Stonehenge is a ring of enormous standing stones on Salisbury Plain, built and rebuilt over roughly 1,500 years by people who left no writing, and it has been baffling everyone who has looked at it ever since.
What is actually there
Two kinds of stone. The huge sarsens — up to 25 tonnes each — came from about 15 miles away and form the outer circle and the great trilithons, pairs of uprights topped by a lintel. The smaller bluestones, weighing two to four tonnes, came from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, roughly 150 miles away in west Wales.
The joinery is the astonishing part. The lintels are held on with mortice and tenon joints, curved to follow the circle, and locked to each other with tongue and groove — woodworking techniques, executed in stone, without metal tools.
Who built it, and who did not
Not the Druids. This is the single most persistent myth about the site: the Druids were Iron Age Celtic priests who appeared around 2,000 years after Stonehenge was finished. The association dates from antiquarians in the 1600s who guessed, wrongly, and the guess stuck.
The builders were Neolithic and early Bronze Age farming communities. Analysis of pig bones from nearby Durrington Walls shows people travelling to the area from as far as Scotland, which suggests the site drew visitors from across Britain even then.
What it was for
Nobody knows, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing confidently. The leading theories are a temple, an astronomical calendar, a burial ground, or a place of healing — and the evidence supports several at once. Cremated remains of at least 150 people have been found there, making it one of the largest Neolithic burial sites in Britain.
The solar alignment is not in dispute. The monument frames the sunrise at the summer solstice and, more precisely, the sunset at the winter solstice — which many archaeologists now think was the more important of the two.
Visiting
You view the circle from a path around it; you cannot walk among the stones on a standard ticket, following damage from decades of unrestricted access. Stone Circle Access visits, booked well in advance, let small groups inside outside opening hours, at dawn or dusk.
The exception is the solstice, when the site opens for free and several thousand people — pagans, druids, revellers and the curious — gather to watch the sun come up. It is a genuinely strange and rather moving night, and the traffic is dreadful.