Its inner ring of smaller stones was dragged some 250 km from the Preseli Hills in Wales
The bluestones; one Welsh circle at Waun Mawn may have been dismantled and moved wholesale
Geography · Landmarks & wonders
Stonehenge
c. 3000–2000 BC
England — Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire
The most sophisticated prehistoric stone circle in the world: a ring of dressed sarsen uprights capped with lintels locked on by mortise-and-tenon joints, with smaller Welsh bluestones inside, set at the centre of a vast Neolithic and Bronze Age ritual landscape. It is aligned on the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, and after a century of excavation its purpose is still argued over.
How to spot them
- ▸Quiz clue: 'Salisbury Plain', 'sarsen', 'bluestone', 'trilithon', 'Heel Stone'
- ▸Lintels held on by mortise-and-tenon joints — carpentry technique executed in stone
- ▸Aligned on the summer solstice sunrise and the winter solstice sunset
- ▸Two miles west of Amesbury, in the middle of a landscape crowded with barrows
Key facts
Its huge sarsen uprights came from West Woods, about 26 km to the north (2020)
A geochemical study matched a core taken in 1958 and returned in 2018 to that quarry
Its lintels are locked onto the uprights by mortise-and-tenon joints — woodworking done in stone
The lintels are also tongue-and-grooved to each other and subtly curved to follow the circle
Its axis points to sunrise at the summer solstice and sunset at the winter solstice
The Heel Stone stands outside the circle on the solstitial axis
In 2024 its recumbent Altar Stone was traced to north-east Scotland, over 700 km away (2024)
Published in Nature; it had long been assumed to be Welsh
Its pairs of vast uprights joined by a single lintel are called trilithons
Five stood in a horseshoe inside the outer circle
John Aubrey and William Stukeley linked it to the druids — several thousand years too late
It was already ancient when the Celtic druids appear in the record
Quick-fire facts
- •Building went on in phases from about 3000 BC to about 2000 BC, beginning as a circular earthwork with a ring of pits, the Aubrey Holes
- •The sarsens stand about 4 m high and weigh around 25 tonnes each; the bluestones about 2 m and 2–4 tonnes
- •It is owned by the Crown and managed by English Heritage; the surrounding land is National Trust
- •Cecil Chubb bought it at auction in 1915 for £6,600 and gave it to the nation three years later
- •Inscribed by UNESCO in 1986 as 'Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites'
- •Common misconception: it was not built by the druids — it predates them by two millennia — and it is not a 'Celtic' monument
- •Another misconception: the stones are not all the same; only the inner bluestones travelled from Wales, while the great sarsens are local Wiltshire sandstone
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites
- English Heritage — Stonehenge: history and stories