Sir,—Mr. G. Engleheart avers that my arguments (“Nineteenth Century,” April, 1920) against the assumed immense antiquity of Stonehenge “could be refuted by a schoolboy.” I wish he would introduce me to that schoolboy! At the moment of writing I have met no one, read nothing, to cause me to modify the views which I expressed some years ago. On the contrary, I find amongst the results of the investigations since made of Stonehenge a good deal to support my most heretical position.
It is Mr. Engleheart’s conviction that Stonehenge is of Neolithic age. He is entitled to his belief, but he could hardly hope to convert those who think otherwise without adducing evidence that his own is the better view. I find in his letter of August 5 no such evidence. Neither his having “lived near to it for over forty years,” nor his wide reading about it, nor even his having assisted at various explorations of it, is in itself such evidence.
Mr. Engleheart has for his ally that weakness of humanity which bids us love an exaggerated eld. I, too, have the profoundest regard for antiquity, but it must be antiquity beyond the reach of doubt.
The same fallacious weakness shows itself in the arguments now being bandied about as to how the Precelly stones got to Stonehenge. One party refuses to believe that they came by water, because “at that remote era” the people of this island cannot have had the needful ships and skill and courage. The other party refuses negatively to believe that they came by land because of the vast labour entailed “at that remote era,” and hints positively that they came up the Avon “at that remote era” when that stream was a veritable river. Through the arguments of all alike runs the same fallacy: all beg the question of “that remote era.”
Meantime, while the theorists theorize, Constantinople is like to fall and perish for ever; and all of us would be more
profitably occupied in the effort to save from destruction, not Stonehenge only, but Avebury also, if only that we have
left to us the same old bones to wrangle about in the far future.—Yours faithfully,
A. Hadrian Allcroft.
Arthur Hadrian Allcroft wrote many textbooks on classical antiquity, but is perhaps best remembered as the author of Earthwork of England and The Circle and the Cross.