improperly. It has, indeed, been a sanctuary for the hares for
many years; but the gentlemen complain that it mars their game, for
that as soon as they put up a hare for their sport, if it be
anywhere within two or three miles, away she runs for the warren,
and there is an end of their pursuit; on the other hand, it makes
all the countrymen turn poachers, and destroy the hares by what
means they can. But this is a smaller matter, and of no great
import one way or other.
From this pleasant and agreeable day’s work I returned to
Clarendon, and the next day took another short tour to the hills to
see that celebrated piece of antiquity, the wonderful Stonehenge,
being six miles from Salisbury, north, and upon the side of the
River Avon, near the town of Amesbury. It is needless that I
should enter here into any part of the dispute about which our
learned antiquaries have so puzzled themselves that several books
(and one of them in folio) have been published about it; some
alleging it to be a heathen or pagan temple and altar, or place of
sacrifice, as Mr. Jones; others a monument or trophy of victory;
others a monument for the dead, as Mr. Aubrey, and the like.
Again, some will have it be British, some Danish, some Saxon, some
Roman, and some, before them all, Phoenician.
I shall suppose it, as the majority of all writers do, to be a
monument for the dead, and the rather because men’s bones have been
frequently dug up in the ground near them. The common opinion that
no man could ever count them, that a baker carried a basket of
bread and laid a loaf upon every stone, and yet never could make
out the same number twice, this I take as a mere country fiction,
and a ridiculous one too. The reason why they cannot easily be
told is that many of them lie half or part buried in the ground;
and a piece here and a piece there only appearing above the grass,
it cannot be known easily which belong to one stone and which to
another, or which are separate stones, and which are joined
underground to one another; otherwise, as to those which appear,
they are easy to be told, and I have seen them told four times
after one another, beginning every time at a different place, and
every time they amounted to seventy-two in all; but then this was
counting every piece of a stone of bulk which appeared above the
surface of the earth, and was not evidently part of and adjoining
to another, to be a distinct and separate body or stone by itself.
The form of this monument is not only described but delineated in
most authors, and, indeed, it is hard to know the first but by the
last. The figure was at first circular, and there were at least
four rows or circles within one another. The main stones were
placed upright, and they were joined on the top by cross-stones,
laid from one to another, and fastened with vast mortises and
tenons. Length of time has so decayed them that not only most of
the cross-stones which lay on the top are fallen down, but many of
the upright also, notwithstanding the weight of them is so
prodigious great. How they came thither, or from whence (no stones
of that kind being now to be found in that part of England near it)
is still the mystery, for they are of such immense bulk that no
engines or carriages which we have in use in this age could stir
them.
Doubtless they had some method in former days in foreign countries,
as well as here, to move heavier weights than we find practicable
now. How else did Solomon’s workmen build the battlement or
additional wall to support the precipice of Mount Moriah, on which
the Temple was built, which was all built of stones of Parian
marble, each stone being forty cubits long and fourteen cubits
broad, and eight cubits high or thick, which, reckoning each cubit
at two feet and a half of our measure (as the learned agree to do),