Layout and Location - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 155

But I already had another idea about Stonehenge that sug-
gested an answer. The general interpretation was that given by
Jacques Briard in The Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe [ 25 ]. “At
that time there may have been great ceremonies, linked with a
worship of the seasons and with agriculture, of which the high
point was the awaited gleam of the golden day-star through the
stones of the trilithons. The layout of the monument suggests a
whole ritual: the arrival in procession along the avenue, the cross-
ing of the sacred ditch and the separation of the faithful into dif-
ferent areas, only the initiated, the officiators at the ceremony or
perhaps the princes of Wessex as well, being allowed to pass under
the giant trilithons.”
Briard had the beginnings of my idea in thinking about Stone-
henge in terms of crowd control, but the layout didn't actually
suit the ritual he described. The ditch and bank surrounding the
circle go right up the Avenue, so it seems more likely that every-
thing within them was forbidden territory to the uninitiated. If
they were kept that far back, however, it would be very difficult to
conduct a ceremony at the center. And even if they were allowed
within the bank to surround the circle, relatively few would be
able to see past the sarsens, bluestones and trilithons. Only the
very few right at the center would actually see the event , the sun-
rise, in its intended relation to the structure, and that just doesn't
make political sense in relation to the Apollo-type commitment of
resources to building Stonehenge.
NASA had no intention of burdening the Apollo 11 astro-
nauts with a TV camera until Congress insisted on it - only one
man could be first on the Moon, but the hundreds of thousands
who worked for it, the millions who paid for it and the thousands
of millions whom their leaders wanted to impress must all be able
to see what happened. Since 'the princes of Wessex' had no TV
remotes their ceremony would have been a spectacle, out where
everybody could see it.
More recently, it's been argued anew that the focus at Stone-
henge wasn't midsummer, but midwinter - see Chap. 4 . Aubrey
Burl pointed out in 1999 that the tallest stones of Stonehenge III
are on the winter solstice sunset arc [ 26 ] , and in 2003 it was sug-
gested that the crowd stayed on the Avenue to watch midwin-
ter sunset, and moonset at furthest south (every 18.61 years, for