Sneferu’s queen so the two could have conjugal visits in the afterlife. His third try was the Red Pyramid, built at the safer 43 degree angle. It held up nicely and is the third largest pyramid in Egypt at 104 meters (345 ft) tall.

Other pyramids at Dahshur include smaller examples from later dynasties. They aren’t nearly as grandiose as the earlier ones, perhaps because later rulers couldn’t command as much authority or they simply had other things they needed to spend their money on. The Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III (c. 1860-1814 BC) makes for an odd photo. To save money, the architects only used stone on the outside, and when later generations stole it for other building projects, the mud brick interior was revealed. This has been weathering away for the last four thousand years and now looks a bit deflated, although it’s still impressive.

%Gallery-97617%Between Giza and Saqqara lies the royal necropolis of Abusir, home to 14 pyramids that will open to the public this month. The necropolis on the outskirts of modern-day Cairo was started in the fifth dynasty (c. 2494 to 2345 BC) after the previous dynasty had filled up Giza with pyramids and temples. Abusir’s pyramids are smaller than those at Giza, and some have all but disappeared after millennia of weathering, but the site is still worth visiting. Most are step pyramids like the famous one at Saqqara, not flat-sided “true” pyramids like those at Giza. Some have smaller pyramids next to them to house the pharaoh’s queens.

One pyramid, that of the pharaoh Neferefre, was never finished, and has given archaeologists a glimpse at the construction techniques that went into building these behemoths. Some people like to think the pyramids were built by aliens or people from Atlantis, but archaeological evidence and the Egyptians’ own written records prove they built the pyramids themselves.

These “new” pyramids are just a few of the large number of Egyptian attractions opening in the next three years. Several museums are under construction, and the area around the Pyramids of Giza has been cleaned up. This month the famous Avenue of Sphinxes between the temples of Luxor and Karnak is opening, with about 900 statues and a recently excavated Roman-era village nearby.

Note to budding Egyptologists: this article is way too short to cover all the various theories and discoveries at Abusir and Dahshur. You need a few books to cover all of them! A good start are the works of Miroslav Verner, including The Pyramids: The Mystery, Culture, and Science of Egypt´s Great Monuments and Abusir: The Realm of Osiris.

UNESCO ponders new World Heritage sites

by Kraig Becker on

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, better known as UNESCO, has announced that it will consider expanding their list of World Heritage Sites when the organization meets in Brazil in a few weeks time. The current list consists of 890 places from around the globe that are considered to have universal appeal for natural or cultural reasons.

There are 41 locations, in 35 countries, up for consideration this year, including first time contenders from Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tajikistan. Kiribati has submitted the Phoenix Islands Protected Area for inclusion on the list, while the Bikini Atoll, a famous nuclear testing zone, represents the Marshall Islands’ hopes for their first World Heritage site. Tajikistan’s spectacular Pamir Mountains could be their first entry as well.

The UNESCO committee will also review the state of 31 of their current sites that have been listed as being in danger. Those sites could be under siege from a number of sources, including environmental concerns, urban development, poor management, increased tourism, wars, or other natural disasters. Last year, Germany’s Elbe Valley was de-listed because a new four-lane bridge was built through the region, while the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Oman was dropped because of poor conservation efforts.

The 34th meeting of the World Heritage Committee will take place in Brasilia from July 25 to August 3, with the final rulings on these new locations being decided then.

[Photo credit: Irene2005 via WikiMedia Commons]

New UNESCO World Heritage Sites for Ireland?

by Sean McLachlan on

The Republic of Ireland has a well-deserved reputation for beautiful landscapes and ancient monuments, so you might be surprised to learn that it has only two UNESCO World Heritage Sites. They are the Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne, which includes megalithic sites such as Newgrange that boast the world’s largest collection of prehistoric megalithic art, and Skellig Michael, a 7th century monastery on an isolated island.

Impressive sites, both of them, but surely the Emerald Isle has more to offer?

The Irish have decided to remedy this poor showing and have proposed seven sites or groups of sites for the UNESCO tentative list. Here’s a brief rundown:

The Burren: both a geological and a cultural landscape, The Burren on the west coast presents an imposing terrain of exposed limestone carved into weird shapes by the wind and rain. Nowadays it attracts hikers and other outdoorsy types, but in early times it attracted a succession of cultures that grazed their animals there and left more than 2,700 monuments. Still used by locals for their flocks, a large body of myth and folklore has grown up around this unique landscape.

The Historic City of Dublin: Ireland’s capital has a well-preserved historic center full of Georgian-era buildings. These eighteenth and early nineteenth century buildings are some of the finest of their type. Add to this generations of writers (Swift, Sheridan, Wilde, Stoker, Yeats, Beckett, etc.) and the fact that it’s the setting for James Joyce’s Ulysses, and you have one of the cultural capitals of the world. Dublin is full of atmospheric views, like the one caught here by user patrodz from Gadling’s flickr pool. You can even go on a literary pub crawl of Dublin.

The Céide Fields and North West Mayo Boglands: It’s strange to think that an entire Neolithic landscape, complete with boundary walls, farm fields, and monuments could survive intact for almost 6,000 years, but that’s exactly what’s happened here. Much of the landscape is buried under a thick layer of peat that preserves organic materials such as pollen, leather, wooden tools, even human bodies. It’s been the playground of archaeologists for generations, and every year new discoveries are made.

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Western Stone Forts: a network of Early Medieval (700-1000 AD) ringforts, circular stone walls that defended the homes of the petty rulers whose lands made up a patchwork of kingdoms on the island. These were dangerous times of constant raiding and brigandage, and regular folk made ringforts too. These Western Stone Forts are on a more grandiose scale than those of the commoners and are often better preserved, such as the impressive stone fort at Dún Aonghasa.

The Monastic City of Clonmacnoise and its Cultural Landscape: This monastic city in central Ireland has yet to be swallowed by the juggernaut of modern “development.” Founded in 545, it became a major center of arts and learning and a royal burial site. There are many churches and a castle still standing.

Early Medieval Monastic Sites: Ireland is famous for its early medieval monasteries that helped keep the lamp of learning lit after the fall of the Roman Empire. While books such as Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization exaggerate the Irish role (the Byzantines and Arabs helped preserve and enhance Classical learning too) there’s no doubt that Irish monks were one of the bastions of culture during a low period in European history. Six monasteries have been chosen for the tentative list owing to their historical importance and degree of preservation.

The Royal Sites of Ireland: Ireland spent much of its medieval history as a group of small kingdoms whose borders constantly fluctuated due to the fortunes of war. The competing royal families gave rise to a rich body of literature and folklore. Five royal sites have been chosen for the tentative list. They are Cashel, Dún Ailinne, Hill of Uisneach, Rathcroghan Complex, and the Tara Complex. Each was a royal center for one of the great royal houses of medieval Ireland.

An impressive list. Here’s hoping UNESCO recognizes their global cultural value. There’s a downside to this, however, as was recently pointed out in the latest issue of Northern Earth magazine. which advised, “Go now–if they get listed, they will enter the tourism industry and become subject to inflation and packaging!”