When was the last time you stepped outside and looked up? It’s hard to find the time to do it, and even when we do, high-rise cityscapes, light pollution and – the bane of all astronomy – “cloud” often limit the view of what lies beyond. But perhaps it is something we are fundamentally drawn to do. Throughout time, people across the world have looked up and wondered what was out there. Cultures around the globe have built structures to augment their views of the cosmos, and one of the most important sites for contemplating the heavens is undoubtedly Stonehenge.
I recently visited this prehistoric monument and as I stood within the ancient stone circle, I felt, perhaps unsurprisingly, a strong connection to the past. Yet at the same time I felt strongly rooted in the present, and yet again, even under cloudy skies, I had a feeling of being part of the expansive universe that lay beyond. It was easy to imagine that our Neolithic ancestors would have gazed at the same skies. It made me think about our connection with the natural world – or our increasing disconnection from it – and the importance of conservation and protection, not just of this monument and others like it but of the world that has been rapidly changing around it since those enormous stones were raised 4,500 years ago.
Was Stonehenge a Neolithic computer for predicting eclipses, an astronomical observatory, a place of moon worship? And how did its use evolve over the years? Standing in the stones and taking in the huge sky above, I am certain that its “skyscape” is as significant in understanding this as the landscape that it sits in.
It is thought that even in Neolithic times Salisbury Plain would have been largely wide-open grassland as it is now – quite different from the woodlands that would have surrounded it, and a perfect place from which to observe the night sky. In my mind’s eye, I can see generation after generation sitting around fires looking up at the spectacle of the heavens and telling stories inspired by the movement of the planets and the constellations as a way of imparting knowledge about changes in season, weather patterns and the marking of time. Beliefs about the sky, the stars and planets would have been intertwined with practical daily life.
Marking the movements of the sun was clearly important to the people who built Stonehenge, as they went to such enormous extents to carefully align the stones. Exactly why they did this, we don’t know. But as Stonehenge Skyscape – English Heritage’s new digital model of the solar system – or “orrery”, illustrates, at midwinter the sun barely rises in the sky. It’s possible that our prehistoric ancestors saw the winter solstice as a time when the sun almost seemed to die, before slowly being reborn.
This may seem absurd, but as recently as 1812 our lack of knowledge about the sun led people to believe that it was indeed dying. Many thought the end of the world was at hand when sunspots appeared on its surface and its light was dimmed by a haze, which was in fact caused by a volcanic eruption.
Lord Byron was inspired to write an apocalyptic poem, Darkness, when his summer holiday on Lake Geneva was overshadowed by dark skies, thunder and torrential rain. He imagined the grim fate of humanity after the sudden death of the sun:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light.
Today, most of us living in towns and cities rarely experience darkness. We check the weather on our phones, rather than going out and looking at it and feeling it. And, unlike our prehistoric ancestors, we take it for granted that the sun will rise and set every day. But it is perhaps they who were more in tune with the world around them.
The pleasure of standing alone in Stonehenge was an extraordinary feeling, a feeling that I would tap into later, to bring calm into my busy life. It also gave me a sense of how important our place in the universe must have been to our ancestors. This is something that they seemed to understand better than we do. And maybe, if we understood it better, and connected with it more than we do, we would be better placed to look after the planet and its precious resources for our children, and to inspire them to do the same for theirs.
• Maggie Aderin-Pocock is a space scientist and presenter of the BBC’s Sky at Night series
