German Stonehenge on Beacon Hill, Ermingen

photo by Philipp Thom, with permission

For our 57th large permanent replica, we go back to Germany, southern Germany in the state of Baden-Württemberg, near the city of Ulm, to the town of Ermingen, where there is a longstanding, possibly ancient tradition of beacon burning on the first Sunday of Lent. Since this site, on a prominence with a clear view in all directions, needs to be kept clear for the beacon, someone came up with the idea of placing stones to track the movement of the sun.

And once you bring up the concept of tracking the sun with stones set in the ground, it’s never long before someone mentions Stonehenge. Hence this rather nice if odd trilithon. That lintel looks like a little cap, doesn’t it?

We don’t know much about this one–who did the planning and building, what kind of stone was used, how it was assembled. Did they use mortice-and-tenon construction as at Stonehenge? All we know is what we found at this link from Stadt Ulm Online’s Ermingen page (a couple of good pictures there, too). [Note: the term translated there as radio beacon would be better translated as relay or broadcast beacon. Funken doesn’t mean radio on this context.]

Herr Thom has posted a nice video of the stone circle and a walk through the trilithon. Click here to see it. Nicely done! Translation of the caption there includes this: “On the days of the summer solstice and the winter sun turn within the stone circle determined points are illuminated by the stone gate through of the sun.” At certain times of the year the sun shines through the trilithon onto special points within the circle.

Ermingen, by the way, is known among fossil buffs as the site of the Turritellenplatte, a unique outcropping of rock rich with fossils of Turritella, a kind of mollusk shell. We don’t know whether any of that rock was used for this structure, but if it was, we would approve. That fossil/megalith connection is in need of strengthening.

Ermingen is also surrounded by many ancient sites, including a cave, Hohle Fels, that is thought to have been inhabited as early as 30,000 years ago. Found there so far were a Venus figurine and bone and ivory flutes, the earliest musical instruments ever found. Brilliant stuff! Let’s go visit!

Score: 6 druids. We like the site, we like the beacon, a very old way of communicating, and we like the fact that there’s a circle rather than just a trilithon. Now we wonder what new large permanent replica will pop up next!

Mountain View, California–It’s a Mystery!

photos by Ghostly Penguin Display (aka Khoi), with permission

We said we weren’t going to post any more but we can’t stand knowing of large permanent replicas and not posting them! People count on us for their Stonehenge replica information. Well, in our dreams, anyway!

We actually knew there was some kind of little Stonehenge in Mountain View, California, but until now we had never seen a picture of it. Then one day recently we were idly searching the interwebular thing-a-majiger and, voilá! Here is this odd little sculpture/replica trilithon/circle in a park. With photos by a fellow of the excellent name Ghostly Penguin Display. (No, sorry, we don’t know why either.) Well, obviously we have to post it.

But what is it? We have stared at these pictures for a while, before and after doig searches to see if there’s any info online about this. We found nothing Perfect! That leaves us free to make up whatever we want.

The most alarming thing about this one is that grate under the trilithon. We had to reject out of hand (so to speak!) the theory that it might be an outdoor urinal. Even California is not that funky. And then there’s that strange screen between the uprights, with the pattern of holes in it. Astronomical sighting holes, lining up with sunrises and sets? Stars? The moon? Unlikely with that configuration, although it’s likely that at least one of them will line up with something.

No, the conclusion we have come to, and we plan to stick to it even if the designer or someone points out that we’re wrong (which is not unlikely), is that this piece, although dry now, was designed as a fountain.

Which makes it our third Stonehenge fountain–fourth if you count one built on an old fountain. There was the Falling Water Designs replica, the Warwick University replica (small and temporary), and, of course, the first replica that caused us to use the word lameness in a post, the Waterfall Stonehenge, for sale now. There’s actually another, since one of the trilithons at Caelum Moor in Texas is a fountain, too, although most photos don’t show it running.

Clearly there’s a pattern here, and we think this is the best explanation for this odd yet charming construction. We like the circle of low stones around it, suitable for people to sit on and listen to the falling water while reading or just thinking, or trying not to think. We want one of these in our town’s park!

Score: 6 druids. We may have been influenced by the nice light captured by our Ghostly Penguin friend. We admit we’re a little mysified, too, by that tree or trees just behind it. A young flowering tree with supports? A small grove with some young white birches? We can’t quite figure it out, but that’s okay. Stonehenge is supposed to be a mystery.

And, yes, we have a couple more to come including a nice German one we had somehow missed. See you soon. Happy Thanksgiving to our Stateside readers!

Wearing Stonehenge: Show Your Love with Tiny Megaliths!

photo from the website of the Vangar Emporium

It’s getting toward the gifting season (groan!), so here’s a fun little set of items for any Stonehenge enthusiast on your gift list. We were impressed with these because most earrings out there that are being called Stonehenge earrings bear no resemblance whatsoever to Stonehenge. These are rather nice little trilithons of spotted stone (okay–in the real Stonehenge it is the short bluestones, not the tall sarsens of which the trilithons are made, that are spotted, but we’ll let that pass because we like the look).

And there’s the nice little pendant to go with them. The whole set would go well with an outfit of solid black, or a wardrobe of solid black if you’re that sort.

We can’t help but imagine these finding their ways onto the ears and chests of cute little wannabe Wiccans who have glittery moon tiaras and only a dim concept of Stonehenge that somehow involves Druids and Irish music or bagpipes although they’re not sure why. But quite serious archaeologists who know about Beaker folk and the cursus and what-not might wear these earrings, too. The stone shapes and proportions are well done and there’s an off-balance sense about them that echoes the cobbled-together look of the real monument.

Score: 6 druids, because good Stonehenge jewellery is hard to come by. Sadly for our Stateside readers, the website selling them is in the U.K. So far we haven’t found anything comparable on Etsy.

By the way, this site also sells small Stonehenge candle holders and even little witches hung from strings to hang from your ceiling or perhaps your . . . ahem . . . Yule tree. And that’s only on their Stone Age/Pagan/Celtic page. Who knows what joys await? Happy winter solstice shopping, or whatever you like to call it!

Stonehenge at Elf Fantasy Fair 2008

photos by Anneliez, from Flickr by Creative Commons License

We aren’t going to score this one. It’s just a trilithon, squarish and non-ancient-looking. But fun! We hadn’t heard of the Elf Fantasy Fair before, but believe us, if we were real people and not just soul-less blog bots, we would definitely make a point of going to Elf Fantasy Fair 2010! If nothing else, on the power of this photo alone:

(Even though it seems only in 2008 did they have a Stonehenge.)

And believe us, there are more where that photo came from, whether you fancy the costumes or the girls! Look at this fellow, and these two. Many more photos scattered about the net, and some of the greatest costumes we’ve ever seen! Do an image search and you’ll see.

What? Oh, yes, the Stonehenge. First take note of what appears to be Ogham, a medieval Irish alphabet, cut into the “stone” on the right side of the trilithon. An odd detail, but there’s always a new wrinkle in any Stonehenge, it seems.

We like this photo, with musicians making music around the stones. The connection between Stonehenge and music seems natural. Research has been done about that, but since it was done at the Maryhill replica, we’re not sure how accurate it is. People say the Maryhill replica is a lot like the real Stonehenge, but you only have to look at it to know it’s not. The stone shapes and the concrete materials are too different.

The music connection, however, is unavoidable. Many albums and CDs feature Stonehenge on the cover. Of course there’s Spinal Tap. And Oxegen in Ireland, the music festival we would most like to attend, features a Stonehenge-like portal for its entrance way.

Portal is perhaps the operative word. The trilithons at Stonehenge look like portals, as if one could stand in the center and walk out into a different world or another different world, depending which one you walked through. Music at its best serves a similar function, opening temporary new worlds or sometimes new doors in our everyday world, bringing the transcendent to the mundane.

Or–that could be hogswallop. After all, we’re just bots!

Untitled Stainless Steel or Admit it, Washington State, You Have a Fetish!

photo from the website of the General Administration of the State of Washington, with permission

Okay, so it’s only a sculpture with Stonehenge references, but coming as it does from the Stonehenge State, we thought this huge untitled piece worth documenting on Clonehenge. The sculptor was Lee Kelly, an artist well known in the Pacific Northwest.

Olympia is the capital city of Washington, and this sculpture is installed near the Transportation Building on the Capitol Campus in Olympia. Stonehenge reaching right to the Capitol of the Stonehenge State! According to the website we linked to above, Kelly said that with this sculpture he wanted to “deal with the ancient attitudes of man and his relationship to what he makes with his mind and hand.”

Stainless03 To suggest ancient attitudes, he mimics, without stating, the trilithon, in steel. It is a likable public piece. We can imagine children clambering over it and running through it. And by children we partly mean, of course, the imaginations of adults who are too stiff about their image in the eyes of others to actually do any of that. But their minds suggest it and their fingers ache to touch that cool steel.

The sculpture was completed in 1973, and we think the Seventies show in it a little, that cosmic resonance people looked for back then, the plainness and friendliness. Kelly also said about the piece, “the forms are simple in that everyone can ‘understand’ them. The mystery is in their interrelationships, the spaces they create, as well as the relationship to the building and plaza.”

Here is another work Kelly did at roughly the same time in his career, and here are other works, most of them newer. Of course, this isn’t a Stonehenge replica so it is difficult to score. Score: 4½ druids as a replica. Quite a bit higher as a piece of public art. We think it is handsome and has that quality of suggesting greater things! You can see the other Stonehenge replicas and sculptures in Washington State here. What a place for henge-ophiles!

If anyone has any replicas they would like posted, this would be a great time to send them in, as we’re running uncharacteristically low, not because of scarcity, of course, but because the photo permissions have been elusive. Come on, help us out. We’re almost at the end of our first year of posting, so you can call it a birthday present!

Witch Henge–Be Prepared for Serious Mojo!

photo by Bob Bradlee of Stonehenge Collectables

This item has witches on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 druids by itself, but once I turned it on, that’s when the magic happened! The evil gleeful witches began to revolve around the fire, which glowed like the eyes of a wolf howling at the moon. I don’t know how I lived until now, without this tasteful objet d’art!

After I plugged it in that first time, my life changed. Mail poured in, all full of checks for thousands of dollars. I’ve had to stop going to public places because of the throngs of ardent admirers I attract. When I step into the garden, bunnies and hedgehogs follow me and colourful birds light briefly on my shoulders or in the nearest branches and sing to me sweetly. Flowers open as I near them, and fill the air with a wonderful fragrance.

Indoors, dust has stopped settling on the furniture. The whole place cleans itself now. My health has improved, I’ve lost weight, and I look ten years younger. I could go on, but of course there is this odd henge to discuss!

This is a resin model made by Lemax for their Spooky Town collection (called Witches’ Cove–do they mean coven or is it a reference to the Cove at Avebury?). There are the four uprights lintelled, one trilithon and some fallen stones. Then there are six witches, or are they just Welsh women in traditional dress, who having swept up at Stonehenge are now burning the debris?

The witches (could one of these be Juniper?!) do revolve in a circle and the fire does light up. The owl, vulture, raven, black cat, skull and bones are there to add atmosphere. It’s surprising there’s no jack-o-lantern. Do you think someone said, “No–that would be over the top!” Heh. You can see more photos here.

Seriously–who comes up with this stuff (and why six witches instead of three?). We love the addition of the autumn leaves in the grass. How often do maple leaves blow onto the grass at Stonehenge, do you think? How much does EH pay per year to have someone come in with a leaf blower? No.

Score: We are waffling on whether this is so bad it’s good, or whether it’s just bad. Okay, I suppose we got a chuckle out of it. We’ll give it 5½ druids–or six witches! We considered just naming this post ROFLMAO. But then we thought of the wolf shirt.

Happy Halloween, Samhain, or whatever you celebrate! And seriously, if any of you witches out there do dress and party like this, send pictures!

Spinal Tap–The Other Stone’enges!

Stone_Henge_tap photo by Peter Renn, from the BBC

It is not at all clear what the little Stonehenge replica, actually a mere trilithon, in the movie This Is Spinal Tap, is made of. Some say it was inflatable, some say it was made of foam. We dedicated our 100th post to that one, the only Stonehenge replica most people have ever seen. But there have been others.

Spinal Tap, although a mock band, also tours, and on some but not all of their tours they have had other Stone’enges, at least one of which, and possibly all of which, were inflatable. Inflatable but apparently not always inflated. People who attended their concert at the Wembley arena in July report that they had trouble, um, keeping it at attention . . .

Spinal Tap - Stonehenge At a Glastonbury concert in June they had a rather smaller one, but it appears to have been closer to 4 feet than 18 inches high.

The inflatable Stonehenge is in general a much rumoured but rarely seen item. It is said one was commissioned a few years ago for a high end party in Manhattan, but if there are pictures of it online, we have not found them. There may be others, too, rentable for paint ball skirmishes and the like, but those, too, we cannot find.

We think it is an unfilled niche! Why doesn’t every party place have inflatable Stonehenges to rent for garden parties and village events? We can imagine them at fairs, music festivals, all kinds of gatherings. And, of course, eventually someone would be seized by the urge to fill them with helium. A floating inflatable Stonehenge! It would be something the world has never seen. And we don’t just mean a trilithon, people! Think of it!

Score for the Spinal Tap touring trilithons: 5 druids. And it’s that high only because they’re funny and because, let’s face it, they put Stonehenge replicas on the map. We want to thank Emma Harrison, bigmollusk, of World Before Wireless, for pointing these out to us. Emma, we await that inflatable Stonehenge you promised us. Deadline is December 21!

Rock On, dudes!

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 5 Now 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 7 So 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!

Toilet Henge Again: Oh, Banksy, You Kidder!

photo by MG/BS4, with permission

Admittedly this is a little late, as the article we got it from was posted in June. It got by us at the time but a friend of the blog sent us a link, so here it is, another toilethenge by Banksy, this time part of the exhibit Banksy vs. Bristol Museum.

Not sure why he went for this again. His Glastonbury replica was sufficiently satisfying, and the guerrilla art pinballhenge that may or may not be his struck us as a little fresher. If you know what we mean.

Written on the Welcome to the Museum sign are the words, “Now wash your hands,” which would actually be funnier if they were on a sign on the way out that said “Thank you for visiting the museum.”

Long time readers will remember that this is not our first Bristol henge. Rogue archaeologists at the uni there built a snowhenge during the great snow last winter. We’ll be keeping an eye on that city from now on.

Score: 5½ druids this time. This is smaller and less elaborate than last time, just one trilithon and a fallen upright, and it feels a little tired. You never know with Banksy, of course–that may be what he’s going for. He certainly is not worried about his score on Clonehenge. We confess we’re fans and we look forward to whatever he comes up with next, henge or no henge!

Stonehenge Built – in a day! Wiltshire Heritage Museum

Stonehenge5 photos by Pete Glastonbury, with permission

On Sunday (30 August, 2009 for those of you who are reading this from the future), Wiltshire Heritage Museum and Julian Richards held an event for families in which visitors could help build a partial Stonehenge replica. You may remember our announcement here. By all accounts, including this one, it was a success and a good time was had by all. Stonehenge6

We love the picture on the right. The excessively cute future archaeologist in pink is putting everything on hold in order to take in what Mr. Richards is teaching them about Stonehenge.

The lesson we want to leave you with today: It’s never too early to introduce Stonehenge replica building to your children! And community Stonehenge building is bound to be the way it was originally done, no matter how Wally Wallington tries to convince people otherwise. Score: 6½ druids. Because while it’s only a trilithon, involving people in the project spreads the word. And, hey, it’s in Wiltshire–automatically more authentic! May this kind of event spread to archaeological museums everywhere.

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CLONEHENGE

A blog about Stonehenge Replicas. We kid you not.

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