Monthly Archives for September 2012

For Mirek, Clonehenge Wishes You a Belated Happy Birthday!

photo sent to us by Agata and Max

Happy birthday to Mirek! And our thanks to the people at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Wroclaw, Poland. This evening we received an email that reads:

“Dear Clonehenge, 

Greetings from Institute of Archaeology, University of Wroclaw, Poland.

Our friend Mirek, archaeologist, have a birthday today so we made this b-day card for him. We wish him all the best!

 This card is very personalized, cause Mirek is a great fan of neolithic, megaliths, aerial photography and of course Clonehenge and Ylvis song.

 Oh! This card is hiding a rebus. First letters of ‘Stonehenge’ word, with the part of ‘latawiec’ (‘kite’ in polish) gives ‘sto lat’* which means ‘100 years’, sentence used as ‘happy birthday!’.

 Many thanks,  Agata & Max”

It included the picture above and another with one person flying what appears to be a box kite while three others watch.

So let’s have a look at this paper Stonehenge model. It is elementary, of course, not much detail, and yet, look at the shapes of the stones–much closer to the real Stonehenge sarsen shapes than in your average paper cut-out. And they even included some fallen stones cleverly by showing lumps by the side of the big stones. For what it is, this is well and thoughtfully done. Plus there is the rebus. The card depicts Stonehenge and a kite, which in Polish is latawiec, so the otherwise inexplicable little post-it at the top left means to strike out all of the letters of Stonehenge except STO and all of the letters of latawiec except LAT, yielding, as the email says, Sto lat!, a traditional birthday greeting. Brilliant!

You have to wonder why smart people like that aren’t running Clonehenge instead of us!

We are honoured to know that there are Clonehenge fans in Poland, and honoured to be thought of and included in the celebration in this way. Agata and Max, you made our day, as we say here. Mirek (he is the one flying the kite), we wish you many happy returns!

And to all of our readers, happy henging!

*Discworld fans can discuss this revelation about sto lat at a later time!

“I can recognise every stone” A Stonehenge Expert Visits a Replica!

This is too good not to share. Watch and listen as Mike Pitts, archaeologist and self-proclaimed Stonehenge geek, has a look around Sacrilege, the inflatable bouncy Stonehenge, with its maker, artist Jeremy Deller. Mike Pitts recognises and discusses individual stones he knows from Stonehenge itself while enjoying his first-ever experience on a bouncy castle. Meanwhile children are bouncing and shouting all around them. We found this video utterly delightful!

You know you have made a top-notch Stonehenge replica when Mike Pitts goes out of his way to visit it and takes time to admire and point out characteristics he recognises from the original stones. Take note, hengers.

Catching Up: Small Henges and Some News–Welcome, Blokes and Sheilas!

One of Kyle van Oldeniel’s excellent small Stonehenges

We have gotten ourselves into a bit of  a pickle (hmmm….have we ever posted a picklehenge?). We have let things go for so long that we have enough henges and henging news to fill five or more posts, even with multiple henges per post. We were going to blame it on the interns, who are always messaging away on the expensive smart phones their parents bought them, but as long as we are making people up, why not blame it on our evil nemesis, who hates Stonehenge replicas and wants to end Clonehenge forever. Yeah, that’s it–we TRY to post but he foils us at every turn!

But apparently we have vanquished him, because here we are at long last! The mini-Stonehenge above was created by Kyle van Oldeniel, who lives on the west coast of Scotland. He has created this and a number of other exquisite little henges, like small art works expressing his longing for the mystery, timelessness, and connection to the earth that Stonehenge represents. He has posted more in the Henge Collective group on Facebook. Too nice for our blog, actually! Thank you, Mr. van Oldeniel–well done.

Jumper (or sweater) henge, created for the birthday of Simon Burrow

The picture above was posted to the Clonehenge group on Facebook by none other than friend of the blog Simon Burrow. It reminds us a little of the clothes henge created by Markus Georg. This may not look like much, but it is undeniably eccentric in conception and unique in the henging world for its casual laundry-pile styling and variations in colour and patterns. We do not recall seeing striped or flowered stones in a henge before! What it lacks in accuracy it makes up for in, well, in… thingy! Well done! Ish.

Flip-flop Henge by Liz Smith Yeats

And as long as we are looking at henges made of things we wear, here is Flip-flop Henge as created and posted by Liz Smith Yeats on the Clonehenge Facebook group, where there is much more up-to-date henging news and pictures than you’ll find on the blog, with the advantage of not having to read our dreadful don’t-you-think-we’re-funny commentary! It’s not that we’re desperate to have you join the group, it’s just that if you are actually interested in henging and hengers, you can keep up despite our troubles with our intern/nemesis/broken hands/dial-up/IE6, pet dragons, etc.

At any rate, Ms. Yeats (any relation?!) says, “Hoping you find this a worthy effort. The backstory is that I find Flip-Flops to be loathsome and will stop at nothing to remove them from the realms of footwear.”

Indeed, Ms. Yeats, we find it worthy! And creating a Stonehenge replica out of dodgy footwear is solidly in the spirit of Clonehenge!

We have many more small henges to post when our interns stop messaging their friends and annihilate our nemesis! And download Chrome. And start taking the dragons out for their daily rides so they’re too tired to keep us from posting. Etcetera. And there are at least two temporary large henges to post: that Basshenge from Burning Man that we posted about in its planning stages, and the Henge Collective’s wood henge from the Audio Soup festival.

Also, there continues to be news: links to Clonehenge have been posted on the website of Current Archaeology Magazine (for a while) as well as our being mentioned in a radio show to be broadcast in Australia on Sunday, 9 September. We learned that the decision has been made, sadly, to film parts of Thor: the Dark World at Stonehenge instead of building one. We would have liked to see what they came up with! And we learned that in Roman Polanski’s movie Tess, a replica was used instead of the real thing! We have no pictures yet, but the interns are working on it!

If you live in Oz and this is your first look at Clonehenge, we have one word for you: Esperance! One of the finest recent additions to the world of Stonehenge replicas. You can be proud.

This post has exceeded recommended dosages, so, until next time, mates, happy henging!