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From The Times
June 16, 2007

A Brief History of Stonehenge

By Aubrey Burl

Reviewed by Ross Leckie

Even if you think it will survive, the United Kingdom cannot be what it
was. We seek such certainties and identities as we can. The blood of
those who built Stonehenge is in our bones. The stones speak of a common
past to an uneasy present, and, therefore, of a future.

Burl has given his life to exploring Britain?s standing stones. Here he
returns to the series of circles that began to be built on Salisbury
Plain around 3000BC. As he says: ?Stonehenge was never still. Change was
continuous.? But ?the ghosts of the ring?s builders are as silent as the
circle itself?. So one admires Burl's confidence in hypothesis: ?If
there were farmsteads then their traces are almost certainly where
today?s villages are, in sheltered spots, near water and wood.?

Burl seeks these ghosts, and gives them life. Along the way he
excoriates the treatment of the site, the ?years of indecision and
miserly bureaucracy?. His book would have been even better for a chapter
on the context of the monument, supreme among its peers for its lintels
alone. That aside, this is a meticulous, comprehensive stone-by-stone
account of Stonehenge, written in beautiful prose. The site entered
written history in AD1129, when Henry of Huntingdon?s /Historia
Anglorum/ (History of the English) first described it as a wonder.
Almost 900 years later, this book renews that claim.