Stonehenge
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Studies published in 2024 traced the Altar Stone not to Wales but to the Orcadian Basin of north-east Scotland, roughly 700 km away.
- Its builders joined stones using carpentry methods, with mortise-and-tenon joints on the uprights and tongue-and-groove joints between the lintels.
- The lintels are gently curved so that, together, they continue the circular outline of the ring.
- Chemical analysis in 2020 showed most of the great sarsens came from West Woods near Marlborough, about 25 km to the north.
- The largest trilithons weigh up to 50 tons each, and the tallest stands about 7.3 metres high.
- Archaeologists excavated more than 50,000 cremated bone fragments from 63 people, men and women in nearly equal numbers along with some children.
- Large Mesolithic postholes found nearby date to around 8000 BC, thousands of years before the first ditch at Stonehenge was dug.
- A ring of 56 pits, the Aubrey holes, is named after the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey who first recorded them.
- Animal teeth from nearby Durrington Walls suggest up to 4,000 people gathered for midwinter and midsummer feasts around 2600 to 2400 BC.
- Researchers have found that some bluestones ring with a loud clanging sound when struck, one suggested reason for hauling them so far.
Why it is worth it
Stonehenge wasn't built — it was built, rebuilt, and rearranged over roughly 1,500 years, and what stands today is really the last of several distinct monuments on the same spot. The earliest phase, a circular ditch and bank enclosing cremated human remains, dates to around 3000 BCE. The giant sarsen stones most people picture went up later, generally placed around 2500 BCE, with the smaller bluestones shuffled between different arrangements across the centuries in between.
Those bluestones are the real puzzle. Geologists have traced them to two specific outcrops in the Preseli Hills of Wales, roughly 230 kilometres away — Carn Goedog for the spotted dolerite, Craig Rhos-y-felin for the rhyolite — precise enough that researchers can point to the exact quarry faces. How the stones got from there to Salisbury Plain is still genuinely contested: the long-standing theory is that Neolithic people hauled them the distance by hand and raft, but a 2024 study of a boulder showing signs of glacial scarring reopened the argument that ice, not human labour, may have carried at least some of the material most of the way.
Why anyone went to that trouble is still debated too — cremated remains found within the earthwork point toward a burial ground, while the monument's alignment with the solstice sunrise and sunset points toward calendar or ceremonial use, and archaeologists generally accept both may be true at once rather than picking one explanation over the other.
Getting there
12 km from Salisbury. Bournemouth Airport (BOH) is about 44 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Salisbury Cathedral 12.9 km · cathedral
- Caen Hill Locks 23.8 km · lock
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Stonehenge is a prehistoric megalithic structure on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, two miles (3 km) west of Amesbury. It consists of an outer ring of vertical sarsen standing stones, each around 13 feet (4.0 m) high, seven feet (2.1 m) wide, and weighing around 25 tons, topped by connecting horizontal lintel stones which are held in place with mortise and tenon joints—a feature unique among contemporary monuments. Inside is a ring of smaller bluestones. Inside these are free-standing trilithons: two bulkier vertical sarsens joined by a single lintel. The whole monument, now in ruins, is aligned towards the sunrise on the summer solstice and sunset on the winter solstice. The stones are set within earthworks in the middle of the densest complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred tumuli.
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