When you enter the building, whether on foot or horseback and cast your eyes around, upon the yawning ruins, you are struck into an exstatic reverie, which none can describe, and they only can be sensible of, that feel it. Other buildings fall by piece meal, but here a single stone is a ruin, and lies like the haughty carcase of Goliath. Yet there is as much of it undemolished, as enables us sufficiently to recover its form, when it was in its most perfect state. There is enough of every part to preserve the idea of the whole. The next Plate, [Tab. VII.] the peep (as I call it) into the sanctum sanctorum, is drawn, at the very entrance, and as a view into the inside. When we advance further, the dark part of the ponderous imposts over our heads, the chasm of sky between the jambs of the cell, the odd construction of the whole, and the greatness of every part, surprizes. We may well cry out in the poet’s words
Tantum Relligio potuit!
if you look upon the perfect part, you fancy intire quarries mounted up into the air: if upon the rude havock below, you see as it were the bowels of a mountain turn’d inside outwards. It is pleasant likewise to consider the spot upon which ’tis situate, and to take a circular view of the country around it. For which purpose I have sketch’d the following prospects, taking in the country almost round the circumference of the horizon. This Use there will be in them further; if ever it happen, that this noble work should be destroy’d: the spot of it may be found, by these views.
[Tab. VIII.] north prospect from Stonehenge.
[Tab. IX.] south-west prospect from Stonehenge.
[Tab. X.] south-east prospect from Stonehenge.
P. 12. TAB. VII.
Stukeley d.
A peep into the sanctum sanctorum 6 June. 1724