Checking In: What’s Up With Clonehenge and the Replicas?

Wonderful trilithon from Twitter with children in the uprights, holding hands
Garden Stonehenge replica in Poland, made by Jarosław Wiśniewski, see link below
https://skierniewice.naszemiasto.pl/skierniewicka-replika-megalitycznego-stonehenge-zdjecia/ar/c1-7682563

Hello. We have fallen behind on this blog and its maintenance, perhaps irrevocably, so we’re doing a post to say hello and tell you what’s been happening in the topic of Stonehenge replicas.

This used to be a single manageable topic. Combining large permanent replicas, home replicas, small exhibit replicas, and larger temporary Stonehenge replicas didn’t seem like taking on a lot. There just weren’t that many of them, at least not posted online.

But things have taken a turn since then. Numbers have increased in every category. We find large new Stonehenge replicas, large Stonehenge-like circles, large trilithons, including sculptures and fountains, very frequently, all over the world. Stonehenge replicas for advertising and for display or exhibit purposes have become more common, or at least posted more often and therefore easier to find, and the number of at-home replicas and models has gone through the roof.

In the interest of documenting Stonehenge replicas, we still do searches every day, especially on Twitter and Instagram, keeping links to anything interesting in a file on our computer. That list has grown to hundreds of examples, large and small. If we posted all of them on Twitter or our Facebook group or page, people would be overwhelmed and unfollow us en masse. In short, people are making a *lot* of Stonehenges. It’s great, but we can’t keep up.

We still intend to work on and complete the Clonehenge map of permanent replicas around the world, but for now just adding a link for each one instead of trying to include photos and info. Once we have that basic map, then we or other people can improve it over time. Our original ambitions for it are not realistic in light of how much time we currently can spare to do the work.

Lockdown inspired a lot of people to try their hands at Stonehenge replicas, and 95% or more of those were made by people who never heard of Clonehenge. This burgeoning phenomenon has nothing to do with our existence, which makes it all the more curious. Stonehenge is looming larger and larger in the zeitgeist.

This all sounds very serious, but we do still think Stonehenge replicas are funny. We just wanted to take a minute and catch you up with what has been going on. We’re working on learning how to reblog things on Instagram, so we can have a presence there, reblogging every Stonehenge we find every day, with the entire original post. That’s a goal. It’s fascinating what people come up with, from dusty cement block Stonehenges in vacant lots to aesthetic little Stonehenge replicas made to look pretty on Instagram, and all of the usual zany and ingenious versions that seem to come out of nowhere to delight us. We see the most creative and joyful side of people every day.

We’re not sure what the answer is to the problem of overwhelming numbers of replicas, how we can best cover them in the time we have in our lives, which is not a lot. This is a non-paying hobby that is increasingly taking the time you would allot for at least a part-time job. It would be a full-time nonpaying job if we were doing everything we probably should.

Is there a place where we should post every single interesting replica we find? Does anyone out there know what might work? We considered finding people to help with different segments: someone for large replicas, someone for social network replicas, someone to catalogue museum and other exhibit replicas, but a lot of time would be required, for no pay.

We always meant to be thorough and to document everything about this topic that we could, including the history and backstories for important replicas, many of which we know more about than almost anyone. We don’t see a way to do that now, and it’s a shame because it has become a bigger, and so more important, topic than we ever imagined it would be. We’re going to keep brainstorming how best to present the replicas and sometimes the people making them. Unlike in this post we hope to make it entertaining and engaging. We’ll see what develops.

There’s some kind of big psychological thing going on here, making people create these replicas, and it’s our hope that someday someone looks into that. For now, we will continue to observe, and in our private files at least, document what we find. I can’t promise how often we’ll post here on the blog in the time to come, but it costs us a bit of money to maintain so we hope to keep using it. Most Clonehenge activity takes place in the Facebook group and page, and on the Clonehenge Twitter account. Our feed on Twitter overlaps with but is different from the accounts on FB. You can contact us there any time.

We hope you had a happy and uplifting solstice and that the turn of the year brings good things! Thank you for being there and until next time, friends, happy henging!