Stonehenge and Castors

Stonehenge is located in Wiltshire, an English county north of Salisbury. It was built somewhere around 2000-3000 BC out of enormous stones and is the center of some of the most complex Bronze Age and Neolithic monuments in England. Can you imagine the workforce that it took to get those huge stones from where they originally sat to where they currently are? There must have been thousands of people helping get these big boulders from one point to another. If only they would have had Castors to help them along the way.

Keep in mind that the stones that were used to construct Stonehenge are in four different classifications. The stones in each of them are all from different areas of the world. The Sarson stones, for example, came from the Marlborough Downs. The Marlborough Downs are located about 20 miles north of Stonehenge. Not to mention, the size of the stones is almost impossible to comprehend. Some of the Sarson stones are 8feet wide, 5feet thick and 25feet long! Imagine pulling those on your back for 20 miles. Castors would have made the labor for this task much easier.

If the size of the stones isn’t enough to cause disbelief that castors could have made this process much simpler, take into consideration the weight of these stones. The Bluestones are said to weight about 4 tons each and there were a total of 60 used. That is around 240 tons of weight to pull all the way from the Preseli Mountains in Wales. If you’re not astonished by now, just think about the fact that the Bluestones were the lighter stones. The Sarson stones weigh anywhere from 20 to 30 tons a piece. That’s five to eight times as big as the Bluestones!

Using castors and a pulley system, the moving of these stones would have still been quite a pain, but definitely would have been more manageable. Since putting any of these stones on a boat would have made them capsize and sink, they used wooden rollers to get the stones from their natural origin to Wiltshire. As if the idea of moving one roller from the back to the front when necessary to keep the process moving isn’t painful enough, consider trying to steer a stone that big in a straight line. Walking that distance is excruciating as it is, even if it is an excellent form of exercise, but imagine being a part of the workforce that was required to push and maneuver the stones. Your back hurts just thinking about it!

There have been many attempts to reenact the moving of similar sized stones just like what was done when Stonehenge was constructed. Nearly all of those attempts have failed due to the complex nature of the task. However, Bruce Bedlam created a wooden roller system that could successfully transport them. I’m sure, during the whole time he was plotting it out and trying to make it work, he was muttering under his breath, “I really wish I could just use Castors instead.”