Prehistoric Britain
Stonehenge
Last phase c. 2300 BC, Bronze Age stone circle, Salisbury Plain, southern England.
Merlin oversaw the transportation of the Giant's Ring onto Salisbury Plain from a place far to the west.
In Britain, standing stones, stone circles, dolmens and the megaliths associated with long barrows and passage graves can be numbered in the hundreds. Examples include: Long Pierre on Guernsey, the Longstone on the Isle of Wight, Boscawen Un and the Hurlers in Cornwall, a great prehistoric stone circle at Avebury in Wiltshire and the West Kennett Longbarrow, to name but a few. But perhaps the most famous of all is Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in southern England.
Stonehenge has a long history, beginning when Neolithic farmers built a wooden mortuary structure inside a large circular enclosure. Later on, in the third millennium BC, stones each weighing several tons were transported to the henge from the Preseli mountains in south Wales and incorporated into its architecture. Legends of this feat of engineering skill must have trickled down to the twelfth century AD because Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain describes Merlin overseeing the transportation of a stone circle called the 'Giant’s Ring' from Ireland to Salisbury Plain. These stones had healing properties. Merlin explains: Many years ago the Giants transported them from the remotest confines of Africa...
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Story fragment recounted from: Thorpe, Lewis, 1966, reprinted 2004. Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain. Translated from twelfth century Latin with an introduction. Penguin Books Limited. Part Six: The House of Constantine (continued), pp 186–211.
references
Stonehenge - Wikipedia
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