Beautiful curves

Soo has made stone 56, a wonderfully sinuous stone which seems to curve inwards near its top. The nipple you can see at the very top of the stone is a stone tenon joint - Stonehenge's builders were inexperienced in the use of stone as a building material, so they used carpentry techniques, including mortise and tenon joints. It could also be said that modern office workers are equally inexperienced in the use of cardboard, to judge from the amount of glue which ends up on our fingertips.

The real stone is about 30 feet high, of which about nine feet is hidden in the ground. It was leaning over precariously until 1901 when it was straightened up. Excavations conducted at its base in that year showed that it had been originally lowered down a ramp into a hole dug with antler picks and flint tools, then levered upright, and its hole filled up with stone wedges and chalk rubble.