Stonehenge

Sunday, 23rd April 2006 by

Well we've already featured an astronomically correct copy and a reconstruction in the medium of fridges. But we can now see the actual Bronze Age megalithic monument, Stonehenge.

Stonehenge has an incredible 5,000-year history that I won't even attempt to summarise here, as the theories surrounding it are as varied and complex as its history is long. However, the most commonly discussed aspect of this legendary monument is probably how it was built, and Wikipedia has some interesting figures which put the whole thing into perspective:

Estimates of the manpower needed to build Stonehenge put the total effort involved at millions of hours of work. The first stage probably needed around 11,000 man-hours (or 460 man-days) of work, Stage 2 around 360,000 (15,000 man-days or 41 years) and the various parts of the third stage may have involved up to 1.75 million hours (73 000 days or 200 years) of work. The working of the stones is estimated to have required around 20 million hours (830 000 days or 2300 years) of work using the primitive tools available at the time.

If you're interested, then I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia page on Stonehenge, and if you already know all of that, then check out the page of Stonehenge replicas instead!

Thanks to Tim, Jim Geurts, Dave Edmunds and Kelly.

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Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.