When planning our trip and the things we'd like to do in and around London, the question of Stonehenge came up fairly early on. Part of me really wanted to see it, but another part of me was listening to the almost universal review I'd heard from people I know who had been: Stonehenge was all closed off now, you can't actually get near it, and it's frankly kind of lame looking at it all tiny from hundreds of feet away.
But purely by coincidence, we'd already booked our plane tickets for a week in June that would have us in England during the summer solstice. And my boyfriend discovered that for one night only at the solstice, from a few hours before sunset to a few hours after sunrise, English Heritage actually allows full access to the stones themselves. You can walk among them, touch them, and observe all the close details that visitors don't get to see anymore.
That changed everything.
We located a charter tour bus that was shuttling people to and from Stonehenge, and booked a ride that would have us there for 90 minutes on either side of sunrise. Unfortunately, this did mean being awake to catch a bus at 1:15 in the morning, sacrificing our too-recently conquered jet lag on an ancient stone altar.
First, the bad news. This turned out to be the first day of our trip with prolonged bad weather. Torrential rain poured across the plains outside London all night long, and while it had tapered off to a merciful and intermittent drizzle by the time we reached our destination, a low and heavy cloud cover was determined not to go anywhere.
See, the "main attraction" of Stonehenge at solstice is the way that a particular solitary stone about 200 feet outside the circle proper -- called the Heel Stone -- perfectly aligns with the spot on the horizon where the rising sun appears on the solstice. We never saw the sun, only a gradually lightening sky punctuated by a cheering crowd at the seemingly arbitrary moment of 4:51 am.
But that said, I felt like the experience we had was still a once-in-a-lifetime bit of amazing. We were standing right within the inner circle at the moment of sunrise.
In our more than two hours on the site, we got to explore Stonehenge in every detail, from the trilithons...
...to the outer ring (and a face you can see in the rock?)...
...to the chiseled graffiti you can see on the stones from times thousands of years apart...
...to the Heel Stone that would have been even more important had the morning been clear:
We got to see the Ancestor, a huge statue temporary erected near Stonehenge in honor of the solstice:
We were amused by the crowd, a mix of tourists like us, truly committed druidic worshipers who were playing instruments and embracing the stones of Stonehenge in hardy bear hugs, and all-night party-goers both drunk and (heh-heh) stoned.
And yes, we got to touch the stones of Stonehenge:
Stonehenge was a truly unique experience that will always be with me, one I was lucky to have, luckier to share, and luckier still in who I got to share it with.
No comments:
Post a Comment