I visited Stonehenge for my birthday because nothing makes you feel more alive than looking at some immense, ancient mossy rocks that are arranged in a mind-blowing fashion, right? Seeing the Stonehenge World Heritage Site has been on my bucket list for ages so I figured, what with Covid seriously cramping our social lives at the moment, going to Stonehenge would be a fun Covid-approved experience that we could enjoy on my birthday - and by that I mean a safe outdoor-type activity in which my husband and I could spend vast quantities of time totally ignoring Stonehenge because we were worrying about whether or not we were controlling the virus by standing 2 meters apart from all the people surrounding us.
As soon as we parked the car and walked into the bustling Visitor’s Centre, my immediate thought was not, “Wow, let me get my camera to take a photo right now” – it was “Wow, let me get 10 more face masks and some gloves to wear right now” because it was heaving with people and I was convinced that Corona was lurking everywhere. Not easily deterred, we heroically lathered ourselves in antibac hand sanitiser and slipped (literally!) into the crowd.
After producing our pre-booked tickets we were enthusiastically informed by a volunteer that someone had helpfully built the Visitor’s Centre a whopping 2.6 miles/4km from the Stonehenge circle and, due to Covid restrictions, we had to walk there rather than take the shuttle bus. Fortunately for us, that 2.6 mile/4km route was all uphill… on unmade paths… through fields riddled with flies… and we got to enjoy it all to the calming sound-track of a wailing child that was right behind us for most of the way. This child treated us to a rant that was so forceful it could have parted my hair from the back - and my hair was plaited and in a bun! (Unrelated side note: this was not the most arduous experience of my life because as a teenager I spent a week peeing in the Sahara Desert with only a spade and a sand dune as lavatory equipment. True story. But that is a tale for another blog entirely).
The English Heritage Stonehenge website states that, ‘We think you need at least 2.5 hours to see Stonehenge’ – now before our visit, when I read that sentence from the comfort of my living room couch, I naively thought that meant 2.5 hours was required for the entire visit, i.e. from start to finish. However, during our laborious uphill walk to the stones, it dawned upon me that they could have actually been talking about the amount of time it would merely take us to walk towards the stones from the Visitor’s Centre. Anyway, as we climbed the crying hill that sapped us of our will to live, it sure felt like we’d been walking for 2.5 hours (or almost as long as puberty) but eventually there they were: the impressive stones! One of Britain’s most famous cultural icons rose majestically out of a landscape of mask-clad people who were clamouring about it posing for photographs while making deeply enlightened and profound comments such as, “The stones are a lot dirtier than I expected them to be,” and, “This rocks!”
The name ‘Stonehenge’ comes from the Old English words for ‘stān’ meaning "stone", and ‘hencg’ meaning “Who the heck put them there and how on earth did they do it?” It is not surprising it got this name because this prehistoric monument was constructed from colossal stones each being around 13 feet (4.0 m) high, seven feet (2.1 m) wide, and weighing around 25 tons! To this day in academic circles, how Stonehenge was built and for what purpose remains a hotly-debated subject. Personally, I think Stonehenge looks like a dinosaur's Jenga game.
I mean, obviously I'm not saying T-Rex could have played because he clearly didn’t have the biceps to lift those massive stones... but he could have had a substitute dinosaur player that played alongside him - like in Cricket when you need a runner because you’re injured and are unable to run between the wickets. So now that we have straightened that out by applying irrefutable real-world game logic, let's move swiftly on to something we've ALL been wondering - did the dinosaurs become extinct because they caught Covid (or whatever the prehistoric version of it was) and was it all T-Rex’s fault because with those short arms there was no way he could wash his hands or put on his face mask?
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