About Stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric riddle on the Salisbury Plain, a ring of massive sarsen stones that has stood for 5,000 years. Who built it? Druids? Romans? Bronze Age farmers? And why—temple, calendar, or healing center? It stands solitary and windswept, a masterpiece of engineering from a time before the wheel. The lintels balanced atop the standing stones are a feat of physics that still puzzles experts.
From above, the circular layout is unmistakable. The outer circle, the inner horseshoe of trilithons, and the surrounding ditch and bank (the "henge") form a sacred geometry in the green fields. The "Avenue," an ancient processional pathway, can be seen leading to the river. It sits at the center of a landscape dense with burial mounds and other ancient earthworks, a vast sacred necropolis.
The best time to see Stonehenge is at sunrise or sunset, when the stones cast long shadows and align with the sun. Despite the nearby highway, there is a primal power here. It connects us to our ancestors' obsession with the fierce passage of time and the seasons. It is silent, heavy, and undeniably sacred, a cathedral of the open sky.
The monument was built in six distinct phases from about 3100 BC to 1600 BC, and each phase involved a different community with different technology—arguably making it a 1,500-year continuous construction project spanning the entire British Neolithic and early Bronze Age. The very first phase was not the stone circle at all but a large circular ditch and bank containing 56 timber posts placed in what are now called the Aubrey Holes, named after 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey who identified them in 1666. Excavations in 2008 finally proved that these holes had held Welsh bluestones long before the sarsen circle was raised, meaning the site was a monumental cemetery for at least 500 years before it became a stone temple—cremated remains from 63 individuals have been recovered from around the holes, making it Britain's largest late-Neolithic burial ground.