Where the banshees live and they do live well

For those of you who are fans of the movie Spinal Tap, and have memorized the songs and dialogue (come on, I'm sure this applies to many people), you will immediately know what the title of this blog entry means ... We went to Stonehenge on Saturday! Keith and I got ready for our trek as any good students of history would, by watching Youtube videos of the Stonehenge scene in Spinal Tap and giggling. Keith protests that he has also read a Bernard Cornwell novel called Stonehenge - so I guess you could say we were well-prepared, at least artistically speaking, for the trip.

We took the tube downtown to Trafalgar Square and managed to book tickets on the "Stonehenge express" tour bus about 45 minutes before it left. The ride itself was quite exciting, since the bus seemed like it was about a foot wider than the lane we were driving in (particularly as we veered around downtown picking up other passengers from their hotels). The driver's skill in estimating how close he was to clocking pedestrians in the head with his rearview mirrors was exceptional. We sat in the very front seat so we had a good view of the potential carnage. They could probably make a good video game out of the experience - London Bus Driver: Brace for Impact.

The ride to Stonehenge was about 1.5 hours. It was nice to get out of the city and see some countryside. I am continually amazed by how much sheep-filled terrain there actually is in England, considering how small it is and how many people live there. There were some particularly dedicated sheep grazing beside the highway, so I guess they do have to pack them in where they can.

As we rounded a bend in the road and came up a hill, we came upon Stonehenge. It seems to be in the middle of - well, not exactly nowhere, but between two highways, surrounded by (again) grazing sheep. Like many of the famous things we have seen this year, Stonehenge wasn't quite as we expected - it was a little smaller, a little less imposing (though obviously not as un-imposing as the 18" Stonehenge in Spinal Tap...) Still, there is something very compelling about the stones - the fact that people were so driven to create this structure. For me, what was perhaps more compelling than the stones themselves were the ancient burial mounds - small hills (barrows) of earth that dot Salisbury Plain and make the area around Stonehenge look bit like a gigantic golf course. But once you notice these barrows you realize that you are standing in an area that is basically an ancient graveyard – a place that was considered sacred by people very long ago, their motives and beliefs already well forgotten by the Middle Ages – people who could not have imagined the impossibility of people from all over the world standing in that spot, dressed in jeans and taking digital pictures with their cell phones. And there is something very captivating about that.

We would like to go back to Stonehenge, maybe in the spring to see it in a different light and to walk to some of the barrows and other ancient monuments in the area. Perhaps by the spring we will be brave (and coordinated) enough to drive there ourselves.