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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's one of the most famous prehistoric monuments in the world, a monument that was first built more than 5,000 years ago.
Its story and use continue to evolve over the following centuries and millennia, and today it still holds so much meaning to so many people. Stonehenge Now, there are still so many theories surrounding Stonehenge, its purpose, its construction, its Stone Age significance. And yet, new discoveries continue to reveal more fascinating details.
A few years back, for instance, it was revealed that the great sarsen stones that defined Stonehenge, each weighing about 25 to 30 tonnes, came from the Marlborough Downs, roughly 15 miles away. but how exactly these Stone Age people went about transporting those massive blocks remains debated.
Living in a world long before written history, it is amazing to think about who these people were, the builders of Stonehenge. How did they view the world around them? What drove them to undertake such a project, to transport these massive stones over 20 kilometres and set them up at Stonehenge? How might they have done it?
It's this mysterious world that is the setting for the newest historical novel by one of Britain's most cherished writers, Ken Follett. Now, a few weeks back, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ken all about this novel, Circle of Days, shining a light on the people themselves, the Stone Age men and women who made and used Stonehenge. Welcome to the ancients.
Ken, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you. It's great to be here. And to talk about Circle of Days and Stonehenge for such an iconic monument built more than 4,000 years ago, and the fact that there's still so much mystery surrounding almost every part of the monument, so many theories, is that what makes it such an alluring centrepiece for an epic historical novel?
Well, certainly the fact that quite a lot of things are not known leaves the writer of fiction with some room, which of course you don't get if you write about the 16th century or certainly not the 20th century when, you know, people's movements were tracked and so on. But really the interesting thing about Stonehenge is the question of how on earth they did it.
And in a sense, all of it is speculation, but some of it's,
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Chapter 2: What mysteries surround the construction of Stonehenge?
And the best flint is found underground. This is one of the things I first learned about researching this book. The best flint is underground. The kind of flint that you can find just lying around in the fields and so on. I live in Hertfordshire. There's quite a lot of flint in Hertfordshire. In fact, the barn attached to my house is built of flint.
But that flint is not really good enough for tools. And the best flint is found underground. So there are flint mines. And in England, you can visit them. There's a place called Grimes Graves, which is a historical site. And you can go down the flint mine. And it's very like a coal mine. Coal mines, of course, did actually go down a heck of a long way, about 30 feet down, about 30 feet down.
And then there's a layer of this very beautiful black flint that they chopped up. And it's much better to sharpen. If you take a flint from the field and try and sharpen it, it'll quite often break. But the flint from underground is much easier to work. So this is just like a coal mine. There's a shaft. and then tunnels radiating out from the shaft at the bottom.
And this was the only industry in the Stone Age. And these flints were terrifically valuable. They tell us a bit about the Stone Age. Because look, the guys who dug the shafts and mined the flints, you can't eat the flints. So they must have traded them. for what they needed to live, food and clothing and leather for their shoes and so on.
That tells us that there was some kind of organized trade in the Stone Age, something that we might not necessarily have known otherwise.
It's a great example, going back to what I said earlier, maybe I was saying that too strongly, that everything about Stone Age people is this complete mystery. As you say, archaeology is helping us learn more into what life must have been like. This is a time long before the written word comes to Britain. That part of it is much more invisible.
But the archaeology, places like Grimes Graves and so on, can give us amazing insights into things. As you say, a Stone Age industry centered around that wonder material of the time, flint, which was used for so much and so many different tasks.
And I wonder whether it was also a kind of currency. I mean, there was no money in the Stone Age, but I suppose if you wanted to, as it were, put a bit aside for a rainy day, if you had a box full of costly flints, you could stash it. And then in hard times, you could get one out and trade it for a piece of beef or something. So it was key in that respect.
The other thing that we can find, talking about a piece of beef, we can find out a bit about what they ate. Because as I'm sure you know, and when archaeologists dig down in what's called a midden, which is actually full of Stone Age poo, It's not actually stinky. It's just like earth. It doesn't have any bacteria left because it's been there for 4,500 years. But they can examine it.
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Chapter 3: How did ancient communities collaborate to build Stonehenge?
As you do sometimes, Ken, as you feel that you can take over the world. So this area, as you say, that you set Circle Days in 4,500 years ago, the Great Plain, which aligns with Salisbury Plain today. And Ken, the people in the story, how you create it, Do you imagine this plain full of different groups of peoples, of different communities banded together?
And how does that align with the archaeology?
Well, we're pretty sure that there were three groups of people in Britain in the Stone Age. Some farmers. some herders, and some woodland people that would today be called hunter-gatherers.
Now, it's generally agreed that all three types existed in Britain, and it seemed to me quite possible that all three types might exist in this region, because we've got the farmland in the river valleys, and we've got the grassland for grazing. And if you look at Salisbury Plain, even today, there's still quite a lot of woodland there.
And that's interesting because a certain amount of drama comes out of the fact that one of these groups is doomed. Okay? In the world today, there are very, very few hunter-gatherers left. This was not the best way of life. They lasted a long time, but they have almost died out. But then you've got the graziers, the herders, and on the other hand, the farmers. And, you know, traditionally...
There has always been tension between farmers and graziers. Graziers consider that the whole world is there. The grass is there. And so I could put my cattle there and the farmers like, I'm planting seeds on that piece of land, say the farmers. And we all know about this because that was the real tension in the Wild West.
We've seen these movies about conflict between the ranchers and the farmers. And I think something like that must always go on where those two groups are living close together. And so from the point of view of a storyteller like me, if there's conflict, there's a story to tell.
And so there's three different groups there. But as you highlighted earlier with the flint mining industry, this idea of barter, of trade, not just of objects, but presumably of people too, marriages, people going between these different groups, communicating, speaking the same language, and at times kind of this cooperation idea, this gathering for cooperation.
Yes, there has to be cooperation to achieve certain things and certainly building a monument. is something that hundreds of people would have needed to cooperate on. Farmers are a bit more individualistic. This is my field. This is my cow shed. Whereas herders can't be quite so egotistical, I suppose, because Salisbury Plain could have sustained a herd of about 2,000 cattle.
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Chapter 4: What role did flint mining play in Stone Age society?
Because again, in your book, you set it some 4,500 years ago, which is a key moment in the story of Stonehenge and its construction. But that's actually not the beginning of Stonehenge's story. I mean, what do we actually know about Stonehenge before that point, more than 4,500 years ago?
Well, we think there was a monument there before the current monument was built. Well, first of all, we do know that there are some stones at Stonehenge. There's an outer circle of what are called bluestones. And we do know, actually, that they were placed there something like a thousand years earlier than the triliths and the monoliths that are the biggest stones.
And we also know where they came from. And they came from a quarry in Wales. They're not as big as the triliths, and they're not shaped at all. They're just whacking great stones. How do we know they came from this quarry in Wales? archaeologists can match any stone to where it was in the quarry. That seems kind of miraculous to me, but they do that with great confidence.
And so in a sense, there's another story to be told about the outer circle, because there's also the question of how did they get there from Wales and why? You know, the Welsh people just trying to get rid of it or selling it. I don't know. But that outer circle that's a thousand years older is like quite a lot of other stone monuments in Britain, which is it's not shaped properly.
Now, Stonehenge, the stones are very carefully shaped. They didn't come out of the ground like that. They're smoothed and they're rectangular and the corners are square. And if you go to other monuments, even other monuments on Salisbury Plain, there are big stones there, but they haven't been shaped like that.
Then you've got to remember that what we're looking at today when we go to Stonehenge is a ruin.
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Chapter 5: How did Stone Age people transport massive stones?
But originally, it was a very tidy design. 75 stones. There were 30 pairs in a circle, each with a lintel on top. And it was a very neat looking design. monument. And this is what the archaeologists have deduced from their digs around there. You know, they dig and they find where other stones, stones other than the ones that are there now, they found where they were in the ground.
So Stonehenge is different from any other stone monument in the world in its sophistication and complexity.
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And also, I guess we need to remember, Ken... there would have been wooden structures there too, especially with the earlier structure before we get to the moments when you have that next big stage with those larger stones, which we're going to get to.
But the earlier monument there with those blue stones, as you've mentioned, that come from Wales, I can only imagine what stories the people would have had centuries after they were placed about how they reached Stonehenge and how their ancestors did it. But alongside those blue stones, that earlier monument, there would have been wooden structures there too.
Yes, we think so. And it would make a certain amount of sense if, first of all, you had a wooden monument. And after a while, people said, every few years this rots away because of the weather or it catches fire in a hot summer. And what about if we replaced these timber pieces with stone? And then intriguing thought it must have been to the Stone Age people. And then it will be there forever.
we could build something that's going to be there at the end of time. I don't know if they had the concept of the end of time, but they probably had some feeling of that kind. So yes, I think, and it's obviously not my theory, it's an archaeological theory, that there was a wooden monument at Stonehenge before there was a stone monument.
And then I guess also, Ken, as you say, when they're thinking, oh, if we can use stone to create a monument that will last here until the end of time, and it's important. then what type of stone shall we get? And hence, maybe you get the reason why they picked those particular special blue stones they've heard about from so far away to be the core of that very early monument there.
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Chapter 6: What can we learn about the diets of Stone Age people?
I was involved in moving that particular stone and I met my beloved whilst doing it. Yes, that's where I met your mother. Exactly.
I could ask so many questions, but I think we'll wrap up by imagining after that whole process, that amazing kind of human details of what it might have been like for the transporting of one of these stones to the Citerstone Henge, to when it does finally reach the Citerstone Henge, Ken, that final making them upright and putting them in place and making them look as they did in their kind of their final dressed form.
Yeah. And most difficult of all, perhaps, putting up the crossbars. Of course, yes. From one to the other. And that must have been a very difficult and complex task. But once again, they figured out a way to do it, and so did I. Do tell, Ken.
If you're happy to tell and give away what you think.
It would have been very like using the A-frame and the lintel or crossbar would have to be lifted higher than the pair of stones on which it was going to rest. Obviously, lowered onto perhaps one of the two and then pushed along. That's how I imagined it. And this is one of the points where my imagination is working quite hard based on rather little evidence.
Ken, it's such an amazing monument to base a historical novel around. You can shine more of a light on these people themselves, who otherwise we just collectively group as people, Stone Age people who built Stonehenge. But to imagine with the surviving archaeology, with the theories that are already there,
Just what it could have been like, what it could have meant to them, how the process may well have unfolded to then see the monument that so many of us recognize, that so many of us love today.
Well, you've got to remember, because the essence of the novel is the people themselves and their own personal destinies. And of course, they fall in love and sometimes fall in love with the wrong person. They quarrel. and they want revenge, and there's jealousy and envy. And all of those things, of course, are part of everyday life.
And this fantastic project that they're involved in is something that happens, as it were, on top of all the usual dramas of every day. There's also, because I think stone, there must have been some kind of crisis that also catalyzed the beginning of the construction of Stonehenge. I decided that it might have been a drought.
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