Now Playing
Fall Asleep with Frank — Among the Standing Stones: A Slow History of Stonehenge
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A gentle sleep story about Stonehenge — the ancient stone circle on Salisbury Plain that has stood for five thousand years. Frank guides you slowly through its quiet history, from the first postholes in the chalk to the great sarsen rings, as you drift off to sleep.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There's a plain in southern England, wide and open and very quiet. It's called Salisbury Plain, and it sits in the county of Wiltshire.
Inside that outer ring, there's a circle of smaller stones. These are the bluestones, and they came from somewhere very far away, which we'll get to.
The name itself is old. Very old.
Before Stonehenge was Stonehenge, something was already happening on that ground. Archaeologists have found large postholes beneath what used to be a car park at the site.
From its very earliest phase, Stonehenge seems to have been connected to burial. Deposits of human bone have been found that date back to around three thousand BC, when the first ditch and bank were being dug.
The bluestones deserve their own moment of quiet attention. They came from the Preseli Hills in Wales, which is around two hundred miles from Salisbury Plain.
The people who built Stonehenge left no writing. We don't know what they called themselves or what they called the monument.
Stonehenge continued to accumulate history long after the last stones were placed. During the Roman period, there's evidence of activity at the site beyond simple curiosity.
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, educated visitors were beginning to look at Stonehenge with something like systematic curiosity. John Aubrey was one of the first to examine it carefully, in sixteen sixty-six.
Stonehenge was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in nineteen eighty-six. It's been a legally protected monument since eighteen eighty-two.
There's something restful in that, if you let yourself settle into it. The stones are still there.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.