Summer Solstice Sunrise over Stonehenge. Photo: Andrew Dunn (CC)

Today marks the summer solstice – the day of the year when the Earth’s and the moon’s axial tilt is most inclined towards the sun. It’s a day of celebration around the world, as exemplified by the English at Stonehenge, where Steven Morris reports for the Guardian that the usual mix of pagans and partiers are in attendance:

The summer solstice is meant to be a night and dawn of peace, love and amazement. But not all of those attending the celebrations at Stonehenge entered into the spirit of the event.

Druids, pagans and revellers watched as two men, one shirtless, staged a fist fight at the ancient monument in Wiltshire.

While the majority of the 18,000 people who attended the solstice celebrations were well-behaved, 20 arrests and almost 50 drug seizures were made.

Photographer David Hedges, who witnessed the fight, said: “They were sparring for a few minutes before they really started throwing punches.”

Spectators surrounded the pair and a couple tried to break it up before the police arrived.

The 20 arrests included 11 for drugs offences and five for public order offences. Superintendent Gavin Williams of Wiltshire police said most of the attendees “came to see the sunrise in the spirit of the event. Although it was disappointing that some individuals chose to bring drugs with them, they were dealt with robustly.”

Fewer people attended than in recent years, partly due to the damp weather, perhaps, but also because the event fell at the start of the week.

But Arthur Pendragon, a well-known druid who purports to be a modern incarnation of the legendary king, said both those who were there for faith reasons and the many others who attend just for a good time – including plenty who stopped off on the way to Glastonbury – seemed to have enjoyed the night and dawn…

[continues at the Guardian]

Photo: University of Exeter

The construction of megalithic structures, such as the pyramids and Stonehenge, have long since been a mystery to modern civilization. An archaeology student at the University of Exeter thinks he has found a key component in the movement of the rocks of Stonehenge. Science Daily reports:

A revolutionary new idea on the movement of big monument stones like those at Stonehenge has been put forward by an archaeology student at the University of Exeter.

Whilst an undergraduate, Andrew Young saw a correlation between standing stone circles in Aberdeenshire, Scotland and a concentration of carved stone balls, which may have been used to help transport the big stones by functioning like ball bearings.

Young discovered that many of the late Neolithic stone balls had a diameter within a millimetre of each other, which he felt indicated they would have been used together in some way rather than individually. By plotting on a map where the carved balls were found, he realised they were all within the vicinity of Neolithic monuments known as recumbent stone circles. These stone circle monuments in Aberdeenshire share an equivalent form to Stonehenge, yet with some much larger stones.

[Continues at Science Daily]

The prehistoric monument of Stonehenge stands tall in the British countryside as one of the last remnants of the Neolithic Age. Recently it has also become the latest symbol of another era: the new fiscal austerity.

Renovations — including a plan to replace the site’s run-down visitors center with one almost five times bigger and to close a busy road that runs along the 5,000-year-old monument — had to be mothballed in June. The British government had suddenly withdrawn £10 million, or $16 million, in financing for the project as part of a budget squeeze.

Stonehenge, once a temple with giant stone slabs aligned in a circle to mark the passage of the sun, is among the most prominent victims of the government’s spending cuts. The decision was heavily criticized by local lawmakers, especially because Stonehenge, a Unesco World Heritage site, was part of London’s successful bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games.

The shabby visitors center there now is already too small for the 950,000 people who visit Stonehenge each year, let alone the additional onslaught of tourists expected for the Games, the lawmakers say…

[continues in the New York Times]

Stonehenge had a previously unknown wooden “twin” just 900m to its north-west, according to remarkable new archaeological investigations.

Using the ground-penetrating equivalent of an X-ray, scientists have discovered what appears to have been a circle of massive timber obelisks, constructed more than 4,200 years ago.

The newly discovered “henge” would have been visible from Stonehenge itself – and seems to have been part of a wider prehistoric ritual and religious landscape. Roughly 25m in diameter, it was almost the same size as the central part (the circle of standing stones) at Stonehenge itself.

The newly discovered monument – almost certainly some sort of Neolithic temple – is thought to have consisted of 24 wooden obelisks, each around 75cm in diameter and therefore potentially up to 8m high. The circle of obelisks was enclosed by an inner ditch and probable outer bank.

Of potential significance is the fact that the newly found henge “mirrors” a similar monument (this time long known to archaeologists) on the other side of Stonehenge – 1,300m south-east of the famous monument. Like the newly discovered site, it is in direct line of sight of Stonehenge and had two entrances. All three monuments would have been roughly aligned.

The discovery of the site north-west of the stone circle suggests that the Stonehenge landscape was even more complex than people have thought – and archaeologists are now keen to find further unknown elements of it…

[continues in the Independent]

Austrian motorway authority ASFINAG said it was skeptical at first and kept the project a secret. But it went public after the druids’ efforts cut the number of deaths at the notorious crash site from six a year to zero in two years.

Arch druid Ilmar Tessmann was called in as a last resort after a high number of fatal accidents were reported on a straight stretch of motorway near Salzburg.

He said the crashes were caused by radiation from a nearby mobile phone mast disrupting the area’s normal ‘terrestrial’ radiation. As well as using quartz standing stones to restore the area’s ‘natural energy’, the druids…[buried] magnets in the ground.

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The Black Fridays is pleased to bring you Julian Richards! We believe Julian to be one of the foremost experts on Stonehenge today and we were thrilled that stopped by for a chat! We cover most of the new discoveries that have been made in the areas around the site, as well as other sites of interest in the vicinity. Our honor to talk to Julian … we hope you enjoy!

You can learn more about Julian Richards at www.archaemedia.net.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of what they believe was a second Stonehenge located a little more than a mile away from the world-famous prehistoric monument.

The new find on the west bank of the river Avon has been called “Bluestonehenge”, after the colour of the 25 Welsh stones of which it was once made up.

Excavations at the site have suggested there was once a stone circle 10 metres in diameter and surrounded by a henge – a ditch with an external bank, according to the project director, Professor Mike Parker Pearson, of the University of Sheffield.

The stones at the site were removed thousands of years ago but the sizes of the holes in which they stood indicate that this was a circle of bluestones, brought from the Preseli mountains of Wales, 150 miles away.

The standing stones marked the end of the avenue that leads from the river Avon to Stonehenge, a 1¾-mile long processional route constructed at the end of the Stone Age.