Stonehenge with Ken Follett

What if the secrets of Stonehenge lie not just in the stones, but in the people who hauled them there? Tristan Hughes sits down with best-selling novelist Ken Follett to uncover and imagine the lives of the Stone Age builders, the rival communities around Salisbury Plain, and the extraordinary teamwork needed to raise one of the most famous monuments in the world. They reveal fascinating details about flint mines, giant Sarsen stones, ancient trade, communal festivals, and the breathtaking ingenuity behind moving and lifting blocks that weighed 25 tons or more. MORE The World of Stonehenge Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-world-of-stonehenge/id1520403988?i=1000559656539 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3hO4nzt9uZruMaWj431Fms?si=0aa9910f38ea419d Stonehenge Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stonehenge/id1520403988?i=1000621901855 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/19LqOpDMGBtFTygVsJJfsw?si=482346ddcf784e8a We're going on *TOUR* to Australia and New Zealand! - grab your tickets here https://fane.com.au/whats-on/an-evening-with-tristan-hughes/. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor and producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 0:35Speaker 02

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• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:18Tristan Hughes?

  It's one of the most famous prehistoric monuments in the world. A monument that was first built more than 5,000 years ago. Its story and use continue to evolve over the following centuries and millennia. And today, it still holds so much meaning to so many people. Stonehenge. Now, there are still so many theories surrounding Stonehenge. Its purpose, its construction, its Stone Age significance. And yet, new discoveries continue to reveal more fascinating details. A few years back, for instance, it was revealed that the great sarsen stones that define Stonehenge,

• 2:03Tristan Hughes?

  each weighing about 25 to 30 tonnes, came from the Marlborough Downs, roughly 15 miles away. But how exactly these Stone Age people went about transporting those massive blocks remains debated.

• 2:18Tristan Hughes?

  Living in a world long before written history, it is amazing to think about who these people were, the builders of Stonehenge. How did they view the world around them? What drove them to undertake such a project? To transport these massive stones over 20 kilometres and set them up at Stonehenge? How might they have done it?

• 2:41Tristan Hughes?

  It's this mysterious world that is the setting for the newest historical novel by one of Britain's most cherished writers, Ken Follett. Now, a few weeks back, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ken all about this novel, Circle of Days, shining a light on the people themselves, the Stone Age men and women who made and used Stonehenge. Welcome to The Ancients.

• 3:09Tristan Hughes?

  Ken, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today.

• 3:12Speaker 05

  Thank you. It's great to be here.

• 3:13Tristan Hughes?

  And to talk about Circle of Days and Stonehenge for such an iconic monument, built more than 4,000 years ago. And the fact that there's still so much mystery surrounding almost every part of the monument, so many theories, is that what makes it such an alluring centrepiece for an epic historical novel?

• 3:32Speaker 05

  Well, certainly the fact that quite a lot of things are not known leaves the writer of fiction with some room, which of course you don't get if you write about the 16th century, or certainly not the 20th century, when people's movements were tracked and so on. But really, the interesting thing about Stonehenge is the question of how on earth they did it. And in a sense, all of it is speculation, but some of it's soundly based and some of it is in the book, a little of it is my imagination.

• 4:05Tristan Hughes?

  Do you also think it's the people themselves? It's the mystery around who these people must have been, with their stone tools at the time, before metal tools and so on, giving colour to their lives? And how these everyday people would have gone about building a great monument like Stonehenge?

• 4:23Speaker 05

  Oh, yes. Of course, a novel is always about the people and their everyday lives and their emotions. Any kind of novel, you know, wartime novel. It's a novel because it's about the people rather than the dates and the dry facts. And we do know, within the bounds of probability, we do know a bit about the lives of Stone Age people. So the thing that's easiest to find out about is the tools that they used. Because there were no metal tools, as you mentioned, there's no metal at all. So their only cutting implement was a flint. That was used to cut down trees because that was all they had. It was used to cut anything they wanted to cut, the joint of meat

• 5:07Speaker 05

  or crops or anything. So for me, that was like the first thing that gave me the clue to life in the Stone Age. Because we find these flints, they're two a penny. I mean, I wouldn't have one on my desk if they were seriously rare. But there are different qualities of flint. And the best flint is found underground. This is one of the things I first learned about researching this book. The best flint is underground, the kind of flint that you can find just lying around in the fields and so on. I live in Hertfordshire. There's quite a lot of flint in Hertfordshire. In fact, the barn attached to my house is built of flint. But that flint is not really good enough for tools.

• 5:52Speaker 05

  And the best flint is found underground. So there are flint mines. And in England, you can visit them. There's a place called Grimes Graves, which is a historical site. And you can go down the flint mine and it's very like a coal mine. Coal mines, of course, did actually go down a heck of a long way, about thirty feet down, you can go about thirty feet down. And then there's a layer of this very beautiful black flint that they chopped up. And it's much better to sharpen. If you take a flint from the field and try and sharpen it, it'll quite often break. But the flint from underground is much easier to work. So this is just like a coal mine.

• 6:35Speaker 05

  There's a shaft and then tunnels radiating out from the shaft at the bottom. And this was the only industry in the Stone Age. And these flints were terrifically valuable. They tell us a bit about the Stone Age. Because, look, these guys, the guys who dug the shafts and mined the flints, you can't eat the flints. So they must have traded them for what they needed to live. Food and clothing and leather for their shoes and so on. That tells us that there was some kind of organised trade in the Stone Age. Something that we might not necessarily have known otherwise.

• 7:17Tristan Hughes?

  Again, it's a great example, going back to what I said earlier. Maybe I was saying that too strongly, that everything about Stone Age people is this complete mystery. Because as you say, archaeology is helping us learn more into what life must have been like. This is a time long before the written word comes to Britain. I mean, that part of it is much more invisible. But the archaeology, places like Grimes Graves and so on, can give us amazing insights into things. Like you say, a Stone Age industry centred around that wonder material of the time, flint, which was used for so much and so many different tasks.

• 7:53Speaker 05

  And I wonder whether it was also a kind of currency. I mean, there was no money in the Stone Age, but I suppose if you wanted to, as it were, put a bit aside for a rainy day, if you had, you know, a box full of costly flints, you could stash it and then in hard times you could get one out and trade it for a piece of beef or something. So it was key in that respect. The other thing that we can find, talking about a piece of beef, we can find out a bit about what they ate. Because as I'm sure you know, and when archaeologists dig down in what's called a midden.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Which is actually full of Stone Age poo. It's not actually stinky, it's just like earth. It doesn't have any bacteria left because it's been there for four thousand five hundred years. But they can examine it and obviously it shows them what food was eaten. So we know, for example, that they were carnivores. They ate a lot of pork and quite a lot of beef and lamb. And that's why I think there must have been a lot of grazing in the Stone Age. And I set circle of days around, not just at Stonehenge, but all around Stonehenge.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  Because the thing about Stonehenge is that the soil is not very good for cultivation. And even today, there are not many farms on Salisbury Plain, there are not many farms. One or two particularly in the river valleys where the soil is better, but for most of Salisbury Plain, you can't farm it and so it is grassland. You could certainly keep cattle and sheep. You can keep pigs anywhere, of course, they seem to find food anywhere they are, but actual grazing animals. So of course that sort of fits, doesn't it? Because you've got a vast plain, it's something like three hundred square miles Salisbury Plain. Room for a jolly good herd of cattle and sheep and so on.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  And at one end of it, this monument that must have been built by people who were so well off for pork and lamb that they actually had time to erect this enormous monument. Of course, that's one of the questions is how they had time. I think the answer is because they were pretty well off. Then, of course, there's the question, if they had a bit of spare time, you know, you could have gone for a swim or go for a walk with your girlfriend. But they decided to do something that must have seemed pretty near impossible.

• 10:38Tristan Hughes?

  As you do sometimes, Ken, as you feel that you could take over the world. So this area, as you say, that you set the circle of days in four thousand five hundred years ago, the Great Plain, which aligns with Salisbury Plain today. And Ken, the people in the story, how you created.

• 10:56Tristan Hughes?

  Do you imagine this plain like full of different groups of peoples, of different communities, banded together? And how does that align with the archaeology?

• 11:07Speaker 05

  Well, we're pretty sure that there were three groups of people in Britain in the Stone Age, some farmers, some herders, and some woodland people that would today be called hunter-gatherers. Now, it's generally agreed that all three types existed in Britain, and it seemed to me quite possible that all three types might exist in this region. Because we've got the farmland in the river valleys, and we've got the grassland for grazing. And if you look at Salisbury Plain even today, there's still quite a lot of woodland there. And that's interesting, because a certain amount of drama comes out of the fact that

• 11:52Speaker 05

  one of these groups is doomed. Okay, in the world today, there are very, very few hunter-gatherers left. This was not the best way of life. They lasted a long time, but they have almost died out. But then you've got the graziers, the herders, and on the other hand, the farmers. And, you know, traditionally, there has always been tension between farmers and graziers. Because graziers consider that the whole world is that the grass is there, and so I could put my cattle there. And the farmers, like, I'm planting seeds on that piece of land, say the farmers. And we all know about this, because it was, that was the real tension in the Wild West.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  We've seen these movies about conflict between the ranchers and the farmers. And I think something like that must always go on, where those two groups are living close together. And so, from the point of view of a storyteller like me, if there's conflict, there's a story to tell.

• 12:52Tristan Hughes?

  And so there's three different groups there. But as you highlighted earlier, with the flint mining industry, this idea of barter, of trade, not just of objects, but presumably of people too, marriages, people going between these different groups, communicating, probably speaking the same language, and at times, kind of this cooperation idea, this gathering for cooperation.

• 13:16Speaker 05

  Yes, there has to be cooperation to achieve certain things, and certainly building a monument is something that hundreds of people would have needed to cooperate on. Farmers are a bit more individualistic. This is my field, you know, this is my cow shed. Whereas herders can't be quite so egotistical, I suppose, because Salisbury Plain could have sustained a herd of about 2,000 cattle. And I thought about this, and I thought, well, how are we going to keep track of who owns which cow? Even to people who, you know, who work with animals, one cow can look a bit like another,

• 13:59Speaker 05

  and how to prove that it was yours? Now, later in human history, ways were devised of putting your mark on livestock to show that it was yours. And nowadays, for example, you quite often see a symbol painted in red paint on a sheep's fleece, as to indicate who that sheep belongs to. And with cattle, of course, they can be branded, which is to put a mark on them on the hide with a hot iron. And they didn't have any iron. This is the Stone Age, so they can't brand the cattle. And they didn't really have any paint. They used a little bit of ochre as a dye, but, you know, you would have needed gallons

• 14:40Speaker 05

  of paint to identify, you know, thousands of livestock. So it seemed to me that they must have been communally owned. And that, of course, now you look at the way people make their living and stay alive, and that tells you a bit about what culture they must have. So they must have had something of a sharing culture if they were herdsman. And of course, the farmers did not have to have that. As it's easy to demarc, you know, this my cornfield and my pasture and so on. Farmers sometimes have some things in common, but generally speaking, they know what's theirs. So there probably two different cultures there.

• 15:22Speaker 05

  One that's quite egotistical and sort of self oriented and one that's much more communal.

• 15:28Tristan Hughes?

  And is that also reflected in their house styles? Do we know much about that kind of domestic part of the lives of these people who lived in the Great Plain in Salisbury Plain?

• 15:38Speaker 05

  Well, of course, the houses were made of things like wattle and daub and thatch and turf. And so none of them survive. All we have is post holes. It's amazing, really, because post hole is a place where there used to be a pretty sturdy stake planted in the ground. And it would be one of four or more that were holding the roof up. Of course, even the wood has long ago rotted away, but that space, that cylinder of earth where the wood used to be is different in character from the earth all around it.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  And archaeologists are very clever people and they find these post holes and they'll find four at the corners of a rectangle or maybe six and then no more for a few feet. So they say, okay, this was a house, they say. Now, I think that's pretty smart of them. And if there are six post holes that are in a rectangle, then it's a bigger house. Most of the Stone Age settlements show really quite small houses with something like four post holes. So we guess that the rest of the house, probably the walls were wattle and daub, which is the simplest way to build a wall.

• 17:04Speaker 05

  The wattle is flexible branches from trees which can be bent a little bit and can be interwoven to make a big patch. And the daub is the mud that you stick on this and in the holes, which serves first of all to keep it all stuck together and secondly, to keep the draughts out. So there's nothing left of those. So those are the houses, they're pretty small. They might have had mattresses. Probably made of leather stuffed with straw. I say made of leather because although they probably had weaving, and I've learned recently that there are some Stone Age loom

• 17:46Speaker 05

  weights, or at least objects that look like loom weights and seem to be dated to the Stone Age, but weaving at that level is very arduous and takes a long time. So you wouldn't have much of it. And so leather would have been their preferred fabric because they had plenty of that, because they had two thousand cows, you know. So they probably did have something other than the bare floor to lie down on. But they didn't have many possessions. If you look around your house, I mean, you've got cupboards and bookshelves and fridges and drawers, and you might even have a garden shed with tools in it. We've got millions of possessions, and they probably didn't have very many in the Stone Age. A cooking

• 18:30Speaker 05

  pot, which of course would have been pottery rather than metal, and bowls and cups perhaps, and that would have been about it. So they didn't need very big houses.

• 18:41Tristan Hughes?

  Ken, one thing I always love when going back to the Stone Age in chats like this is that communal nature of these societies that you've already highlighted. But one thing I always think of is like, people gathered around the fire, whether it's in one of these houses or outside, whether it is just the farmers, or they're also the woodland people, as you said, or the herders. And they're gathering round and that sharing of knowledge between them and just trying to reimagine what it might have been like, the kind of the telling of stories, what they believed in, what they believed the world was like beyond the plain as well, you know, that sense of mystery that surely was there for these people and those things that they might well have believed in, whether it was linked

• 19:22Tristan Hughes?

  to the land that they were farming, or the animals that they were herding that were central to their ways of life as well, or the mysterious world that lay much further beyond the extent of the Great Plain, of Salisbury Plain, for instance.

• 19:37Speaker 05

  It seemed to me, seems to me very likely that they sat around a fire, particularly in summer when it wasn't too cold to sit on the ground. They sat around a fire. See, the first form of literature, I should put literature in inverted commas, because if we look at our oldest stories, which are the Iliad of Homer.

• 20:00Speaker 05

  And the Epic of Gilgamesh. And these are our oldest story, but it's generally thought that these were told orally long before they were ever written down. So it seemed to me quite likely that in the Stone Age, this tradition might well have begun. Part of the reason why early stories like the Iliad and Gilgamesh, part of the reason why they're poems is that makes it easier to remember them. And it seems, a lot of people think, and it seems very plausible to me, that the earliest stories were in that form, they were poems that some people learned.

• 20:46Speaker 05

  Of course, it was a folk art, because everybody who decided to become a poet would change and improve the stories. The only kind of really popular folk art nowadays is dirty jokes. If you think about a dirty joke, you hear one, you think it's funny. When you tell it to somebody else, you improve it, don't you? Or you change it, or if you're not very good, then you you make it worse, but you try to make it better. So that's a real folk art. There are no professional practitioners. Every practitioner just alters it in any way he sees fit. So I guess that in the Stone Age, there must have been some kind of troubadours who had good memories.

• 21:28Speaker 05

  It probably was a father to son thing, or perhaps mother to daughter. They'd no reason why they should be men in the Stone Age. And it was passed down, your parent told these stories. You heard the story so often, practically every night you sat next to your parent and heard this. So that after a few years, you'd know it. And when he died, you could carry on the business, as it were. And the other thing about that is, the only way they had. To transmit knowledge from generation to generation was in this way. It couldn't be written down. And there was, as far as we know, no organised body of knowledge.

• 22:10Speaker 05

  It must have all been learned by rote for somebody to repeat. And it seems to me very likely that that was the way of passing knowledge down from generation to generation. Knowledge and of course superstition. I mean, stories about ghosts and gods. I mean, we don't know what they had, but there'll be something of that kind, zombies or fairies or elves and gnomes. You can make it up because it's a very strong tradition that we still have, don't we? These fairy tales and these stories of the supernatural. It's very strong in our imaginations now. Why do they make zombie films? It's because people love that sort of thing.

• 22:55Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely, and it's quite fun to speculate as to what stories, what mythical stories they almost certainly had for the landscape of Stonehenge itself, even back in the Stone Age. As the story of Stonehenge is very much still evolving. Because again, in your book, you set it some 4,500 years ago, which is a key moment in the story of Stonehenge and its construction. But that's actually not the beginning of Stonehenge's story. I mean, what do we actually know about Stonehenge before that point, more than 4,500 years ago?

• 23:28Speaker 05

  Well, we think there was a monument there before the current monument was built. Well, first of all, we do know that there are some stones at Stonehenge. There's an outer circle of what are called bluestones. And we do know actually that they were placed there something like a thousand years earlier than the triliths and the monoliths that are the biggest stones. And we also know where they came from. And they came from a quarry in Wales. They're not as big as the triliths and they're not shaped at all. They're just whacking great stones. How do we know they came from this quarry in Wales?

• 24:13Speaker 05

  Archaeologists can match any stone to where it was in the quarry. That seems kind of miraculous to me, but they do that with great confidence. And so in a sense, there's another story to be told about the outer circle. Because there's also the question of how did they get there from Wales and why? But you know, the Welsh people just trying to get rid of it or selling it, I don't know. But that outer circle that's a thousand years older is like quite a lot of other stone monuments in Britain, which is it's not shaped. Now Stonehenge is, the stones are very carefully shaped.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  They didn't come out of the ground like that. They're smoothed and they're rectangular and the corners are square. And if you go to other monuments, even other monuments on Salisbury Plain, there are big stones there, but they haven't been shaped like that. Then you've got to remember that what we're looking at today, when we go to Stonehenge is a ruin. But originally, it was a very tidy design. Seventy-five stones. There were thirty pairs in a circle, each with a lintel on top. And it was a very neat looking monument.

• 25:39Speaker 05

  And this is what the archaeologists have deduced from their digs around there. You know, they dig and they find where other stones, stones other than the ones that are there now, they find where they were in the ground. So Stonehenge is different from any other stone monument in the world in its sophistication and complexity.

• 26:09Speaker 01

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• 26:13Speaker 02

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• 26:40Speaker 06

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• 27:30Tristan Hughes?

  And also, I guess we need to remember, Ken, there would have been wooden structures there too, especially with the earlier structure before we get to the moments when you have that next big stage with those larger stones which we're going to get to. But the earlier monument there with those bluestones, as you've mentioned, that come from Wales, I can only imagine what stories the people would have had centuries after they were placed about how they reached Stonehenge, how their ancestors did it. But alongside those bluestones, that earlier monument, there would have been wooden structures there too.

• 28:02Speaker 05

  Yes, we think so. And it would make a certain amount of sense if first of all you had a wooden monument, and after a while, people said, every few years this rots away because of the weather, or it catches fire in a hot summer. And what about if we replaced these timber pieces with stone? And then, intriguing thought it must have been to the Stone Age people, and then it'll be there forever.

• 28:29Speaker 05

  We could build something that's going to be there at the end of time. I don't know if they had the concept of the end of time, but they probably had some feeling of that kind. So yes, I think, and it's obviously not my theory, it's an archaeological theory, that there was a wooden monument at Stonehenge before there was a stone monument.

• 28:47Tristan Hughes?

  And then I guess also, Ken, as you say, when they're thinking, oh, if we can use stone to create a monument that will last here until the end of time and it's important, then what type of stone shall we get? And hence, maybe you get the reason why they pick those particular special blue stones they've heard about from so far away to be the core of that very early monument there.

• 29:09Speaker 05

  And in fact, in my story, when they first broached the idea of replacing the wooden monument with a stone one, somebody says, we're going to get the biggest stones in the world. And they were probably the biggest stones in England. Quite understandable that they should think that they were the biggest stones in the world. They probably didn't know how big the world was, but it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. They were, and they are absolutely huge. I mean, that's why we get that very weird spiritual feeling at Stonehenge, when you stand next to those stones and they are just so massive. It's a bit like when you look at an elephant. Do you know what I mean? You think, how can

• 29:54Speaker 05

  something be this big? And it is kind of a spiritual feeling because you're getting the idea that life continues to be surprising and intriguing.

• 30:04Tristan Hughes?

  So what reason then, Ken, do you give for that key stage that you centre in your book, which is the decision to enlarge that monument to then get these biggest stones in the world in their imagination, what we today call the Sarsen stones?

• 30:20Speaker 05

  I think it was originally a place of worship. And we know that Stonehenge is oriented to the rising sun on midsummer day and the setting sun on midwinter day. So they may have worshipped the sun, there may have been a sun god, it's a very, very common thing in history. We don't know for sure, but it's probably a good guess. And it just has such a religious feel that you've got to think that at least it was a religious place. Now, the thing is that whenever there's a place where people gather in great numbers, a market grows up. That's observed all over the place. In England, markets always grew up where the cathedrals were built.

• 31:04Speaker 05

  People come, they come to your town to look at the church and then they want to buy something. And so I think that must have operated in the Stone Age. And we do occasionally, archaeologists do find things like tools or pieces of very unusual carved stone, that they are pretty sure come from a thousand miles away. And that indicates that there must have been some traffic along long distances in the Stone Age. And so it seems to me that Stonehenge was probably the most impressive religious monument in Europe at the time.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  And I think people would probably come a long way to see it. And so that market would have been very valuable to the people who actually lived around Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. So there's a, as well as the religious motivation, there seems to me very likely there was a commercial motivation. People would come from hundreds of miles to see this monument and of course, the market is held on midsummer day, which is when the largest number of visitors will be there.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  I've talked about how flint miners had to exchange their goods. But it's quite likely that there were specialists in things like making shoes and pottery particularly, pottery very useful. And as well as the flint miners, there were people called flint knappers who had the art of shaping them. Phil Harding showed me how to knapper flint. You have to hit it with a stone, another stone, no, it's one stone hitting another, but there's a way to do it that just makes the flint flake until you've got a sharp edge. And he showed me how to do it and I tried it and of course I was a complete duffer at it. It requires a certain amount of skill.

• 33:03Speaker 05

  So there were probably people who acquired the rough flints from the miners and then shaped them until they were nice sharp knives.

• 33:11Tristan Hughes?

  Almost the Stone Age equivalent of a guild, I guess you could imagine in that commercial economic market like place nearer site like Stonehenge potentially?

• 33:19Speaker 05

  You could imagine it. I'm not sure that Stone Age people were organised enough for that. Gills are certainly a feature of the Middle Ages and they existed to nurture and protect the industries and businesses in the towns. If I'd thought of it while I was writing the book, I might have tried to develop something. Why didn't you interview me before?

• 33:43Tristan Hughes?

  I'm sorry, Ken, I'm sorry. It was just a thought that came to my mind, this idea of all these specialists coming together. I love that idea of the importance of Stonehenge as a religious site. But also, you know, as you say, the gathering of people, that natural kind of commercial aspect that could easily have been there with all these people bartering and so on. And so do you think that is the context in which they then decide to enlarge this great structure with the fetching of these massive stones, the sarsen stones?

• 34:12Speaker 05

  Yes, I think those are two quite sound reasons. And there is a third reason which is much more speculative. You see, they need a calendar. Because they know when it's midsummer day and they know before the event and they know when it's midwinter day and they know when the solstices are. So they need a calendar, but they don't have paper and pens and writing. So how did they keep track of the days of the year? And there is a theory, and it's by no means proved, but I thought it was quite a plausible explanation, which is that the stones helped them. The stones formed a calendar.

• 34:56Speaker 05

  There are thirty pairs of uprights. They could have been the days in a month. You know, and you can imagine on midsummer day, okay, you put something down by the first stone and then the next day you move it. And you know, that's a perfectly reasonable way of keeping a calendar in the stone age. It seems to me that they must have done something like that. And that Stonehenge was certainly the most permanent thing in the country, actually. Because, you know, not a, it wasn't just a ring of stones, as I mentioned before. It's a ring of very carefully shaped and placed stones. And it'll stay like that. And it, it hasn't quite stayed like that till the twentieth century, but it stayed

• 35:40Speaker 05

  for thousands of years, which would have been a big thing, you know, because if it can be altered, as a wooden one can, then you get into trouble, aren't you? Somebody's going to take one of the pillars and use it to start a fire or something.

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• 37:23Tristan Hughes?

  All right, Ken, let's get into the juicy stuff. These Sarsen stones, where do they source them from? And what do you think about how they would have extracted these amazing stones, these grand stones, and transported them to the site? We've, as we've mentioned already, tools like flint and, you know, more perishable materials that don't survive.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  The stones come from a place that's now called West Woods, and it's about 30 miles north of where Stonehenge is. There are still some stones there, but all the best ones went a long time ago. But once again, archaeologists and their geologist friends know that the Stonehenge stones came from that valley, not even the valley next to it, because these stones are very distinctive. And they were lying on the ground, but somewhat buried in the mud. So they had to clear away the earth all around. And then the next thing

• 38:25Speaker 05

  to do would have been to get them upright. This must have been pretty difficult. These things weigh 25 tonnes, and all these people have got is pieces of wood. So you must have got an awful lot of people trying to shove bits of wood into the earth underneath the stone, and then use those bits of wood as levers to lift the thing up.

• 38:53Speaker 05

  And then, when you get it upright, you're going to be awfully careful that it doesn't fall down the other side because you have to do it all over again. So it would have to be done very carefully. Now, lifting the side of it up, you can imagine just about lifting it upright the other way, which would have been necessary because of the way it had to travel. If it's thirty feet long, then to get it upright, you've got to be more than thirty feet high. And if there doesn't happen to be a handy tree, a very big tree, right by this, what are you going to do? There's an archaeological museum down south just beyond Guildford.

• 39:36Speaker 05

  And I was there and they had a small monolith, it was only about twelve feet high. And nearby on a piece of waste ground, I saw an A-frame. And I said, what's that for? And they said to me, well, we used the A-frame to lift the monolith upright, on end as it were, not on its side. And of course, I realised that was the way they must have done it. But nowadays, you do it with a crane, wouldn't you? And it, no problem, you know, but that must have been how they did it in the Stone Age. Because with an A-frame, you could tie a rope to the stone and drape it over the A-frame, which is higher than the stone, and then pull down on it. Now you don't have to get above the stone to lift it.

• 40:19Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, I'm getting a sense of it. And they would make that A-frame out of sticks, timber, we presume?

• 40:25Speaker 05

  I should think some pretty hard oak, because it's going to take an awful lot of strain from this twenty-five-ton stone. And actually, when I was writing these scenes, I really found myself, you know, it was really stretching my imagination. It seemed to me that the only way they could have moved the stones was by tying ropes around them and dragging them along the ground. They didn't have the wheel in the Stone Age. There are no carts, you couldn't even have a cart, so it had to be like a kind of sled. And archaeologists nowadays like to do experiments. And so two or three times, they've got a group of people together to try and do this, to tie ropes around something very, very heavy,

• 41:08Speaker 05

  twenty five tonnes and pull it. And one of the discoveries they made is that you need about two hundred people to do this. So that was a very good marker for me because that gave me an idea of how many people are needed to bring the stone from Westwoods to Stonehenge. Some of the journey would have been very difficult, in muddy ground, swampy ground, uphill must have been murder. Two hundred people could pull it on the level, but what happens when you've got a hill? And I think I saw a picture of hunter gatherer types somewhere in the Far East, might have been Indonesia. And they were moving big stones, not as big as Stonehenge. They were moving them.

• 41:49Speaker 05

  And what they had done is out of tree trunks and tree branches cut in half, they'd made a sort of corduroy road. And that made the pulling easier. Now, for the thirty miles from Westwoods to Stonehenge, if they'd tried to make a thirty mile road, it would have taken all the trees on Stonehenge and more besides. So that wasn't possible. So my idea was that they probably did it for the difficult bits. That they could manage without completely denuding their habitat. And to be honest, I found myself making stuff like this up from hints. I mean, the corduroy road, it wasn't really my imagination. It was me seeing something that was done in the twentieth century on the other side of the world and saying, it must have been something like that.

• 42:34Speaker 05

  But that interesting thing about that is Tristan, that I was doing what they must have been doing. Because they'd never done this before either. And so they must have gone to Westwood. Looked as though that's the one we want. Well, how the heck we gonna lift that up? Right, what we need is some levers. Certainly, the first time they did it, the whole process must have been one of inventing new things every day.

• 42:59Tristan Hughes?

  And I think you hit on a really important point, which I think is sometimes easy to overlook, but I always love restating when we do Stonehenge monuments. The whole process of getting the stone from A to B could have been just as important, if not more important, than the stone when it's in its final position in Stonehenge itself because of the massive task, the communal task it would have been. And as you say, the ingenuity, the creation, the thinking how they're gonna do it of moving that massive stone in the first place.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  Well, I agree with you totally. And thinking about this, I thought, if they're gonna get hundreds of people to do this, and they're not gonna do it once, there were originally 75 stones at Stonehenge. In my story, in A Circle of Days, they do it for about a week every year after the Midsummer Festival. And what it is, it's a festival. And of course, a lot of the people doing this would have been quite young, adolescents and people in their twenties, because there's, people are strong at that age. But what fun it must have been. And think of the goings on overnight, because this would take more than a day. Think of the goings on overnight. There would be boys and girls, and there would be romances.

• 44:20Speaker 05

  And they would sing, there would be singing and feasting because they had to be fed and they had to be fed well to do this work. So it would have been like a festival. And perhaps you would have gone there in something of the spirit in which you you might go to a club in London. You're gonna have a good time, and who knows, you might meet somebody and fall in love.

• 44:42Tristan Hughes?

  And tell that story again and again to the generations that follow you. I was involved in moving that particular stone, and I met my beloved whilst doing it.

• 44:51Speaker 05

  Yes, that's where I met your mother.

• 44:53Tristan Hughes?

  Exactly. I can ask so many questions, but I think we'll wrap up. By imagining after that whole process, that amazing kind of human details of what it might have been like for the transporting of one of these stones to the site of Stone Henge, to when it does finally reach the site of Stone Henge, Ken, that final making them upright and putting them in place and making them look as they did in their kind of their final dressed form.

• 45:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, and most difficult of all, perhaps, putting up the crossbars.

• 45:22Tristan Hughes?

  Of course, yes.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  From one to the other, and that must have been a very difficult and complex task, but once again, they figured out a way to do it and so did I.

• 45:34Tristan Hughes?

  Do tell, Ken, if you're happy to tell and give away what you think.

• 45:37Speaker 05

  It would have been very like using the A-frame and the lintel or crossbar would have to be lifted higher than the pair of stones on which it was going to rest, obviously, lowered onto perhaps one of the two and then pushed along. That's how I imagined it. And this is one of the points where my imagination is working quite hard based on rather little evidence.

• 46:07Tristan Hughes?

  Ken, it's such an amazing monument to base a historical novel around. You can shine more of a light on these people themselves, who otherwise we just collectively group as people, Stone Age people who built Stonehenge, but to imagine with the surviving archaeology, with the theories that are already there, just what it could have been like, what it could have meant to them, how the process may well have unfolded, to then see the monument that so many of us recognise, that so many of us love today.

• 46:41Speaker 05

  Well, you've got to remember, because the essence of the novel is the people themselves and their own personal destinies. And of course, they fall in love and sometimes fall in love with the wrong person. They quarrel and they want revenge and there's jealousy and envy. And all of those things, of course, are part of everyday life. And this fantastic project that they're involved in is something that happens, as it were, on top of all the usual dramas of everyday. There's also, because I think Stone, there must have been some kind of crisis that also catalyzed the beginning, the construction of Stonehenge. I decided that it might have been a drought.

• 47:26Speaker 05

  Now, that would be very difficult for herdsman if the plains dried up and the grass turned yellow. And that's a much more mundane kind of crisis. But I think it might have sort of spurred them on to do something to try and make their lives more stable.

• 47:43Tristan Hughes?

  Ken, this has been so much fun. It's wonderful to have you with your latest book being brought back into the ancient prehistoric period. Has this sparked your interest in doing more around ancient and prehistory going forwards?

• 47:55Speaker 05

  Well, I never say never again. There's something very attractive about ancient history because for the novelist, you can do much more. You're not so constrained. And so I'm very attracted to it for that reason. But we'll see.

• 48:10Tristan Hughes?

  Ken, this has been so much fun. One last time, your book on this is called?

• 48:15Speaker 05

  Circle of Days.

• 48:16Tristan Hughes?

  Circle of Days. Ken, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 48:21Speaker 05

  It was a pleasure. Thank you.

• 48:26Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was bestselling historical novelist Ken Follett talking about Stonehenge and in particular, the people who lived at the time that it was being built, who are central to his newest novel, Circle of Days. Thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to listen to more episodes about Stonehenge, well, we have quite a few in the archive. We have one episode all about Neolithic Stonehenge, what the archaeology has revealed so far with Dr. Sue Greeney. That episode is just called Stonehenge. We have also released an episode to align with a previous British Museum exhibition that explored the world of Stonehenge, what we know about the cultures,

• 49:08Tristan Hughes?

  the people who lived in Western Europe at the time that Stonehenge was used. And that episode is called The World of Stonehenge. We'll put a link to that in the show notes too. Now, if you have been enjoying the ancients, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

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