BRITAIN: The Lost Megaliths Older Than Stonehenge You’ve Never Seen

Around five thousand years ago, while the very first stones were being dragged into place at Stonehenge, people in the north of what we now call England had already raised something far larger, three giants of stone, taller than anything the builders of Stonehenge would ever lift, standing in a quiet field in Yorkshire, and for so many centuries afterward nobody could explain how they came to be there. So they blamed the only builder grand enough to fit the crime. They said the devil himself had thrown them down from the sky. We call them the Devil's Arrows. They stand on the edge of a sleepy market town called Boroughbridge, and they are among the tallest standing stones in all of Britain, and yet most people have never heard of them. There is no great visitor centre here, no proper modern excavation, almost no answers at all. Now, you will hear strange ideas about these stones—lay lines drawn across maps, landing markers for visitors from the sky. We can set all of that gently to one side, because the truth, the real and measurable truth, is stranger and far more satisfying than any of it. Tonight we look at the giants that history walked straight past. CHAPTER I GIANTS THAT SHOULD NOT BE HERE Let us begin with the simple fact of their size, because it is the first thing that refuses to make sense. The tallest of the three stones rises almost seven metres, around twenty-two feet, into the Yorkshire sky. That single stone is taller than any stone standing at Stonehenge. It is, in fact, the second tallest standing stone in all of Britain. Its two companions are very nearly as tall. Together they stand in a long line, stretching almost a hundred and seventy-five metres across the fields, set out from the north-west to the south-east, with a care that does not look at all accidental. And these are not boulders that happen to lie nearby. They are millstone grit, a heavy and gritty stone, and the nearest place they could have come from is an outcrop called Plumpton Rocks, around nine miles to the west. Each of these stones weighs somewhere between twenty-five and over forty tons. To put that in plainer terms, the lightest of them outweighs a fully loaded lorry several times over. Think for a moment about what that means. Somebody, five thousand years ago, with no wheel that we know of, no iron, no teams of horses, chose stones the size of a house, and moved them nine miles across rivers and rising ground, and then stood them upright in a careful line. The estimates we have are sobering. To drag a single one of these stones on sledges and timber rollers, you would have needed something close to two hundred people working together, perhaps for half a year, half a year of a whole community's labour for one stone, and there were once more than three. When you see a small standing stone out on a moor, you can imagine a handful of strong backs heaving it upright in an afternoon. That tells you very little, for it could have been raised for almost any reason at all. But you do not move forty tons of stone nine miles, and pour half a year of your people's lives into it, for no reason. People simply do not do that. Whatever these stones were for, it mattered to them more than almost anything else in their world, and here is the first thread to hold on to, because they were not the only ones who felt that pull. Far to the south, in Brittany, lies a fallen giant called the Grand Menhir, the largest single stone ever shaped and raised by the people of the Stone Age, nearly seventy feet long, and weighing some three hundred and thirty tons, quarried, shaped, and lifted almost seven thousand years ago by people who supposedly never met the builders of Yorkshire, and yet who felt the very same impossible compulsion. Moving these stones was the hard part to explain. But it turns out that what they did to the stone before they ever raised it is the part that truly stops you. CHAPTER II THE SURFACE UNDER THE SOIL For a long time people looked to the devil's arrows and saw something curious at their tops. The stone is worn into deep vertical grooves, long flutes running down from the summit, almost as though the fingers of a great hand had dragged through wet clay. Many have looked at those grooves and felt certain they were carved, shaped on purpose by the builders, and here we have to be honest, because honesty is exactly what makes the real mystery worth your time. Those grooves at the top are almost certainly natural. Millstone grit is a soft and thirsty stone, and five thousand years of Yorkshire rain, running down the same channels again and again, will carve flutes like these all on its own. So if anyone tells you the fluted tops are proof of ancient carving, the weather has a simpler answer and we should take it. But now we go underground. And underground is where the story quietly changes. In the year 1709, long before modern archaeology existed, curious men dug down around the base of the central stone. They found that the builders had not simply dropped it into a pit. The base of the stone had been worked flat, deliberately squared, so that it would sit true on a bed of hard-packed clay and cobbles, sunk around five feet into the earth, and the surface of the stone, the part that had been buried away from the rain for five thousand years, was smooth, finished, worked with pointed tools into a deliberate even face. Let that settle for a moment. The roughness you see today, the weathered and pitted skin of these giants, is the work of the rain. But beneath the soil, sealed away from the weather, the original surface survived. And that surface had been shaped by human hands, with patience and with real skill. This is the quiet heart of the whole mystery. These were not rough pillars hauled up just as they were found. They were chosen, dressed, and finished, in the same way the great stones of Stonehenge were finished, by people who cared what the surface looked like, even where no living eye would ever see it. And once again, they were not alone in this care. Far away, on a hillside in southern Turkey, stands a place called Göbekli Tepe, where people were carving great pillars of stone into deliberate shapes almost twelve thousand years ago—that is, thousands of years before farming, before pottery, before the wheel. We were once told that people of that age could not possibly have done such a thing. The stones patiently say otherwise. So the people of the Arrows shaped their giants with love. Which leaves a simple and unsettling question. If this much care went into the three stones we can still see, how many were there to begin with? CHAPTER III THE VANISHING STONES To answer that, we have to listen to the voices of those who came before us, the early travellers and antiquarians who saw the Arrows, when there was still more of them to see. The earliest clear account comes from a man named John Leland, who passed this way in the 1530s. He described not three stones, but four, standing roughly shaped by human hands beside the old road. He thought them so grand that he guessed they must be some kind of Roman trophy. He was quite wrong about the Romans, as we shall see, but he was right about the number—four. Later, in the 1580s, the great scholar William Camden also recorded four, and he added a detail that should make any of us wince. One of the stones he wrote had lately been pulled down by men, hoping to find treasure buried beneath it. They found nothing, of course, and the broken body of that lost giant is believed to have been carted away and built into the foundations of a bridge over a nearby stream. One of the wonders of prehistoric Britain, broken up for rubble, to save somebody the trouble of quarrying fresh stone. The accounts go on, and the numbers rise. An antiquarian named William Stookley counted five stones still standing in his day, and in the 1690s a local fisherman swore he had seen seven of them, though we should hold that last figure lightly, since the man himself may not have had the clearest of eyes. But four, and very probably five, we can trust. So the three stones that survive to-day are not the monument, they are the survivors of it—the last remnant of something larger, that was already being chipped away, stone by stone, while Shakespeare was still alive and writing. One of those early visitors, a man called John Aubrey, sketched the site in 1687, and he could not shake the feeling that he was looking at the ruins of something far grander. He imagined great rings of stone, like a northern cousin of Stonehenge, with these last giants as the final survivors of a vast and broken circle. We will never know how many stones once stood here, because the town, the farmers, the treasure-hunters, and the long, slow centuries all took their share before any one thought to count properly. What we can say is that the line was longer once, and a longer line raises a new question entirely. If these stones were arranged with such care, then what, exactly, were they lined up to point at? CHAPTER IV. A LINE ACROSS THE LANDSCAPE Stand at the arrows and follow the line they make, and it leads you down toward the river Ouray, to a natural crossing-place, a ford where people could pass from one bank to the other. These giants guard a threshold in the land. But the line does not end at the river. Lift your eyes from the ground, and look at the wider country, and something extraordinary begins to appear. The devil's arrows are not alone. They are one piece of a vast pattern, stretching for miles across this corner of Yorkshire, a stretch of land so thick with ancient monuments that some have called it the Henge capital of Britain. Run a line north from the arrows, and it passes through a chain of great circular earthworks, henges with names like Caner Barn, and Nunwick, and Hutton Moor, one after another, until it reaches the crown of the whole landscape. THE THORNBURGH HENGES Three enormous rings of bank and ditch set out in a row, raised more than five thousand years ago. People have called them the Stonehenge of the North, and in their day their banks may well have gleamed, coated in crushed white gypsum, so that they shone across the plain like fallen pieces of the moon, and here the pattern reaches up from the earth toward the sky. The three henges of Thornburgh are not set in a perfectly straight line. They bend, very slightly, in what looks like a dog-leg, and when you lay that bend against the night sky, it mirrors the three stars in the belt of Orion. The whole complex also appears to face the moon, aligned to the place on the horizon where the moon rises at the very limit of its long wandering. That wandering is worth understanding, because it tells you just how patient these people were. The moon does not keep to one path across the year. Over a slow cycle of roughly eighteen and a half years, the points where it rises and sets drift outward to their furthest extremes, and then slowly draw back in again. To build a monument that captures that furthest moon, you must watch the sky carefully for a lifetime, and pass what you learn to your children, and to their children after them. These were not simple people. They were astronomers, working in earth and stone. And if you think a stone monument aligned to the extreme moon sounds like a lonely coincidence, then travel north and west, out to the Isle of Lewis, far in the Scottish seas. There stand the stones of Calanish, an avenue of giants laid out around five thousand years ago, and they too frame that same extreme moon, the same eighteen-and-a-half-year cycle, in a corner of Britain that supposedly had nothing whatever to do with Yorkshire, the same sky, the same patience, the same quiet obsession, written in stone in two distant places, and the line through Yorkshire, it turns out, may not stop at Thornborough. It may reach a great deal further than that. CHAPTER V. HOW FAR DOES IT REACH? Turn now, and look to the east. Around forty-four miles away, almost exactly due east of the Arrows, stands one last giant, the Ruddston Monolith, the tallest standing stone in all of Britain, rising some twenty-five feet into the air in the churchyard of a quiet village, two of the very tallest stones ever raised in this country, set upon a single line that runs east to west across the whole breadth of Yorkshire. You may call that chance, if you wish, but the people who placed forty-ton stones with such care across the land did not deal much in chance, and the discoveries are not finished. In recent years, close to the Arrows themselves, the faint outline of an enormous enclosure has been noticed in the fields, an earthwork so large that, if it is what some suspect it to be, it could rival or even surpass the great superhenge that lies beside Stonehenge. It remains unproven, and undated, and we should be careful with it, and honest, but it sits exactly where the old monumental line runs, and there are even hints, in old stone sockets found a few miles to the north, that the row of giants may once have marched on far beyond the three we know. Now hold all of it in your mind at once, and let the lens pull back, all the way back, beyond Yorkshire, beyond Britain. In Brittany, three thousand standing stones march in long rows across the land at Carnac, the oldest great stone monuments in all of Europe. On a Scottish island, the avenue at Calanish frames the wandering moon. On a Turkish hillside, people were carving giant pillars almost twelve thousand years ago, and in a quiet Yorkshire field, others shaped forty-ton giants by hand, and lined them up with the sky. Different lands, different centuries, peoples who, as far as we are ever told, never spoke a word to one another, and yet, again and again, they did the same four things. They sought out colossal stone, they shaped it with care, they moved it across distances that should have been beyond them, and they pointed it at the heavens. We have mapped only a fraction of all this, and almost none of it, here in Yorkshire, has ever been properly dug, which leaves us standing in the field, with the wind moving in the grass, and one very large question—what were they all answering to? CHAPTER VI. THE QUIET GIANTS. So let us gather what we know, and be honest about what we do not. We know these are among the tallest standing stones in Britain, we know they were quarried from nine miles away, and dragged here at a cost we can barely imagine, we know that beneath the soil their surfaces were shaped and smoothed by careful hands, we know there were once more of them, four at the very least, very likely five, and that they stood at the head of a sacred landscape that stretched for miles and reached up to the moon and the stars, and we know that, in all the centuries since, almost nobody has put a spade in the ground to learn more. What we do not know is the one thing we most want to. We do not know who they were, or what they believed, or what these giants truly meant to them. The textbooks will give you a careful answer, a late stone-age date, a few cautious words, and a shrug. But the stones themselves, finished by hand and aligned with the moon, and standing silent in the rain for five thousand years, do not seem to agree that they were ever ordinary. And so I will hand the question to you, because your guess to-night is as good as the textbooks, and perhaps a good deal better. From a Yorkshire field to the long rows of Brittany, to a hillside in Turkey, people who supposedly never met kept shaping colossal stone and aiming it at the very same sky. Was that only coincidence, or were they all answering the same call, one that we have simply forgotten how to hear? Tell me your theory down in the comments, and let the bold ones come, the bolder the better, because the official story has already given its careful little answer, and a forty-ton stone, finished by hand and pointed at the moon, does not seem to agree with it. If you would like to walk with me to the next forgotten giant, then stay a while, subscribe, and ring the bell, so that the next story finds you when it comes. Next time we travel east, to that lonely churchyard, to stand at the foot of the tallest standing stone in all of Britain, the Ruddston Monolith, and ask what on earth it is doing there. Until then, rest easy. The giants have stood for five thousand years. They are in no hurry at all, and neither, tonight, are we.