Past Events

Stonehenge is the most tangible evidence of the civilisations that lived in the south of England 4000 years ago. Amongst the Stonehenge folklore are numerous probable methods as to how it was built, the numbers of people required and, by inference, the sophistication of the society that achieved the feat. No ideas were put to the test until the BBC, with WBGH from Boston American, selected a team to do it live for television...

Chosen because he admitted he had no idea, Mark Whitby, with archaeologist Julian Richards, proceeded to decipher clues. Together with a team from the fledging Whitbybird, they devised and tested methods of moving the largest stones and ultimately erected manually, using 120 volunteers over three weekends, the great trilation – a pair of 10m long/ high,40 tonne stones, capped with a 12 tonne lintel. This remains the only practical experiment, but undeterred ‘experts’ continue to suggest alternatives and claim mankind could never have devised such ingenious methods.

Mark’s talk will look back at the engineering logic he and his colleagues brought to the problem and reveal how following the experiment Jocelyn Stevens, then chairman of English Heritage, ordered the publication of all research on Stonehenge, citing the lack of openness of his archaeologists as a crime against science.

About the speaker: In 2001 Mark Whitby was the youngest president of ICE for two generations. Following his Stonehenge experiment, he went on to engineer many modern buildings and bridges with Whitbybird before merging the company with Nordic practice Ramboll in 2008. He is founder of the Engineering Club and www.engineering-timelines.com.