Hello and welcome to the second episode of The Lives of Stonehenge, a new short podcast series from the London Review of Books.

I'm Rosemary Hill, a contributing editor at the

paper, and in this series I'm looking at what people have thought about Stonehenge over the

past few hundred years or so, what it is, what it means, and why it has come to loom so large

in the story of this country. In the first episode, we saw Stonehenge through the eyes of two architects,

Inigo Jones and John Wood, who were inspired by it in their designs for Covent Garden and the

city of Bath, and how these in turn, the idea of the square, the idea of the circus and the idea of

the crescent, had a huge influence on the development of towns and cities across Britain.

None of this, of course, got us any closer to explaining how or why Stonehenge got there.

Jones's theory that it was an early Roman construction didn't really convince anybody,

but what it did start was a great tradition of rouse about Stonehenge.

So today we're going to be talking about the

next episode in this argument, looking at the work of two antiquaries. We're now in the middle of

the 17th century, in the middle of the civil wars, a few decades after Jones wrote his brilliant

but misguided book, and we're meeting the great antiquary John Aubrey, who was spending a lot

of time at Stonehenge, measuring, drawing and thinking, and then we're meeting the great antiquary John Aubrey, who was spending a lot of time at Stonehenge,

measuring, drawing and thinking, and then we're going to take it up in the 18th century with another

antiquary, William Stucley. And to discuss the work of both of them, I'm delighted to be joined today

by Kate Bennett, a lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, who's currently writing a life

of John Aubrey,

who left his mark on Stonehenge, didn't he, Kate?

He did. He was the first Fields archaeologist and the circle of chalk pits at Stonehenge

...