It stands on the open chalk downland of Salisbury Plain, visible for miles across a landscape that has changed enormously in the four and a half thousand years since the first stones were raised, yet which retains something of the openness that made this particular place sacred to the people who built here. Stonehenge is Britain's most iconic prehistoric monument, one of the most famous structures in the world, and one whose construction and purpose has been the subject of speculation, myth and increasingly rigorous scientific investigation for centuries.
The structure we see today is the culmination of a long building programme that began around 3000 BC, when the circular earthwork — the outer ditch and bank — was first dug. The sarsen stones — the large upright stones and the lintels that join them — were erected around 2500 BC, transported from Marlborough Downs about 25 miles to the north. But the smaller bluestones, which form an inner circle and horseshoe, present the most extraordinary puzzle: they originated in the Preseli Mountains of Wales, approximately 150 miles away. How people of the Neolithic period transported stones weighing up to four tonnes over such a distance — by sea around the Pembrokeshire coast and up the Bristol Channel, then overland — has been debated for generations. Recent experimental archaeology has demonstrated that it was feasible, though not easy, using wooden sleds, ropes and large teams of people.
Why was such extraordinary effort invested in bringing these specific stones from so far away? Modern isotope analysis of the bluestones confirms their Welsh origin but does not answer the question of their significance. The most persuasive current theories suggest the bluestones may already have been sacred objects — already part of a monument in Wales before their journey — or may have been associated with healing traditions that made them particularly potent materials for a monument connected with the veneration of ancestors and the intercession of the dead.
The astronomical alignment of Stonehenge is not in doubt. At the summer solstice, the rising sun aligns precisely with the monument's axis, illuminating the central altar stone. At the winter solstice, the setting sun aligns through the Great Trilithon. These alignments were clearly intentional and required significant astronomical knowledge to achieve. The interpretation of this astronomical significance — whether Stonehenge was a calendar, a solar temple, a place of ritual connected with the solstices, or all of these things simultaneously — continues to be refined as new techniques allow archaeologists to extract more information from the monument and its surrounding landscape.
The people who built Stonehenge were not the Druids of later Celtic tradition, as eighteenth-century romantic mythology suggested. They were Neolithic and then Early Bronze Age communities who left no written records but whose sophistication in engineering, organisation and symbolic thinking is demonstrated by the monument itself. Recent DNA analysis of skeletal remains from the Stonehenge landscape suggests the builders may have included people whose ancestry traced back to Anatolian farming communities who arrived in Britain around 4000 BC, replacing or absorbing the earlier Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. The story of Stonehenge is, among other things, the story of human migration.
