Sunrise over the Heel Stone and Slaughter Stone

Hello! We have now made the Heel Stone and Slaughter Stone, and have positioned them at the correct scale distance from the centre circle. (This meant printing out lots and lots of extra grass and sticking it to the back of an old exhibition display board.) The completed Cardhenge is now almost as impressive as the real shebang.

What has proven to be well tricky is photographing a fake sunrise over the stones... This is the best shot, and even so it's not as good as we had hoped. It has proven impossible with our kit to get the main stones, the Heel Stone and the "sun" all in focus. Ah well.

More to follow!

Meditations on finished-ness

Our most loyal reader, Unkle E in Australia whom we have never met, has asked some questions which really deserve answering in the main blog, his first one being how close we are to finishing the circle... well we have done about 70-ish stones, and only have six to go from the official packet, although we also have two special additional stones which we are saving to the end - you'll hear more about these soon. In theory we could finish the circle by Friday at this rate, but we're not around for the rest of the week (Soo will be on leave and I have been called out on work trips) so it's not going to be done just yet.

Here's some before-and-after photos of stone 70, which I have done at lunchtime today, to show you just how tiny the remaining stones are.

Of course, this begs the question of whether there actually ever was a 'finished' Stonehenge in the first place. The real Stonehenge is known to have gone through numerous changes of design while it was slowly being built, the bluestones being a good example of this: they were all dragged there with the intention of being erected in a circle, but the circle was never completed, the stones were removed, and their holes were filled in. Some of the bluestones were then re-erected in a horseshoe layout a few centuries later.

This seems quite common with stone circles in Britain. It is accepted by archaeologists that many of the recumbent stone circles in north eastern Scotland were never finished. At Arbor Low in Derbyshire, the stones are lying on their sides; Aubrey Burl in his book thinks they all blew down over the years, but other experts have pointed out that there's no archaeological evidence of any holes ever being dug for them, so perhaps the project was abandoned.

Uncompleted projects are familiar from other ancient cultures too. After Djoser's Step Pyramid was constructed in Old Kingdom Egypt none of his successors - Sekhemkhet, Khaba, perhaps Huni too - managed to get higher than a few courses until Sneferu built one at Dahshur. Djoser's pyramid would have towered above his successors' feeble attempts, a mute indictment of their failure.

Abandoned, half-completed projects are something wholly foreign to the modern western world, of course.

Rain

Today stone 14 has joined its companions. More importantly, however, Britain has been flooded over the past few weeks, and our cardboard Stonehenge is no exception. Here you can see a quick snapshot Soo has taken of the rain pouring down on Cardhenge. The Lego men have had to find refuge next to a mountain of files, where it is dry. Let's hope the site dries out by tomorrow.

And so it begins

We work in a British archives service - running databases, creating digital photographs of historical documents, all that sort of thing. But we need a break from staring at computers all day, so in our lunch break we are building Stonehenge. Out of cardboard.

When it's all done, we'll fill it with Lego druids and align it with the sun!