Tag Archives for limestone stonehenge

Henge Shui: A Garden Henge in Red Oak, Texas

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photos and henge by Thomas, and Power Feng Shui, with permission

Building a large trilithon of stone is no easy task. The stones  have to be much larger than the portion visible above ground, and stone weighs a lot. We bring this up in order to underline the respect due to anyone who manages to build a large stone replica, no matter what the motivation.

And we bring that up because we suspect there are some among our readership who may be inclined to jeer, to cavil, indeed even to scoff, at the stated motivations of Thomas, the man who imagined and then built the replica above. He gives an explanation at this website, and in it he mentions Celtic magic and power and a bridge to the underworld, spirits and elementals–even white robes.

Thos 5Now we know that these topics rub many of our readers the wrong way, but they are, as inevitably as archaeology, engineering and astronomy, tied up in people’s perception of Stonehenge. And when the henge parasite hatches in the mind, it goes straight as if by instinct for the most vulnerable area. Sometimes it’s art, sometimes it’s science, sometimes it’s tourism, sometimes it’s bravado, sometimes it’s nostalgia, sometimes it’s play and sometimes it’s a mystical inclination. That last is the case here.

We’ve made the argument often that the Celts and druids could not have built Stonehenge, having arrived at least a millennium too late, but that does not technically preclude the possibility that those descended from Celtic peoples have some blood of the megalithic builders in their veins.  Celtic culture could have arrived as a style embraced by the indigenous people of the isles, rather than as a race who arrived to exterminate them–and some DNA testing suggests that is precisely the case.

Thos 7So scoff if you must, scoffers, but in the henging world there are many mansions and all who henge are welcome. You can read more by and about Thomas and his henging inspiration here.

Score for this nice garden trilithon and stone circle: 6 druids. He included a heel stone and a few small bluestone-like uprights. And to be honest, we would be thrilled to have this in our garden, an intimation of a magical world. We’re also thrilled to have another large, permanent replica!

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Montana’s Stonehenge: Big Sky

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photos by Bob LeBlanc, with permission

Montana has the kind of landscape that  just begs for a Stonehenge replica, but that requires someone with the henge-building bug plus the space and money needed  to implement it. Could it be that the land itself lured in the well-to-do, brilliant inventor Jim Smith, who just happened to have a friend in the stone/masonry business? Voila! Big Sky Stonehenge!

This replica stands on a private golf course in northwestern Montana that isn’t open to the public. It did attract some interest among the crowd who use Google Earth to scan the earth for odd and interesting things, but there’s  really not anything mysterious about it beyond the Clonehenge Principle: that strange something that impels people to build Stonehenge replicas.montana-fireworks2

Montana’s Stonehenge, on a golf course near Crystal Lakes, is made of limestone blocks, with great care taken to match the original in size and proportion. Some say it is the most exact copy of all the replicas, but as connoisseurs would point out, many criteria exist beside the sizes of the stones and the proportions of the layout. Things like the ditch and bank and the Aubrey holes seem to be missing as far as we can tell from the gallery photos, and certainly the shapes of the stones were not copied as closely as they were in the cardboard replica or the U. K. Foamhenge.

Nevertheless, this is a beautiful henge. If you can, be sure to look over the gallery at the underlined link above. Score: 8 druids for this stirring structure!