The first religion might have left buildings as well as books. William Stukeley (1687–1765) approached Stonehenge and Avebury with the conviction that their arrangements preserved something of their builders’ beliefs. He measured, drew, and recorded the monuments, leaving observations that remained valuable after many of his explanations lost their authority. The problem lay in deciding how far a plan of stones could take him into the minds of the people who had raised them.
Stukeley identified the builders with Druids and connected their worship to the biblical patriarchs. Britain acquired a place in a sacred history whose beginnings lay farther east. In Stonehenge (1740) and Abury (1743), circles and serpentine forms became evidence of religious knowledge, including an anticipation of the Trinity. The landscape seemed to preserve a teaching older than the Christianity preached around it.
For an Anglican clergyman, this could give local antiquity a reassuring ancestry. The monuments were no longer merely evidence of a remote pagan population. They suggested that Britain had once shared in an early revelation, later obscured but still recoverable through its remains. Theological expectations helped direct his attention and shaped what he thought the measurements meant.
The records and their interpretation cannot always be judged together. A drawing may preserve a feature accurately without establishing the doctrine assigned to it, and Stukeley’s increasing commitment to his reconstruction could affect how he presented the monuments. Later readers inherited both the plans and the explanations. They could use his record of a stone’s position while setting aside the journey from the biblical East that he believed accounted for its presence.