Ravehenge
Saturday, January 10th, 2009
Okay, the so title is a tad misleading. I snatched it from the British press which, I don’t know if you’ve heard, can on occasion tend towards the sensationalistic.
The actual story is that Stonehenge has perfect acoustics. It’s not that the standing stones would have been dedicated explicitly to musical performances, but that whatever the hell they were doing there most likely involved music and they wanted it to sound great.
In conclusions which were far from revelatory, Till used a computer model of Stonehenge and a concrete replica in America’s Washington State to recreate the sounds of the space 5,000 years ago, adjudging it to have possessed perfect acoustics.
Hey wait. There’s a Stonehenge replica in Washington? Well I’ll be damned. It’s a WWI memorial in Maryhill, overlooking the Columbia river.
This Stonehenge is the creation, not of Druids, but of Sam Hill, a dreamer and entrepreneur who founded the Maryhill community along the shores of the Columbia in the early 1900s.
Back then it was generally believed the English Stonehenge was built for human sacrifice. Hill believed that war was mankind’s greatest sacrifice. Thus he built his own Stonehenge to honor Klickitat County soldiers who died in World War I. Plaques bearing the names of the 13 soldiers killed in this war are attached to the inner circle of pillars.
That’s kind of cooler than the acoustics news. It looks like a beautiful place.
