A replica of the English Stonehenge has been built in a paddock in Carterton.
As someone who has witnessed a fair few solstices at Stonehenge in England, I was curious to hear that New Zealand also has its own stone circle, situated in the back country of Wairarapa’s Carterton.
Arriving on a cold and windy winter solstice day, a wooden sign proudly announces to visitors the entrance to “Stonehenge Aotearoa”.
As one of the designers and directors of this modern-day Stonehenge monument, Richard Hall has developed a knowledge for why neolithic hunter-gatherers spent so much time and effort creating these massive edifices.
Hall’s first introduction to the “stones” was as a boy: “We used to live near London and used to get to Stonehenge, and sit and have a breakfast sitting on the stones. Then it was just an ancient monument.”
Arriving in New Zealand 50 years ago, Hall studied and then taught astronomy, and his interest in the ambition of the stone circles, and their meaning, deepened.
Richard Hall during the construction of Stonehenge Aotearoa. Photo / Richard Hall
Gaining the majority of funding from the Royal Society and Phoenix Astronomical Society, an adapted modern-day version of Stonehenge was started in 2005.
Its purpose was to create a full-size working model that showed the precise movement of the sun and stars, which were so important to ancient societies and their survival.
“This is like a stone age computer,” said Hall. “The stones actually portray exactly when certain events are going to be occurring. You can tell the time, the day of the solstices and equinoxes.”
Like the original Stonehenge, this stone circle is 30 metres in diameter, with 24 three-metre high stones, capped with lintels that span the tops of the upright stones. It’s a perfect arena for accurately viewing the solstice and other astronomical events.
Stonehenge Aotearoa as it sits in the Wairarapa countryside.
“In a sense, the sun moves in an arc across the sky, moving backwards and forwards and that’s what the stone circle shows us is how that big clock works,” Hall said.
“There’s an enormous amount of information if you know how to decode it.”
While the original Stonehenge took around 4000 years to construct, a team of volunteers ingeniously built the Aotearoa stone circle in just three years on reinforced concrete foundations.
It has a wooden frame covered with concrete board. Hall said like its prehistoric predecessor, Stonehenge Aotearoa wasn’t without its challenges.
“Each of these stones weighed a ton. No one had built one of these for a long period of time, if we had an engineering problem we would have to stop, have a cup of coffee and work it out.”
The construction of Stonehenge Aotearoa - with concrete spray. Photo / Richard Hall
Unlike our modern, technological computerised world, Stonehenge Aotearoa gives us a glimpse of what ancient technology would have looked like and how it was used.
“From a very early stage, people were using the stars to understand the complex world they were living in and to absolutely be able to foretell what was going to happen. This knowledge was a matter of life and death,” Hall said.
For anyone keen to learn how humans existed without wristwatches and smartphones, Stonehenge Aotearoa is at hand.
