#solstice

Stonehenge: The Great Stone Circle of Salisbury Plain

On the open chalk downland of Salisbury Plain in southern England stands the most famous prehistoric monument in the world: a ring of enormous standing stones, some capped by level lintels, arranged with a precision that has drawn wonder and speculation for more than a thousand years. Stonehenge was not built in a day, or in a single lifetime, or by a single people. It grew over roughly fifteen hundred years, from about 3000 BCE, beginning as a simple circular earthwork and cremation cemetery and culminating, centuries later, in the great stone architecture we know — the towering sarsens quarried from the hills to the north, and the smaller 'bluestones' brought, astonishingly, some 150 miles overland from the mountains of west Wales. Its builders, working with antler picks, timber, rope, and muscle, dressed the stones with woodworking joints translated into rock, raised lintels weighing tonnes onto uprights, and aligned the whole monument to the rising and setting of the sun at the solstices. For centuries, outsiders credited the achievement to anyone but the people who actually managed it — to Merlin and giants, to Druids, and in our own age to visitors from the stars. The truth is that Stonehenge is the work of prehistoric Britons of extraordinary skill and organisation. How they built it, we largely understand. Why they built it is a question we are still, carefully, trying to answer. This is the story of the great stone circle.