“‘What monstrous place is this?’ said Angel.
“‘It hums,’ said she. ‘Hearken!’
“The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp.” It was indeed Stonehenge, “a very Temple of the Winds.”
And here, as the night wore away, and Tess lay sleeping on the Altar Stone, and the great trilithons began to show up blackly against the coming dawn, the figure of a man advancing towards them appeared rising out of the hollows of the great plain. At the same time Clare heard the brush of feet behind him: they were surrounded. Thoughts of resistance came to him; but “‘It’s no use, sir,’ said the foremost plain-clothes man: ‘There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is reared.’” And so they stood watching while Tess finished her sleep.
Stonehenge sadly requires such romantic passages as this to renew its interest, for, truth to tell, the first glimpse of this mysterious monument of prehistoric ages is wofully disappointing. No use to strive against that disappointment as you come up the long rises from Amesbury under the midday sun and see its every time-worn cranny displayed mercilessly in the impudent eye of day: the interval between anticipation and realisation is too wide, and the apparent smallness and insignificance of the great stone circles must, although unwillingly, be allowed. This comparative insignificance is, however, largely the effect of their almost boundless environment of vast downs, tumid with the attendant circles of prehistoric tumuli, each tumulus or barrow crowned with its clump of trees, like the tufted plumes of a hearse.
Mystery continues to shroud the origin of Stonehenge, which was probably standing when the Romans first overran Britain, and seems by the most reasoned theories to have really been a Temple of the Sun. Its name is only the comparatively modern one of “Stanenges,” or “the hanging stones,” given by the Saxons, who discovered it with as much astonishment as exhibited by any one of a later age, and so named it, not from any reference to the capital punishment of sus. per coll., but from the great lintel-stones that are laid flat upon the tall rude columns, and may fancifully be said to hang in mid-air, at a height of twenty-five feet.
Those who speak of Stonehenge remaining a “monument to all time,” speak not according to knowledge, for the poor old relic is becoming sadly weatherworn and decrepit, and has aged rapidly of late years. No good has been wrought it by the fussy interferences and impertinences of “scientific” men, who, taking advantage of an alleged necessity for shoring up one the largest stones, dug about the soil and strove to wrest its secret by the method of sifting the spadesful of earth and stone chippings. Then a last indignity befell it. Sir Edward Antrobus, of Amesbury, lord of the manor, claimed Stonehenge as his manorial property, and, erecting a barbed-wire fence around it, levied a fee of a shilling a head for admission through the turnstiles that click you through, for all the world as though you were entering some Earl’s Court Exhibition. The impudence that has found it possible to do these things, in defiance of undoubted public rights of way, bulks majestically—much larger than Stonehenge itself, whose grey pile it indeed belittles and vulgarises.
CHAPTER V
THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD