As I approached the brow of a hill, memories came flooding back from when I was a small boy sitting in the back of my parents old Riley car.
I knew what I was going to see, even though so many years had passed by, my imagination, the pictures in my head were so vivid, the road sweeping to the left of a green field rising at a slight incline, and a road off to the right that I would take, and there in the middle of the field would be what I had come to see, Stonehenge.
The power of the human mind, to have small triggers, or anchors in NLP terms, bring back such vivid memories, as if we were experiencing them in real terms, as if we were there in reality.
The smell or trigger of jasmine instantly takes me, as if I was actually there, to the harbour of Antalya in Turkey, breakfast on a tray, instantly takes me back to a hotel room overlooking the Golden Horn in Istanbul on a snowy morning, a cooling breeze on a hot day gives me the sensation of walking on the British seaside promenade of Skegness, a stone carving to the old Roman city of Leptis Magna in Libya.
As I drove over the brow of the road from London, there in the near distance they were, the stone circles of standing stones called Stonehenge, standing so majestic on a site that is over 5,000 years old, a site that has been used over these years for worship, for calculating seasons of the year, astronomical observatory, for burying the dead, a healing centre, for reasons we still do not know of.
Stonehenge a World Heritage site
These megalithic monuments are said to predate those in the Mediterranean, Greek, Egyptian and Mycenaean cultures.
The stones some weighing about 5 tons, (5,080 KiloGrams), were transported nearly 250 miles (400 Kilometres) from Wales to Stonehenge, and how they did that without modern transport methods, and once on-site, raise them to their standing positions leads to even more speculation.
Two main types of stone have been used, the warmer to touch bluestone and the Sarsen stones, some being eighteen feet in length (5.5 meters) and weighing some twenty-five tons (25,500 KG’s).
As the real meaning of Stonehenge and similar stone circles around the UK are fathomed out, it is believed that they were used for astronomical and ritual purposes. By using the stars, the celestial bodies, times of the year could be calculated, the solstices, the equinoxes, lunar periods, and from these festivals, ceremonies and ritual gatherings could be observed.
Many mythes and legends have been born from these magic stone circles, for example the stones were carried from Africa by giants, as told by Merlin, that perhaps King Arthur is buried there, for around the site are many mounds, little hillocks, called barrows which were burial sites.
Stonehenge is part of British heritage, it is a World heritage site, and as such must be preserved for the future. But, I was disappointed that I was not allowed like I was as a small boy to walk between the stones, visitors are shepherded to walk around the circle at a distance, making a strange sight as I drove down toward the site. I understand the reasons, much damage and loss of stone has been done over the years, but somehow I missed the interaction, Stonehenge was in the distant, but it is very much deep in my memory bank.