Study Abroad: Stonehenge and Bath

Today we traveled to the famous Stonehenge and from there we went to the city of Bath. Stonehenge was about 2 hours straight west of our flat. I thought that it was going to be right in a big city, but in fact, Stonehenge is in the middle of no where. It is a very scenic route to get there. Go over the rolling hills of England 2 hours straight west and you will end up close, if not at Stonehenge. It is very interesting and hard to grasp where the history behind it. We had a guide that did there best to describe the history of it, but it was hard to comprehend until I bought a small history book on it for 3 pounds. The stones came from far away and vary in sizes and composition. Pretty interesting stuff. The big stones came from around 20 miles to the north and weigh somewhere around 45 tonnes. They had homemade rope and a lot of men to pull these rocks over 20 miles in a the rolling hills of England to the current location. It must of been very important for the people to get these rocks here. The smaller ones came from a lot farther location, estimated at 150 miles. These rocks only way anywhere from 5-10 tonnes but some get bigger than that. Here are some pictures, you can't walk up to them, but it is hard to get real detail, but this is my best for you.

I have so many pictures of this and if you want more, email me at jmstodolka@csbsju.edu and I can give you hundreds of them. I did take some pictures of what is suppose to look like, it is a diagram.

The last two pictures, are of the men power it took to drag these rocks across the land. It is pretty impressive.

From Stonehenge, we got back on the coach and drove an hour to the city of Bath. This is a famous city that the Romans founded about 900. It was founded because of the huge natural hot baths that come from the land, that it supposedly healed people from there wounds. It turned into a village and then it went extinct and was buried under ground for 1200 years until it was excavated in 1700 or so. This was a very cool place to visit, the museum was built over the old ruins of the bath, where you can walk through and see all the old artifacts. Again, I took lots of pictures so let me know if you want some. Here are some good ones:

Also, there are some pretty cool sites to see around the city of Bath. There was a large abbey built in about 900 where the first king was coroneted. It is some pretty cool architecture on the abbey.