Stonehenge: The Prehistoric Stone Circle on Salisbury Plain

Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument of standing stones on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, southern England. Built in several stages between about 3000 BC and 1500 BC, it is famous for its huge sarsen stones capped with lintels and for its alignment with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. It is one of the most important and most visited prehistoric sites in the world.

Background: Neolithic Britain

Around 4000 BC farming spread to Britain, and communities began to clear land, keep animals and build large monuments such as long barrows and causewayed enclosures. Building on a monumental scale required many people to work together over long periods.

Salisbury Plain became a focus of ceremonial activity. Long before the stones arrived, people had raised timber posts near the site and built a long earthwork enclosure known as the Cursus. The posts, found under the modern car park, date back to the Mesolithic period, several thousand years before Stonehenge itself.

Stonehenge was not unique. Britain and Ireland have hundreds of stone circles, and the nearby henge at Avebury is larger in area. What makes Stonehenge exceptional is the size and careful shaping of its stones and the lintels laid across them, found at no other prehistoric circle.

How Stonehenge was built

The first monument

The first Stonehenge, built around 3000 BC, was a circular ditch and bank about 110 metres (360 feet) across. Inside its edge lay a ring of 56 pits, called the Aubrey Holes after the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey. Excavations have shown that cremated human remains were buried there, making Stonehenge one of the largest cemeteries in Britain of its time. Many researchers now think the Aubrey Holes first held bluestones, which would mean that some Welsh stones arrived at the very beginning.

The great stones

Around 2500 BC the builders raised the sarsen stones that dominate the site today. They formed an outer circle of about 30 upright stones topped by a continuous ring of lintels, and inside it a horseshoe of five larger trilithons, each made of two uprights and a lintel. The largest stones stand about 7 metres (23 feet) high and weigh around 25 tonnes or more.

The stones were carefully shaped. The lintels are held in place with joints copied from woodworking, including mortise-and-tenon and tongue-and-groove joints. Smaller bluestones were set up in arrangements that changed several times over the following centuries. The workers had only stone and antler tools, and they dressed the hard sarsen by pounding it with heavy stone hammers.

Where the stones came from

In 2020 a geochemical study showed that most of the sarsens came from West Woods, about 25 kilometres (15 miles) to the north. The bluestones were brought from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales, around 240 kilometres (150 miles) away. Archaeologists have identified Neolithic quarries there, at Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin. In 2024 researchers traced the six-tonne Altar Stone to north-east Scotland, more than 700 kilometres away.

How the stones were moved is not known for certain. Most archaeologists think people dragged them on sledges, perhaps over timber rails, using ropes and large teams. Experiments with replica stones have shown that a few dozen people hauling a sledge can move a multi-tonne block surprisingly quickly over prepared ground. Raising the uprights probably involved tipping each stone into a prepared pit and hauling it upright with ropes and timber frames, while the lintels may have been lifted on rising platforms of timber. Altogether, building the monument must have taken many thousands of working days spread over generations.

Purpose and meaning

The main axis of Stonehenge points towards the midsummer sunrise in one direction and the midwinter sunset in the other. This suggests that the monument was linked to the calendar and to the turning of the seasons. Many archaeologists think midwinter gatherings were especially important.

An earthwork path known as the Avenue leads from the monument’s entrance towards the River Avon, around 2.8 kilometres (1.7 miles) away. Its first section follows the same solstice axis, and some researchers think it formed part of a ceremonial route between the river and the stones.

Nearby, at Durrington Walls, archaeologists have found a large settlement with evidence of winter feasting on pigs, which some think housed the builders or visitors. Other theories see Stonehenge as a place of the ancestors, a centre of healing or a symbol of unity between communities. No single explanation is accepted by everyone.

The archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson has argued that Stonehenge and Durrington Walls formed a pair: a timber circle for the living at Durrington and a stone circle for the dead at Stonehenge, linked by the River Avon and the Avenue. Timothy Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright have instead suggested that the bluestones were believed to have healing powers, which might explain why they were dragged so far. Both ideas have supporters and critics, and they need not exclude each other, since the monument’s meaning probably changed over its long life.

The wider landscape is crowded with burial mounds of the Early Bronze Age. One of the richest, Bush Barrow, contained a gold lozenge and other fine objects. Near Amesbury, a man buried around 2300 BC and known as the Amesbury Archer was found in 2002 with copper knives, gold ornaments and other goods. Isotope analysis suggests he grew up in the Alps region of central Europe, which shows how far people travelled to the area.

Later history and research

Stonehenge stopped being changed after about 1500 BC, but it never disappeared from memory. In the 12th century Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a legend that the wizard Merlin had brought the stones from Ireland. In the 17th and 18th centuries antiquarians linked the site to the Druids, an idea that is now known to be wrong.

Over the centuries some stones fell and others were taken away for building material. Several fallen or leaning stones were straightened or re-erected in concrete in a series of restorations between 1901 and 1964. Major excavations were carried out by William Hawley in the 1920s and Richard Atkinson in the 1950s, and radiocarbon dating later established the monument’s long building history. The Stonehenge Riverside Project, led by Mike Parker Pearson in the 2000s, transformed knowledge of the surrounding landscape.

In 1915 Cecil Chubb bought Stonehenge at auction, and in 1918 he gave it to the nation. Today it is cared for by English Heritage, while much of the surrounding landscape belongs to the National Trust. A new visitor centre opened in 2013, and a road that ran beside the stones was closed and grassed over. Crowds still gather at the stones to watch the sunrise at the summer solstice. Access at the solstice has been controversial: after clashes in the 1980s, the stones were closed to solstice crowds for years, and English Heritage has allowed managed open access since 2000. Today the site attracts more than a million visitors in a normal year.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Druids built Stonehenge. The monument was finished long before Druids are recorded in Britain. The link was popularised by antiquarians such as William Stukeley in the 18th century.

Myth: Stonehenge was built by the Romans, Danes or other later peoples. In the 17th century the architect Inigo Jones argued that it was a Roman temple, and others credited the Danes. Radiocarbon dating shows it is thousands of years older than any of these peoples’ arrival in Britain.

Myth: Stonehenge was an ancient computer for predicting eclipses. In the 1960s some writers claimed the stones were used for complex astronomical calculation. Most archaeologists accept the solstice alignment but find little evidence for more elaborate astronomy.

Myth: glaciers carried the bluestones to Salisbury Plain. This theory had supporters, but the discovery of Neolithic quarries in the Preseli Hills shows that people moved the stones.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 3000 BC: A circular ditch and bank are dug, with the ring of Aubrey Holes inside.
• c. 2500 BC: The sarsen circle and trilithons are raised, with bluestones from Wales.
• c. 2300 BC: The “Amesbury Archer” is buried nearby with goods from continental Europe.
• c. 1500 BC: The last major changes are made to the monument.
• 1915: Cecil Chubb buys Stonehenge at auction.
• 1918: Chubb gives Stonehenge to the nation.
• 1986: Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
• 2024: Scientists trace the Altar Stone to north-east Scotland.

Why it matters

Stonehenge shows what prehistoric farming communities could achieve with stone tools, timber, rope and organised labour, and without writing. It connected people across Britain, from Wales to Scotland, in a shared monumental project. Like the Great Pyramid of Giza, built in the same centuries, it remains a symbol of human ambition, and earlier works such as the Lascaux cave paintings remind us how long that creative story stretches back.