Walking Through History - Path to Stonehenge

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending you are reading this and enjoying your summer.  Tony continues his walks throughout Great Britain, learning about its history.  This time, Tony is going to embark on a 45-mile walk.  He is going to learn about the history of Britain’s Stone Age in Wiltshire.  The run day for the episode is 47:06 and it is called The Path to Stonehenge.

Tony will begin his walk in Windmill Hill and then he makes his way to Avebury Circle.  He continues and visits Silbury Hill.  Eventually, he ends up in East Kennet.  He climbs Milk Hill.  Then he travels along the River Avon and ends his journey at Stonehenge.

Wiltshire was an open grassland in the Stone Age, unlike the rest of Britain.  Great Britain would have been heavily forested apart from this area in Wiltshire.  Eventually Tony makes his way off of Windmill Hill.  He visits Avebury and visits the famous Avebury circle.  He meets Josh Pollard to learn about the great Stone Age monuments.  Avebury henge is the biggest henge in all of Europe.  In fact, the modern village sits practically inside it.  Tony walks along these massive stones and talks about the first pioneers of archeology: William Stukeley.  Stukeley was friends with Isaac Newton and told the story of the apple falling from the tree.  Stukeley was the first person to write about Avebury, even though he was led to some fanciful conclusions.

Tony continues in the rain on his walk just not on the ancient route.  The ancient route is now covered with a highway.  Eventually, he makes it to a site where druids held their ritual.  It is here that Tony meets up with Ronald Hutton.  He talks about who built these places and it was Stukeley who concluded that these monuments were built by the Stone Age people.  Stukeley had the works of Julius Caesar to help him make his determination.  However, the monuments were built one thousand years earlier.  Stukeley thought that the Stone Monuments were built by the druids and he created the image of the druids that continues on to this day.  Day one concludes and Tony will continue on his walk.

Day two begins with Tony viewing some visible proof of who built these Stone Age monuments.  Tony is definitely in his element and in Time Team mode to learn about who built these monuments.  He finds these hints at Silbury Hill.  It was a manmade hill and it was a hill of myths and legends.  Tony meets Jim Leary who led the last excavation of this hill.  He concluded that people just came by with dirt to dump on the pile.  The hill was constructed bit by bit over one hundred years.  Why was it built?  The mystery still remains.  Still, Tony enjoys the story of how ordinary people came together with their little bowls to make this hill.

Tony walks on and makes his way to a giant tomb.  About sixty years ago, it had thousands of British people fascinated.  An excavation of this site was shown on a television program called Buried Treasure.  Who knew that archeology could make for fascinating television?  Anyway, Tony makes his way into the tomb and talks with David Dawson about the site and the people who were buried in the tomb.  After learning about the dead, Tony continues on his way.  He makes his way through a field of large sarsen stones.  He eventually meets a very familiar person in this field.  It is a person who knows this area like the back of his hand.  What else does Tony learn about the Stone Age people?  To learn about how the people got these stones to Stonehenge continue to watch the rest of this episode.

Yes, I love the fact that Ronald Hutton made an appearance in the episode!  Yay, Phil Harding also makes an appearance too.  It was nice to see both Tony and Phil together again, we need something with Phil and Tony together again.  This walk was very interesting and I enjoyed the different sites he walked to learning about the Stone Age.  This continues to be a good series and one I would recommend showing to a history class as well as a geography class.