0093, 0223, 0774, 1330 UNITED KINGDOM (England) - Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites - Stonehenge (UNESCO WHS)

Posted on 08.01.2012, 26.05.2012, 30.07.2013 and 09.11.2014
I don't know if Stonehenge is the most important megalithic construction which survived the history, but certainly is the best known and most intensively researched. Located in the county of Wiltshire, at about 13km north of Salisbury, in the middle of the most dense complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred burial mounds, Stonehenge assembly consists of four concentric circles made of standing stones set within earthworks. The outer circle (33m in diameter) is constructed of 30 sarsen blocks, arranged vertically, above which were placed as lintels some other blocks, circular arc-shaped. Inside is another circle of eggplant stone blocks. They surround a horseshoe-shaped arrangement, built also of eggplant stone, within which is a sandstone slab mecacee called the Altar Stone.

The whole building is surrounded by a circular ditch measuring 104m in diameter. Inside stands a sandbank which contains 56 tombs, known as the Aubrey holes (named after the discoverer). The embankment and the ditch are intersected by a processional path 23m wide and almost 3km long, Stonehenge Avenue, which connects Stonehenge with the River Avon, and the small henge on its bank, discovered in 2008, at West Amesbury. Near the entrance to the Avenue is Slaughter Stone (a fallen sarsen that once stood upright with one or two other stones across the entrance causeway), and on the other side is the Heelstone, a single huge unshaped sarsen boulder. The main axis of the stones is aligned upon the solstitial axis. At midsummer, the sun rises over the horizon to the north-east, close to the Heel Stone. At midwinter, the sun sets in the south-west, in the gap between the two tallest trilithons, one of which has now fallen.

With regard to construction's purpose, opinions are divided, the most important theories circulated claiming that Stonehenge have served as a burial ground, as a place of healing, as part of a ritual landscape or have a celestial observatory function. Even I'm not historian, may have my own opinion, isn't it? Personally I believe that the people who have built it (between 3100 and 1600 BC) just don't thinking like us, ie they not separate the sides of existence as we do, but they viewed things globally. Surrounding universe didn't have for them a sacred dimension and a profran one, but life, death, nature, cosmos, divinity was closely entwined, forming a inseparable whole. As a result I don't think there was a space where they worshiped gods, another in which they buried the dead, another in which they made astronomical observations and so on, but there was only one site (like Stonehenge) which served all these types of activities. Anyway, many aspects of Stonehenge remain subject to debate.

Throughout the twentieth century, Stonehenge began to be revived as a place of religious significance, this time by adherents of Neopagan and New Age beliefs, particularly the Neo-druids. The historian Ronald Hutton would later remark that "it was a great, and potentially uncomfortable, irony that modern Druids had arrived at Stonehenge just as archaeologists were evicting the ancient Druids from it." The first such Neo-druidic group to make use of the megalithic monument was the Ancient Order of Druids, who performed a mass initiation ceremony there in August 1905, in which they admitted 259 new members into their organisation. Between 1972 and 1984, Stonehenge was the site of the Stonehenge Free Festival. After the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, this use of the site was stopped for several years and ritual use of Stonehenge is now heavily restricted.

All three stamps are part of the definitive series issued in 2011, about which I wrote here.

On the fourth postcard 
The first two stamps, depicting a tulipe and a crocus, belong to the set Blumen,about which I wrote here.


The last stamp was issued on September 1st, 2014, to commemorate a great literary work by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - The Little Prince, published in 1943. It is both the most-read and most-translated book in the French language, and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France.

References
Stonehenge - Official website
Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites - UNESCO official website
Stonehenge - Wikipedia
Stonehenge - english-heritage.org.uk

Sender 1, 2: Jeni & George Dragoman

Sent from London (England / United Kingdom), on 07.12.2011
Photo 1: Skyscan Balloon
Photo 2: James O. Davies 
Sent from Amesbury (England / United Kingdom), on 25.07.2013
Sender 4: Postcrossing meeting
Sent from Bielefeld (North-Rhine Westphalia / Germany), on 27.10.2014