Bella Bella visits Stonehenge

When I was in New Zealand, I visited Stonehenge.

“Whoa there, Teddy Bear … surely Stonehenge is in England, on the other side of the world?”

And others might say, “Hold on … what on earth is a Stonehenge?”

Those are both good questions! And this star-gazing bear is delighted to tackle both.

The original Stonehenge is in England, in a county called Wiltshire that is full of incredibly old and beautiful monuments.

 

Stonehenge was built in stages between – get this – five thousand and about 3,600 years ago! It has amazed and baffled visitors during all the long centuries since then. Were these upright stones and earthworks a temple? A cemetery? An astronomical observatory?

Stonehenge seems to have been all these things. Archaeologists (those are scientists who learn about humanity’s past by studying the stuff people leave behind) are still looking into Stonehenge and the countryside around it, learning new things about it all the time.

Let’s talk about the astronomy of Stonehenge. The upright stones in and around Stonehenge let people line up special views on important dates in the year. By looking from certain parts of the monument toward (or between) various stones, people could see when the sun and the moon rose or set on the summer solstice (around June 21^st) and the winter solstice (around December 21^st).

My season-savvy readers will remember that June 21^st is the start of summer north of the equator, while December 21^st is the start of winter. Thousands of years ago, people couldn’t buy calendars at the store, or look dates up online! The only way they could know important dates like these was by following the sun’s changing path in the sky.

In 2005, near Carterton in New Zealand, the Phoenix Astronomical Society opened a new version of Stonehenge: Stonehenge Aotearoa. It is built to the same scale as the ancient English site, but is set up specially for the skies of New Zealand. It is there to help visitors understand how much all of our ancestors understood about the sky.

Bears, too.

Below is Richard Hall, who helped to build Stonehenge Aotearoa. He showed us how the monument lets you find the solstices (and the equinoxes in between: those are around March 21^st and September 21^st each year) by seeing the sun rise or set over six special “heel stones.”

 

A stone near the centre of Stonehenge Aotearoa lets you find the southern celestial pole. That’s the place in the sky where Earth’s South Pole seems to point. Remember when we talked about Polaris and the north celestial pole? This is the other end of Earth’s axis!

I really liked this set of seven stones. It represents a beautiful cluster of stars called the Pleiades. The Maori call this cluster “Matariki.” In the traditional Maori calendar, or “Maramataka,” the new year begins when Matariki first rises above the horizon at dawn.

We can see the Pleiades cluster much of the year from Canada, too! Ask your teacher to point it out to you on a star chart.

Wow, I’m beat! Time to ride the train back to Wellington.

Stonehenge photos courtesy D. Clouthier
Other photos and story © S. Clouthier