Devil's Arrows: Ancient builders hauled 55k-lb stones 11 miles for UK stone row
Comments
cjs_ac
graemep
and at least one stone came from Scotland: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c207lqdn755o
pseudohadamard
And two more were supposed to come from Aliexpress but they got stopped at customs because of asbestos contamination. That's why there's that gap on the southwest side.
Not a lot of people know that.
airin_stories
[dead]
dmichulke
25-tonne stones for 18km in case you wondered
walthamstow
Stones are the Fahrenheit of weight. Useful for the human body but fuck all else.
lostlogin
Are they useful for human bodies?
We have a dumb system here in New Zealand. Most people seem to know their height in feet/inches and weight in kilograms.
nickt
Or about 3 double-decker buses for the length of 171 footy pitches.
gnufx
That's not dimensionally correct! Double-decker bus is a unit of length, and footy pitch is too prosaic to be an approved unit: https://www.theregister.com/bootnotes/2026/05/31/the-reg-onl...
frereubu
It's a shame it's not about area then at least we could agree on Wales as a unit.
tantalor
It's not too prosaic, it's just too imprecise. There is no standard size, and some regulations even allow a range of sizes.
gnufx
I don't think that's relevant for Register units. Clearly there's a standard brontosaurus somewhere, for instance, otherwise how could we have the conversion table? However, sorry, I was wrong about the football pitch, at least as a unit of area, equal to 194.89nWa per the original article: https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2007/08/24/so-whats-the-...
tantalor
You're not wrong! Personally, I like to use penguin as a measure of height. Everybody knows how big a penguin is, right? It's pretty standard.
blater
to clarify for those of a nautical bent - that's about half a blue whale for about 4/5ths of a dozen nautical miles
robertlagrant
For anyone confused, British people would generally use tonnes (or tons, but maybe not know the difference exactly) and miles.
wuliwong
I initially read the title as 55,000 one pound stones. I was thinking, huh that does seem like a lot of work. (>▽<)
tomcam
I’m beginning to conclude that about 47% of all ancient activities in England consisted solely of either moving comically huge rocks around, or attempting to convince the remaining 53% to do their fair share.
chrisweekly
Ken Follett (of "Pillars of the Earth" fame) wrote a terrific semi-historical* novel called "Circle of Days" that portrays a vivid picture of the people and circumstances that could've led to the creation of Stonehenge.
*"semi" qualifier bc there's so little known for sure -- but it's at least plausible, and his extensive research doesn't contradict things that can be verified.
ChrisRR
Imperial is confusing at the best of times, but couldn't they have said 24.5 tons instead of 55,000 lbs?
Xmd5a
Sir ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_ton
> he long ton,[1] also known as the imperial ton, displacement ton,[1][2] or British ton,[3] is a measurement unit equal to 2,240 pounds
guenthert
They could have said 3300 stones stones ...
euroderf
That rocks.
GJim
It's the weigh I like it.
masfuerte
That's the way they like it. American road signs have mad shit like "No trucks over 15,000 lbs".
walthamstow
Surely they don't actually like drill bits measured in fractions of an inch, do they?
edoceo
Yes, in USA the bits are in fractions and stuff you purchase will have instructions like, drill 3/8 hole for a wall anchor, or 2+1/4 hole for a door-bolt set.
hamdingers
This is an is-ought inference. Americans have not been given an option and use the units they're provided with, which is a frustrating mix of everything depending on context.
Nobody seems to like it this way.
thechao
That's because we measure weight in tonnage.
close04
In the EU and UK the weight of the vehicle is on the signs too [0], or the weight per axle [1].
[0] https://hgvlgvtraining.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/weig...
dboreham
The American thousands of pounds thing is even more weird than that: I buy gravel from the gravel pit. They weigh my truck and dump trailer in lbs and then charge me per ton. Everyone talks about tons: e.g. I'd call a dump truck operator and ask him to deliver 18 tons of rock, not 36,000lbs. But the weighbridge and road signs and regulations about vehicle and axle weight are always in lbs. If you only read things and never talked to other people you'd never know tons existed.
ninalanyon
I wonder if using pounds exclusively stems from a time when the word ton was potentially ambiguous. In both British Imperial and US Customary one ton means 20 hundredweight (20 cwt) but the hundredweight differs between the two countries, 112 lb in Imperial, 100 lb in US Customary resulting in the US Customary ton being the short ton of 2 000 lb and the Imperial ton being the long ton of 2 240 lb.
Using only lb avoids confusion.
cucumber3732842
A lot of the older "no vehicles over X" signage is denominated in tons.
spikels
Strange they don't mention how many stones. Image shows two. There are three today and four, maybe five, originally.
hashim
The word for this structure is apparently a menhir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menhir. The article calls it the tallest in the UK but its Wikipedia page calls it the second-tallest. This is the actual tallest, interestingly also in Yorkshire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudston_Monolith.
qingcharles
Asterix taught me the word menhir.
ButlerianJihad
This must be the origin of the saying, “People who start stone rows shouldn’t build glass houses”.
vogelke
Lovely.
JKFSOM
Meanwhile, in Egypt...
airin_stories
[dead]
surfingdino
Must have been a contractor. The permies would wait for the procurement process to pick someone to move those stones for them. /s
TZubiri
Lol. First time I ever heard permie as a slur for the second best worker categorization
dgan
Need 7 more paragraphes telling us that the stones, weren't in fact, chosen from the nearest location, but were chosen from a distant location.
Without ever telling *how" they were moved of course, that would give out too much
TZubiri
Horses
Also, Stonehenge was built (partially) from parts of other stone circles, from as far away as Wales: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56029203