That Damn Henge

The first mistake was the scale. They’d worked from a single feather, a freakishly large one that washed up on the shores of Doggerland, and the Chief Computator, a man remembered only as “Oof,” had done his sums. The result was a monument to avian hygiene so catastrophically over-engineered that it bankrupted the entire Bell Beaker culture from the Skagerrak to the Bristol Channel. The second mistake, of course, was the dodo. The dodos did not migrate. They did not, in fact, go anywhere. And when they finally arrived, carried by increasingly exasperated Neolithic sailors in a fleet of thirty-seven thousand wicker baskets, they were seasick, confused, and deeply unimpressed by their new bath.

The dodos, you see, were a simple people. They enjoyed a good grub, a quiet patch of shade, and a profound lack of ambition. The bluestone megaliths, hauled all the way from the Preseli Hills by thousands of sweating builders who would really rather have been inventing cheese, meant nothing to them. The astronomical alignments were irrelevant. They ignored the ceremonial causeway and simply flopped about in the damp chalky mud on the periphery, pecking disconsolately at the trilithons. An entire priesthood, trained for generations in the complex water-purification rituals and ceremonial dodo-scrubbing techniques, found itself dangerously unemployed. The official record, a series of increasingly frantic carvings on aurochs shoulder-blades, shows the High Priest sacrificing three prize goats and a junior accountant to the Sky-Lizard, begging the dodos to please, for the love of all that is holy, just take a fucking bath.

They did not. Instead, they discovered the one thing the builders had brought in surplus: beer. The dodo, it turned out, was a creature purpose-built for alcoholism. Within a week, the solemn, five-thousand-year project had devolved into a permanent, squawking frat party. The dodos, drunk and belligerent, refused to leave. They’d climb onto the lintels and defecate ceremonially onto the Altar Stone. They learned to mimic the Druidic chants, but with more shouting about worms. They formed a rudimentary union, the Amalgamated Society of Drunken Fowl and Allied Trades, and demanded a steady supply of fermented grain and better nesting materials, issuing their demands by pushing carefully selected pebbles into patterns that spelled out, approximately, “MORE BEER. ALSO, FUCK OWLS.”

The final indignity came in the form of a rival bird. Geese. Specifically, a flock of bog-standard greylags who, seeing a large, beer-soaked party, decided to join in. The dodos, fiercely territorial about their new-found squalor, declared war. The resulting conflict, known to baffled archaeologists as the “Trilithon Scuffle,” saw the two flightless factions hurling pebbles, regurgitated barley, and insults at each other across the sacred circle for three straight weeks. It ended not with a bang, but with a shrug. The dodos, realising they could get beer pretty much anywhere without all the architectural grandeur, simply wandered off one Tuesday and were never seen in Britain again. All that was left was a very large, very expensive, and profoundly disappointing stone circle, slick with generations of accumulated bird shit.