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Why did the people all of a sudden start to think that the people were the only ones who were not?

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Why did the people all of a sudden start to think that the people were the only ones who were not?

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Why did the people of prehistoric Britain set up this great stone circle on Salisbury Plain?

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What is the meaning of stonehenge?

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Were Britain's other rings of stone centres of an unknown pagan cult?

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Were they places of sacrifice and death?

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Were they observatories where 4,000 years ago astronomers plotted the courses of the sun, moon and stars?

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Now, press the door.

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Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the communication satellite.

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Now in retreat in Sri Lanka after a lifetime of science, space and writing, he ponders the riddles of this and other worlds.

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Everyone must feel awe, indeed reverence, at a place like stonehenge.

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But these latter-day druids have no more right to be there than anyone else.

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Their association with stone circles is an invention of 18th century romantic writers.

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The druids flourished a thousand years after the completion of stonehenge.

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So to confuse them with stone circles is like mixing up the Battle of Britain and the Battle of Hastings.

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This is one of the few facts we do know about the thousand or so stone circles scattered over the British Isles.

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The

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I'm standing amongst the 2,000-year-old ruins of Anuradapura, the ancient capital of Sri Lanka.

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The Romans sent their ambassadors here before the birth of Christ.

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We know the exact history of this city because its builders left written records.

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Indeed, we know what it looked like in its glory because its greatest shrines are now being restored.

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By contrast, the hundreds of stone circles scattered over the British Isles are a complete mystery.

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Their builders left no record of their thoughts or their motives.

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More than a thousand circles and hengies have survived into modern times.

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The power of their lingering magic has outlasted the rise and sometimes the ruin of Christianity.

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These are empty places scattered over the British Isles.

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The ground they stand on holds few clues to their purpose.

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But in some circles the layout of the stones themselves may indicate the answer.

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At Long Meg in Cumbria, the sun sets behind this megalith only on midwinter's day.

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So did standing stones help to fix the calendar in prehistoric times.

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Nowhere on earth is there more spectacular proof of ancient fascination with the changing skies than here.

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This is New Grainge Tomb in Ireland.

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Set on a hilltop above the River Boine, it is an almost unknown wonder.

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Yet this is the oldest building in the world.

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Faced with gleaming and immaculate quartz, it was built five centuries before the pyramids.

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It is 5,000 years old.

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THE END

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Every year on one special day, New Grainge Tomb is a place of pilgrimage for the archaeologist who restored it, Professor Michael O'Kelly.

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He comes here in the pre-dawn darkness because this is December the 21st, the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

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THE END

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Professor O'Kelly began to unlock the secret of New Grainge when he uncovered a strange slit above the door.

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At first its purpose baffled him.

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The tomb has an inner chamber magnificently vaulted.

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Oddly it contained the bones of just four adults and one child.

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His hunch was that the slit above the door was to let the sun into the tomb to wake the spirits of the dead.

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This would probably happen, he thought, at dawn on midwinter's day.

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THE END

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His hunch proved to be correct.

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THE END

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Through the slit on the shortest day of the year come the first rays of the sun as it rises above the ridge on the far side of the river Boine.

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Michael O'Kelly will never forget the first time he witnessed the astounding phenomenon which the builders of New Grainge designed their Stone Age Cathedral to capture.

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The first shot of orange-red light penetrated right to where I was sitting, gradually widened to a 17-centimeter band.

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Illuminated the whole interior.

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THE END

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I could feel the spirits of the dead ha-ha round about me and I wondered if a voice shouldn't come and say something,

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even if only to tell me to get the hell out of here, but nothing happened. Silence.

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The band of light slowly crossed the floor and then a point came after 17 minutes, suddenly cut off, darkness.

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How to explain it? I don't know, but quite obviously the builders of this place had taught the whole thing out,

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and they had organized this slit so that it would be level with the local horizon,

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and so that when the tip of the sun appears there's a horizontal line from the horizon through the slit right to the center of the floor.

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The world's oldest building guards one of the world's oldest mysteries.

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Perhaps people gathered here 5,000 years ago to commune with the spirits of the dead.

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Perhaps this unique dawn marked the end of the old year, the beginning of the new.

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Whatever the truth, the marvel of new Grange displays the central importance of the movements of the heavens to the builders of the ancient world.

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Far to the north in the Scottish Highlands, Dr Archie Tom believes he has proof that standing stones mark full-scale observatories used by prehistoric astronomers.

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His theory, first suggested by his father and Oxford professor, is that the stones were aligned with distinctive features on the horizon.

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In this case, a cleft in the hills, the Papps of Jura, 26 miles away.

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The Tom's surveys suggested that the astronomers stood on this platform known to be man-made.

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In an age when Scotland enjoyed fine weather, they could fix the date of the winter solstice by standing in line with the stone

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and watching the sunset precisely in the cleft of the hills of Jura.

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The Tom's believe ancient astronomers used observatories like this to fix their calendars for the business and ceremonial of their year.

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A computer has already established what seemed to be dozens of astronomical alignments at Stonehenge.

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But strange pits on the top of the Stonehenge lintels have inspired this American schoolmaster Richard Brinkerhoff to suggest an even more exotic astronomical theory.

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He believes the ancient astronomers used the top of Stonehenge as a catwalk.

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From there, with the help of sighting poles stuck into the pits, they could observe important developments in the cycles of the moon.

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There are eleven pits altogether, probably, perhaps more obscured by later erosion.

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These two particular holes, like all the others, were probably used as sights by people on top of the lintels yonder,

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looking past them at moonrise on the distant horizon.

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The northernmost point that the moon ever rises on the horizon, as seen from across the circle, is identified precisely by the farthest of these pits behind me,

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above which the moon rises once every fifty-seven years.

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The northernmost point that the sun rises is identified, seen by a man across the circle, is identified by the pit right there in front of me.

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All of the pits between these two identify intermediate stages in the moon's motion northward along the horizon in those regions where the sunrise never occurs.

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There's no doubt that some of these stone circles do have astronomical alignments, but this doesn't mean that their builders were skilled astronomers.

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As for the other circles, the majority, well, perhaps there were no more than meeting places, the equivalent of the village hall, if you like.

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We can't prove this because all these structures disappeared except for the basic stones.

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Look at this forest of columns around me, known to every guest what this was.

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In fact, these pillars were the foundations of a very tall building many stories high built about two thousand years ago, but all the wood has vanished,

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so today it's impossible to guess what the original structure was like, and that may be the case with the still unexplained stone circles.

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But the incredible scale of this circle at Avebury in Wiltshire almost defies modern explanation.

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It covers twenty-eight and a half acres and encompasses a whole village.

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In the ancient world some experts believe it must have been such a showpiece that Stonehenge with its weird arches was built later as a rival attraction.

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Avebury must have been a massive undertaking. Its construction leaves archaeologists awestruck.

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Dr. Aubrey Burr, the amazing thing is that places like Avebury and Stonehenge were built with tools as simple as this antler pick,

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which I've just driven into the ground with a lump of stone, and the people who built these places would use tools like this to break up the chalk,

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which lies underneath all this grass and earth, leave it out into huge blocks, and then having done that they'd take another very, very simple bit of equipment they had,

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the shoulder blade of an ox, they'd use this to shovel up the chalk into wickerwork baskets, chalk which of course was as hard as rock.

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It's not as soft as the sort of stuff we use in classrooms, it really is very, very hard.

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They'd get it into a basket like this and then hefty it up onto their shoulder, they'd carry this up the sides of the ditch to the bank where they'd dump load after load after load of it until the bank was 30 or 40 feet above them.

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Now the amazing thing is that this ditch where I'm standing is only the top because when it was excavated just before the First World War, it was discovered that it's at least 18 to 20 feet deeper than this.

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All this is just material that has fallen in over the last 4,000 years, and when the ditch was first dug it would have been shearsided, it was so steep in fact that the workers had to leave little steps in the chalk so they could lift the chalk up and out up to the ditch,

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and it would have been so deep that had someone had a telegraph pole at the bottom, rising up here at the top would not have shown above the sides of the ditch, it's an incredible undertaking.

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And it must have taken 50, 60 generations of people, people who would be born in the middle of the work, would work all their lives at it and yet would never see it finished.

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And then inside the ditch were the great circles of stones. We know they were dragged several miles from the Marlborough Downs to Avesbury. The stones were carefully selected for size and shape.

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When we look at a huge thing like this, it wasn't moved very easily, but what isn't obvious is the work that went on before they moved the stone because they couldn't just get hold of something like this and drag it.

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First of all they had to make sledges, and they had to make sledges of oak or elm, something very, very tough and resilient. They would also need ropes.

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Now they hadn't got the sort of rope or horse we have today, they'd have to kill hundreds and hundreds of cattle probably to flay their hides and wind them, bind them into very thick skeins of leather.

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So there then we have a stone weighing 20, 30, perhaps as much as 60 tonnes on its ledge. And there are people dragging on these great leather ropes.

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But for every tonne of stone weighs you need perhaps four people to drag on the ropes. And so for a stone like this, this is this 50, 60 tonne stone, you need at least 200 people dragging and hauling and the stone is moving almost imperceptibly.

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Some of these stones have been re-erected in modern times. In 1934 for example, quite a small stone was put upright. It only weighed 8 tonnes, yet it took 12 men, 5 days, using steel horses.

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At circles like Castle Rig in Cumbria, the construction was easier, but the layout is often puzzling. Many seem to have been deliberately designed to be non-circular. Penman Moor in Wales is an ellipse.

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Burrow Hill in Roxbrookshire is one of many shaped like an egg. Castle Rig itself is a flattened circle. Such precise patterns are repeated all over the country.

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16.25 meters.

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Studying this strange geometry is the hobby of Dr John Edwin Wood. For it's not a case of bad drawing. Oddly, the early rings are perfect circles. The juicing how Castle Rig was laid out is a challenge.

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We think that this was laid out quite simply, starting with a number of equilateral triangles.

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An equilateral triangle is very easy to produce on the ground. You start off with an open field, and you cut strings all of the same length, and then you pull them taught at the corners, and that gives you an equilateral triangle.

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This was built up with four equilateral triangles, with ropes and pegs like this. One, two, three, four, and they put a peg there, and a peg there, a peg here, and a peg here.

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Well, we think that it was probably laid out like this. Now, this represents Castle Rig, and the stones are shown by the black blobs on the plan.

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And these pins are the positions where they would have had to put the pegs in to lay out the stone circle. And we think they started with a rope from that pin, direct to this one, and then round to make the circumference of the circle start there.

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And notice how it swings round to that one, and then it comes free to give you a circle of a different radius, and when you get to here, it catches up again on this one to make the other little arc.

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And now the next thing that they would have done is to transfer the rope to that peg and complete the rest of it by allowing it to swing round the centre peg all the way.

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So that finally you get the full geometry of the Castle Rig ring without anything more elaborate than strings and pegs.

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The stone circles of the British Isles are strange and need haunting places. Many of them have precise astronomical alignments, which must require great skill.

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For others, the geometry is very obscure. We simply don't understand the motives of the designers.

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But there are clues from this circle in Aberdeenshire that these places were indeed the cathedrals or temples of the ancient world.

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Well, most of their local stones are from the Granite Fund.

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Castle Fraser has been studied by Dr Aubrey Burl. There's an extraordinary feature in the Aberdeenshire circles, a great stone lying on its side flanked by two uprights.

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Well, this stone is a recumbent. You can see why it's called that because it's just lying flat between these two huge stones.

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One of the remarkable things about these stones is that they're absolutely horizontal.

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If we put a spirit level on it just like that, look where the bubble comes right in the centre.

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The people obviously have shifted and balanced these stones because they have bases that are shaped like this and they can be rocked to and fro until they're absolutely level.

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Then they bang these huge chalk stones in underneath.

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The presence of the recumbent stone has given Dr Burl an insight into the minds of the circle builders.

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These are places of dread. People who built these circles were people who had very insecure lives.

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They had no knowledge of what caused a blizzard or a drought or an epidemic.

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They saw their children dying. They saw their crops failing. Not every time, but when it did happen, they had no means of stopping it because they had no understanding of it.

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Now, if you're in that sort of situation, you either take an attitude of,

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K-sur-ah, sur-ah, what will be, will be, or else you try to do something about it.

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In other words, you're either fatalistic or else you try to be adventious and try to intercede with whatever is causing these disasters.

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The recumbent stone told Dr Burl what the people who built this circle turned to for help in their uncertain world.

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He found the stone had been placed between the southeastern and southwestern points.

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They were concerned with one and one phenomenon only. That was the moon up in the sky.

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Because the moon rises towards the southeast. It sets towards the southwest.

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And there are nearly 50 recumbent stone circles where it's possible to work out exactly in which direction a recumbent stone is directed.

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And every one of them is directed just to that position where the moon would pass between one flanker and the other flanker passing over the recumbent stone and then setting.

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The moon must have been an object, I think, of very special reverence, if that's the right word, to these people.

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We don't know how they regarded the moon, but we do know, even from today's astronomical observations, that to pass from one flanker to the next,

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the moon must have been slowly moving across the recumbent for one, perhaps two hours.

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And it must have been at that time that the people performed their ceremonies.

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But there's rather more than that. The moon has a very peculiar motion in the sky.

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And once about every 19 years, the moon is very, very low on the southern horizon. Very low indeed.

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And at that time, instead of being high up, it would have appeared almost to roll along the top of the recumbent stone.

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A magical moment for the people.

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Although there are some clues to ceremonies enacted on nights of the full moon, the ashes of fires, even the pitiful remains of many different children, the stones keep their eerie secrets.

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When we look at circles like these, at least I am always very much aware of a mystery surrounding them, because we can collect so many facts about them, we can make so many deductions about them.

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And yet in the end, when we stand in a ring like this on a beautiful moodlet night, I am more aware of mysteries than of answers.

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I can see shadows, but what I can't see, however hard I try, are the people who built them.

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I know something about their lives. I know their lives were short. I know their children suffered.

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I can understand why they put up these stones.

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But what actually went on inside the rings? The actual beliefs of the people.

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These are matters which escape me, and I suspect they will always escape.

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It's like reaching out into the darkness. You can go so far, but in the end, you can never touch them. You are always reaching for a shadow.

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Finally, the people who created this world.

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Subtle questions, from life, by birth or death, in immense terraces.

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And then but still in the end and at last, we have the kingdom of the stars.

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