A DIY Stonehenge

Megalithic monuments of all types have been a special interest of mine for many years. Off and on I've done a fair amount of reading about them. The quintessential megalithic monument is of course Stonehenge. I've read a lot about that site, and the related ones around it. There is something about Stonehenge which invites, even demands, an explanation of its purpose and its manner of construction. Naturally, the fecund imaginations that gave us the world's great conspiracy theories are not at a loss to explain Stonehenge: aliens built it, the Atlanteans built it, the Egyptians built it, the Druids built it (even though it preceded the Druids by some thousands of years), etc. Likewise these armchair theorists are not shy about proposing more exotic techniques the ancient builders must have used to move the massive stone blocks around: levitation (either alien or Atlantean), telekinesis, magic, harmonic resonances (especially those using Ley lines), and so forth. There are also some more reality-oriented explanations, such as the idea of using huge numbers of people, the way the Pyramids were supposedly built long ago, and the way the Chinese have built things in more recent times.

Just yesterday I ran across a story about Wally Wallington, a man from Flint MI who has worked out some exceedingly simple but highly effective ways to move very heavy objects. Using these techniques he can single-handedly move and lift multi-ton objects, without any metal tools, pulleys, hoists, or any of the gadgets one would normally expect to use. In other words, his techniques are precisely those that a neolithic culture could manage. He even wants to build s scaled-down version of Stonehenge on his property, and he's on his way to doing that. Take a look at this video showing some samples of Wallington's work.

One of the more interesting legends associated with Stonehenge is that the wizard Merlin built Stonehenge by himself in a single day. Watching Wallington move these huge concrete blocks around by himself gives you the feeling that such a legend wouldn't necessarily have been just a tall tale. It's not a huge stretch to imagine a Stone Age David Copperfield doing some elaborate setup with big stone blocks, and then making Stonehenge appear in a very short time for a suitably prepared audience.

By the way, Wallington has a website appropriately named Forgotten Technology, which gives a bit of the history of his work. Wallington is obviously proficient in the use of technologies that would have worked well even 5000 years ago. For me, there is inescapable irony in the fact that his website 'is best viewed using the latest version of Internet Explorer' , a likewise [ahem] less-advanced technology. If you find his pages ugly or hard to navigate in, be persistent. I have to admit that I couldn't make all of the images on the site appear in Firefox, and I haven't yet stooped to looking at the site with IE, although I may.

Sometime I'll have to write about what I've learned of Stonehenge's design and purpose. It's fascinating stuff, and there are a few legitimate archeoastronomy researchers who have come up with explanations that strike me as very solid.