# Stonehenge

Neolithic henge monument in Amesbury, Wiltshire, England, UK

Amesbury, United Kingdom

Settlement · Monument. Neolithic, Bronze Age · 3001 BCE – 1401 BCE

## Story

• Stonehenge is a prehistoric stone circle on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, about two miles west of Amesbury, aligned on the summer solstice sunrise and the winter solstice sunset.
• The first earthwork, a circular ditch and bank with 56 Aubrey holes, was built around 3100 or 3000 BC and became the largest late Neolithic cremation cemetery in the British Isles.
• The great sarsen circle and trilithons were raised in the centuries around 2500 to 2400 BC, with smaller bluestones from the Preseli Hills and an Altar Stone whose source is still unknown.
• The Amesbury Archer was buried nearby around 2300 BC with the oldest gold yet found in England, in the same age as gatherings at Durrington Walls and a large change in the population of Britain.
• Aubrey Burl and Brian John questioned a human haul of the bluestones, while later quarry evidence and the study of the Altar Stone have kept the argument open.

## Visiting

The monument is open every day from 9.30am to 5pm, with last entry at 3pm. From 28 March to 6 September the opening hours run from 9.30am to 6pm, and the site is closed on 25 December. Opening hours on the summer solstice and the winter solstice are subject to change. Tickets booked by midnight the day before cost less than a ticket bought on the day, and each ticket is valid all day within opening hours.
Adult admission in the 2026 to 2027 season runs from £24.65 on quieter weekdays to £29.32 on summer weekends and bank holidays, with a middle price of £27.03. Child admission runs from £12.32 to £14.62, and concession admission is £22.35 or £24.65 where it is offered. Admission is free for members who bring a membership card, and admission is also free for members in England of the National Trust. Visitors are not allowed to touch the stones, though entry among the stones is permitted at the solstices and equinoxes and by special booking at other times.

## History

Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, about two miles west of Amesbury. An outer ring of sarsen uprights once carried lintels locked on with mortise and tenon joints, with a circle of smaller bluestones and five trilithons inside. The axis lines up with sunset at the winter solstice and sunrise at the summer solstice. With Avebury, it is the heart of a World Heritage property inscribed in 1986.

Pine posts stood here in the Mesolithic, between about 8500 and 7000 BC, or about 8000 BC in another dating of the same pits. The chalk may already have been open grassland when much of southern England was wooded. Around 3500 BC a causewayed enclosure, two cursus monuments, and long barrows occupied the neighbourhood, and they probably drew later builders to the spot.

The circular ditch and bank date to about 3100 BC in one account and to about 3000 BC in another. The enclosure was about 100 to 110 metres across, with two entrances, and a ring of 56 pits, the Aubrey holes, lay inside the bank. It became the largest late Neolithic cremation cemetery in the British Isles. About 64 cremations have been found, perhaps 150 people were buried, and a later study examined 63 individuals, men and women and some children, some of whom may have come from the bluestone region of Wales.

The great sarsen circle and trilithons were raised between about 2600 and 2400 BC, or about 2500 BC in another account. The smaller bluestones are generally traced to the Preseli Hills in Wales. Brian John and Aubrey Burl argued that ice had carried those stones nearer the plain, while quarry evidence published in 2019 supports human extraction and transport. A circle at Waun Mawn may have supplied some of them, though later work found that the Welsh circle was never finished and that no more than thirteen stones were removed.

Most of the sarsens match stone at West Woods, about fifteen or sixteen miles to the north, and other sources have also been proposed. The Altar Stone, a sandstone slab once traced to Wales, was linked in 2024 to the Orcadian Basin of northeast Scotland. Later analysis excluded the Orkney mainland and found that no examined British outcrop of the same sandstone yet matches the stone, so its exact source is unknown.

Beaker pottery, metalworking, and individual burial with grave goods arrived from the Continent around 2500 BC, and in time most of the older Neolithic ancestry in Britain was replaced. The Amesbury Archer, a man of about thirty-five to forty-five buried near Amesbury around 2300 BC, carried the oldest gold yet found in England and had grown up in alpine central Europe. Archaeologists reject the claim that he built the circle. The sarsens may already have been standing when he was born.

The builders of the early phases had farming ancestry that began in Anatolia and reached Britain about 4000 BC, mostly by way of Iberia. Aşıklı Höyük, a Cappadocian village occupied from about 8200 to 7400 BC, belongs to that much older Anatolian world and is not named as their home. At Durrington Walls a timber circle and houses are read as a place of the living, and animal bone has been taken to suggest gatherings of as many as four thousand people at the solstices.

Medieval writers gave the stones to the wizard Merlin and to Aurelius Ambrosius, a king who wanted a memorial for nobles killed by the Saxons. Gildas had earlier described Ambrosius as a fifth-century Romano-British war leader, and the circle was already ancient by his time. Antiquaries from Inigo Jones onward argued for Romans and then for Druids. Excavation replaced both ideas with a phased Neolithic cemetery and a sarsen monument.

Cecil Chubb gave the circle to the nation in 1918. Arthur Uther Pendragon later campaigned against entry charges and against the solstice exclusion zone. One account says a human-rights ruling lifted that zone, and another says the court sided with the government and that a separate decision on public assembly ended the ban the next year. A road tunnel beside the monument was cancelled in 2024, and the consent for it was revoked in 2026.

## Photographs

- [Stonehenge, GB — Stefan Kühn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Stonehenge_Total.jpg)
- [pronunciation recording — Jeuwre](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/De-Stonehenge.ogg)
- [Stonehenge - taken during a road trip to southern England and Wales in 2026 by Thomas Fuhrmann, SnowmanStudios - see more pictures on www.snowmanstudios.de — Thomas Fuhrmann](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Stonehenge_in_2026_v01.jpg)
- [Stonehenge - taken during a road trip to southern England and Wales in 2026 by Thomas Fuhrmann, SnowmanStudios - see more pictures on www.snowmanstudios.de — Thomas Fuhrmann](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Stonehenge_in_2026_v02.jpg)
- [Stonehenge - taken during a road trip to southern England and Wales in 2026 by Thomas Fuhrmann, SnowmanStudios - see more pictures on www.snowmanstudios.de — Thomas Fuhrmann](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Stonehenge_in_2026_v03.jpg)
- [Stonehenge — garethwiscombe](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Stonehenge2007_07_30.jpg)
- [Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England This is a photo of listed building number 1010140. — Diego Delso](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Stonehenge%2C_Condado_de_Wiltshire%2C_Inglaterra%2C_2014-08-12%2C_DD_02.JPG)
- [Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England This is a photo of listed building number 1010140. — Diego Delso](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Stonehenge%2C_Condado_de_Wiltshire%2C_Inglaterra%2C_2014-08-12%2C_DD_08.JPG)
- [Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England This is a photo of listed building number 1010140. — Diego Delso](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Stonehenge%2C_Condado_de_Wiltshire%2C_Inglaterra%2C_2014-08-12%2C_DD_09.JPG)
- [Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England This is a photo of listed building number 1010140. — Diego Delso](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Stonehenge%2C_Condado_de_Wiltshire%2C_Inglaterra%2C_2014-08-12%2C_DD_10.JPG)

## Sources

- [Stonehenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge) — Wikipedia
- [Amesbury Archer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amesbury_Archer) — Wikipedia
- [Arthur Uther Pendragon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Uther_Pendragon) — Wikipedia
- [Aubrey Burl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Burl) — Wikipedia
- [Aurelius Ambrosius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelius_Ambrosius) — Wikipedia
- [Aşıklı Höyük](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C5%9F%C4%B1kl%C4%B1_H%C3%B6y%C3%BCk) — Wikipedia
- [Barry Cunliffe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Cunliffe) — Wikipedia
- [Bernard Cornwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Cornwell) — Wikipedia
- [Brian John](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_John) — Wikipedia
- [History of Stonehenge](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/history-and-stories/history/) — English Heritage
- [Research on Stonehenge](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/history-and-stories/history/research/) — English Heritage
- [The Stones of Stonehenge](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/things-to-do/stone-circle/stones-of-stonehenge/) — English Heritage
- [Stonehenge](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/) — English Heritage
- [Prices and Opening Times for Stonehenge](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/prices-and-opening-times) — English Heritage
- [Group admission prices and site opening times 2026/27](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/globalassets/group-admission-prices--site-opening-times-26-27.pdf) — English Heritage
- [Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/373/) — UNESCO World Heritage Centre
- [Searching for the origin of the Stonehenge Altar Stone](https://www.lyellcollection.org/doi/full/10.1144/jgs2026-090) — Journal of the Geological Society
- [Stonehenge Total.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stonehenge_Total.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [De-Stonehenge.ogg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:De-Stonehenge.ogg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Stonehenge in 2026 v01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stonehenge_in_2026_v01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Stonehenge in 2026 v02.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stonehenge_in_2026_v02.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Stonehenge in 2026 v03.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stonehenge_in_2026_v03.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Stonehenge2007 07 30.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stonehenge2007_07_30.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Stonehenge, Condado de Wiltshire, Inglaterra, 2014-08-12, DD 02.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stonehenge,_Condado_de_Wiltshire,_Inglaterra,_2014-08-12,_DD_02.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Stonehenge, Condado de Wiltshire, Inglaterra, 2014-08-12, DD 08.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stonehenge,_Condado_de_Wiltshire,_Inglaterra,_2014-08-12,_DD_08.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Stonehenge, Condado de Wiltshire, Inglaterra, 2014-08-12, DD 09.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stonehenge,_Condado_de_Wiltshire,_Inglaterra,_2014-08-12,_DD_09.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Stonehenge, Condado de Wiltshire, Inglaterra, 2014-08-12, DD 10.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stonehenge,_Condado_de_Wiltshire,_Inglaterra,_2014-08-12,_DD_10.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, about two miles west of Amesbury. It is a ruined circle of enormous stones set inside a circular bank and ditch, in the densest complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England. An outer ring of sarsen uprights, each about thirteen feet high and about seven feet wide, once carried lintels locked on with mortise and tenon joints, a form of jointing not known on other monuments of the same age. Inside that ring is a circle of smaller bluestones, and inside those stand five free-standing trilithons, each a pair of larger sarsens capped by one lintel. The horseshoe of trilithons opens toward the northeast. The axis of the great trilithon, the horseshoe, the Heel Stone, and the embanked Avenue lines up with sunset at the winter solstice and sunrise at the summer solstice. Together with Avebury, the monument is the heart of a World Heritage property inscribed in 1986, with a small change to the boundary in 2008. The property records about two thousand years of ceremonial and funerary building, from about 3700 BC to about 1600 BC, across two areas of chalk downland.

The place was already marked long before the ditch was cut. Four or five pits, three of which held large pine posts, date from the Mesolithic, between about 8500 and 7000 BC, and one account places pine posts about two and a half feet across at about 8000 BC under the ground later used as a car park. It is not known how those posts relate to the later monument. At that time much of southern England was wooded, while the chalk around the future circle may already have been unusually open grassland, which may explain why an early Neolithic complex grew here. Around 3500 BC that complex included the causewayed enclosure at Robin Hood’s Ball, the Greater Cursus and the Lesser Cursus, and several long barrows. The Greater Cursus is a huge rectangular earthwork; one account gives its length as about 1.7 miles, and another gives the Stonehenge Cursus, like the Avenue, as about three kilometres. Those earlier monuments probably drew the later builders to this spot. A causewayed enclosure found in 2017 at Larkhill, north of the circle, belongs to the same early Neolithic family of segmented ditches.

The first major work on the site of the circle itself was a circular ditch with an inner and an outer bank. One account dates that earthwork to about 3100 BC. Another dates it to about 3000 BC and calls it an early form of henge, about 100 metres across, with two entrances. The longer survey describes an enclosure of Late Cretaceous Seaford chalk about 360 feet, or 110 metres, across, with a large entrance to the northeast and a smaller one to the south, standing in open grassland on a slight slope. The ditch was dug in sections, like the ditches of the older causewayed enclosures, and the chalk was piled into the bank. Deer and ox bones laid in the ditch bottom were already old when they were buried, older than the antler picks used to dig, so the people who placed them had kept them for some time. Worked flints went in with the bones. After that the ditch began to silt up on its own. Just inside the bank is a ring of 56 pits, each about a metre across, called the Aubrey holes after John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquary who recorded them. For many years the usual view was that the holes held timber posts. There is also an argument that some of them held stones, and a recent excavation has been read as evidence that they once held a bluestone circle, which would put the first stone setting some five centuries earlier than the famous sarsen circle. The Heel Stone and the low mound called the North Barrow may also belong to an early stage, though that is not certain.

The enclosure became a cemetery. Cremations were placed in and around the Aubrey holes and in the ditch. About 64 cremations have been found, and perhaps as many as 150 people were buried here, which would make it the largest late Neolithic cemetery in the British Isles. In 2013 a team led by Mike Parker Pearson examined more than 50,000 fragments of cremated bone from 63 individuals. William Hawley had dug those remains out of the Aubrey holes in 1920, judged them unimportant, and in 1935 buried them together in Aubrey Hole 7. The dead were almost equally men and women, and included children. The chalk under the graves had been crushed by a heavy weight, which the team read as a sign that the first bluestones from Wales had stood as grave markers. Radiocarbon dates from the bones put burials at about 3000 BC, and a separate study of the reburied remains places them between about 3000 and 2800 BC, more than fifty people of both sexes and various ages. A 2018 study of strontium in the bone found that many of the people buried around the time of construction had probably come from near the bluestone source in Wales and had not lived long in the Stonehenge area before death. Another reading of the same kind of evidence says that not everyone had lived locally in the last ten years of life, so some families may have carried their cremated dead to the circle from a distance.

Between about 2900 and 2600 BC the builders added timber. Postholes of the early third millennium are smaller than the Aubrey holes, about sixteen inches across, and less regular. Timbers stood at the northeast entrance, and a line of posts ran in from the southern entrance. The bank was deliberately lowered, and the ditch kept silting. At least twenty-five Aubrey holes later received cremations in the two centuries after the enclosure was made, and about thirty more cremations were set in the ditch and elsewhere, mostly on the eastern side. Whatever the holes were first for, they became graves. The enclosure is read as the earliest known cremation cemetery in the British Isles. Grooved Ware pottery found with these features dates them to the late Neolithic. Unburnt human bone also occurs in the ditch fill.

Around 2600 BC the builders turned from timber to stone. They dug two concentric settings of sockets, the Q and R holes, in the centre. The sockets are only partly known and are sometimes drawn as crescents, though they may be the remains of a double ring. They could have held up to eighty standing stones, of which only forty-three can be traced today. The smaller stones are the bluestones, some of them dolerite, and also tuff, rhyolite, or sandstone. It is generally accepted that they were brought from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, about 140 to 150 miles, or about 225 to 240 kilometres, away. A megalithic quarry at Craig Rhos-y-felin, near Crymych, identified in 2011, is the most probable source of some of the rhyolite. A 2019 study of the Welsh quarries found evidence of megalithic quarrying, which indicates that people extracted the stone rather than collecting blocks dropped by ice.

Brian John, a Welsh geographer who studied the Ice Age in Wales and wrote The Stonehenge Bluestones, has put the contrary case. A 2011 note of his work asked whether glacial transport of the bluestones was now confirmed, and argued that the Irish Sea Glacier carried them much nearer the site as erratics. Aubrey Burl, the archaeologist of stone circles who died on 8 April 2020, likewise questioned what he saw as an over-romantic picture of bluestones hauled by hand from Preseli to the plain, and thought glaciers had left the stones nearby for the builders to use. He was cautious about the stronger claims of archaeoastronomy, and he treated stone circles as places of ritual connected with death, fertility, and ancestors rather than as observatories staffed by astronomer-priests. Against the glacial reading, others point out that the chemical signature of the bluestones has been traced to the Preseli Hills and not elsewhere, and that no known glacier ran from those hills to Salisbury Plain or reached far enough south. There is no evidence of glacial deposition in southern central England. Burl’s side of the argument notes that glacier ice reached the Isles of Scilly at least once, and that ice which passed through Pembrokeshire did cross the coasts of Somerset and Devon. The quarry evidence published in 2019 is the stronger support for human carriage. The stones of about two tons could have been lifted and carried on rows of poles, or dragged on a sledge. It is not known whether they came straight from the quarries or were taken from a circle that already stood in Preseli, moved so as to join two sacred centres, to unite two regions, or to give migrants a claim to ancestral identity.

Between 2017 and 2021, Parker Pearson’s team argued that the bluestones had been dismantled from a circle at Waun Mawn in the Preseli Hills, of the same diameter as the first Stonehenge circle, about 110 metres, and also aimed at the midsummer solstice. One stonehole there had a pentagonal outline matching a bluestone at Stonehenge. Luminescence dating of the socket fills suggested the Welsh circle was raised around 3400 to 3200 BC and taken down about 300 to 400 years later, in step with the dates for the Wiltshire monument. Human activity at Waun Mawn ended at about the same time, which has been read as a migration. Further work in 2021 concluded that the Waun Mawn circle was never finished, and that no more than thirteen stones had been removed in antiquity. Empty sockets show that at least some unspotted dolerite left the site, and it is likely that the three known unspotted dolerites at Stonehenge came from there, with other stones added from other dismantled circles. A heritage account of the same arc stresses the shared stone type, the gunsight entrance toward midsummer sunrise, and the similar diameter, while leaving the scale of the removal more limited.

The great sarsen phase followed. Thirty enormous sarsen stones, silicified sandstone of Oligocene to Miocene age, were dressed and raised in a circle about 98 feet, or 30 metres, across, with thirty lintels. The uprights were joined to the lintels by mortise and tenon, and the lintels were joined to each other by tongue and groove, both of them woodworking methods transferred to stone. Each upright was about 13.5 feet high, about 7 feet wide, and about 3.5 feet deep, weighing about 26 tons, a little above the rough figure of about 25 tons given for the outer ring. The uprights widen slightly toward the top so that they look straight from the ground, and the lintels curve to keep the circle. The inner faces are smoother than the outer faces. The average gap between stones is about a metre. Seventy-five stones would have been needed for a complete outer circle and a trilithon horseshoe. An exceptionally dry summer in 2013 showed parched patches of grass that may mark missing sarsens, so the ring may have been finished after all. The lintels sit about sixteen feet above the ground. Inside them, five trilithons form a horseshoe about 45 feet across, open to the northeast. The uprights and lintels of that horseshoe weigh up to 50 tons, and another account says the largest stones weigh over 40 tonnes. The smallest pair of trilithons was about 20 feet tall, the next pair higher, and the great trilithon at the southwest about 24 or almost 25 feet. Only one upright of the great trilithon still stands. This phase is radiocarbon dated to between 2600 and 2400 BC. Another account places the setting up of the sarsens, in an outer circle and an inner horseshoe, with the bluestones in a double arc between them, at about 2500 BC.

A geochemical study published in 2020 matched a core drilled from a sarsen in 1958, and fifty of the fifty-two remaining sarsens, to West Woods on the edge of the Marlborough Downs. The distance is given as about 15 miles, or 25 kilometres, and also as about 16 miles, or 26 kilometres. Most of the sarsens are chemically alike. Later work has both defended that West Woods source for all but two of the standing sarsens and challenged it. A further reading finds sarsen material from at least three other places as well: Monkton Down and Totterdown Wood on the Marlborough Downs, Bramdean in Hampshire, and Stoney Wish in East Sussex. Not every piece of sarsen on the site need have come from a single local patch.

The Altar Stone is a different problem. It is the largest of the non-sarsen stones, a slab of greenish, well-sorted, fine- to very fine-grained calcite-cemented sandstone, now lying flat and partly buried beneath two fallen sarsens. It weighs about six tonnes and measures about 4.9 by 1 by 0.5 metres. It used to be grouped with the bluestones and traced to the Senni Beds, perhaps fifty miles east of Preseli in the Brecon Beacons, or more broadly to the Old Red Sandstone of west Wales. That Welsh source was ruled out by geochemistry and mineralogy, and the stone is now better left out of the bluestone group because it is unmetamorphosed sandstone and larger than the Welsh stones. Work announced in 2024, using the ages of zircon, apatite, and rutile grains in fragments that had come off the stone, found the best match in the Orcadian Basin of northeast Scotland, including the regions of Caithness, Orkney, and the Moray Firth. The distance was given as some 430 miles, or about 690 to 700 kilometres, and also as at least 450 miles, or 750 kilometres. Either figure implies a journey far longer than the haul from Wales and strong contacts between southern England and northern Scotland in the late Neolithic. A further study found that the stone did not come from the Old Red Sandstone of Mainland Orkney, even though Orkney has its own great Neolithic circles. A comparison of zircon ages has since pointed to the Lower to Middle Old Red Sandstone of mainland northeast Scotland, with Caithness or the country around Inverness and the Black Isle as the likeliest areas, but that comparison did not test the rest of the rock. A later multi-proxy study of the sediment, the minerals, and the chemistry, using the exposed surfaces and museum pieces that can confidently be tied to the Altar Stone, found that many Orcadian Basin outcrops could not have supplied it. No examined British outcrop of Old Red Sandstone yet shows the same combination of features. The exact source is therefore still unknown. There is no evidence whether the slab originally stood upright or lay flat, and no evidence for the date at which it joined the monument. Its purpose is unknown.

At about the time of the Q and R holes, the northeast entrance was widened so that it matched midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. That phase was left unfinished. The small stones were taken out and the Q and R holes were deliberately backfilled. The Heel Stone, a Tertiary sandstone outside the entrance, may have been raised then, or at any time in the third phase. It once had a partner that is no longer visible. Two or three portal stones stood just inside the entrance. Only the fallen Slaughter Stone remains, about sixteen feet long. Four Station Stones stood on the perimeter, two of them on mounds that are called barrows even though they hold no burials. The Avenue, a pair of banks and ditches, was added to link the circle with the River Avon, a distance of about two miles, or about three kilometres. One account places the Avenue about two or three centuries after the first stone setting, when the bluestones were rearranged into a circle and an inner oval. The oval was later changed into a horseshoe. The Y and Z holes, two rings of pits around the stone settings, are the last known construction. Antler in them has been radiocarbon dated to between 1800 and 1500 BC, and another account puts the holes at about 1600 BC. They may have been dug for a rearrangement of the stones that was never carried out. Their last use may have been in the Iron Age.

The bluestones were moved more than once. In one scheme they were re-erected inside the sarsen circle between about 2400 and 2280 BC, perhaps trimmed, and a few carry woodworking-style cuts that may mean they once had lintels. Between about 2280 and 1930 BC they were set in a circle between the sarsen rings and in an oval at the centre. Some archaeologists think a second group was brought from Wales at this time. The new setting was less well founded than the sarsen work and stones began to fall. The Altar Stone may have been moved into the oval and set upright then, though that remains uncertain. Soon afterwards, in a phase dated about 1930 to 1600 BC and contemporary with Seahenge in Norfolk, the northeastern part of the bluestone circle was removed to leave a horseshoe echoing the trilithons. Only minor changes followed.

Four of the sarsens carry carvings of axe-heads, hundreds of them, and a few daggers. One description counts a dagger and fourteen axe-heads on a single stone, with further axe-heads on the outer faces of three others. The axes resemble bronze axes of the Arreton Down type, of about 1750 to 1500 BC. Laser scanning in the early twenty-first century supports a late Bronze Age date. They may have been signs of power or status, or they may relate to the round barrows nearby. The carvings are difficult to date from the cutting alone.

The sarsen circle was raised at a moment of change. New Beaker pottery, the knowledge of metalworking, and the burial of individuals with grave goods were arriving from the Continent. The Bell Beaker people reached Britain from mainland Europe around 2500 BC, during the megalithic phase dated about 2600 to 2400 BC, and lived alongside the older population for about five hundred years, probably taking the henge into their own beliefs. The earliest British people associated with Beaker pottery resemble people from the Rhine. Their ancestors are traced to the Pontic–Caspian steppe, and they are thought to have spoken Indo-European languages. They carried about fifty percent ancestry from Western steppe herders. In time more than ninety percent of Britain’s Neolithic gene pool was replaced.

The people who built the first and second phases were a different population. Their ancestors were Neolithic farmers whose origins lay in Anatolia and who brought agriculture into Europe. DNA from Neolithic remains across Britain models them as about seventy-five percent Early European Farmer ancestry, from people who left the eastern Mediterranean and travelled west, and about twenty-five percent Western hunter-gatherer ancestry. Most of that farmer ancestry came by way of Iberia, reaching Britain about 4000 BC, with a smaller contribution from groups who followed the Danube. The farming techniques themselves are traced back to Anatolia. Aşıklı Höyük, a settlement mound about a kilometre south of Kızılkaya on the Melendiz brook, and about twenty-five kilometres southeast of Aksaray in central Cappadocia, was already occupied in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, from about 8200 to 7400 BC. It is one of the earliest aceramic Neolithic sites on the Anatolian plateau and an early example of settled village life. Obsidian from the local tuff was traded as far as Cyprus and Iraq. The dead, fewer than seventy people after more than four hundred rooms were excavated, were buried under house floors in varied postures. Women there often died between about twenty and twenty-five, and their spines show the strain of heavy loads, while some men lived into their mid-fifties. Nothing in the Wiltshire evidence names that mound as the home of the Stonehenge builders. It belongs to the much older Anatolian world from which European farming descended, thousands of years before the chalk ditch was cut. When the farmers reached Britain they largely replaced the hunter-gatherers who had lived on the island since the end of the last Ice Age, about 11,700 years ago, and they mixed with them very little. Even so, the paternal lines of the British Neolithic farmers were almost entirely of Western hunter-gatherer origin, as among other megalith-building populations of northwest Europe. Between about 3300 and 1500 BC, cereal growing lost favour in Britain. Many people lived by gathering hazelnuts and by keeping pigs and cattle. Most of the major building at Stonehenge falls in that pastoral interval, when large-scale agriculture is hard to see.

The Amesbury Archer is the clearest person from the Beaker years near the monument. His grave was found in May 2002 during excavations for housing at Amesbury, about three miles from the circle, or, in another statement of the same discovery, about three miles to the west, and a heritage account says the housing site lay south of Amesbury, three miles from the stones. He died around 2300 BC, between about 35 and 45 years old, and the calibrated dates of the grave run from about 2340 to 2300 BC. He is called an archer because of the arrowheads buried with him. The grave held more objects than any other early Bronze Age burial in Britain: five Beaker pots, three small copper knives, sixteen barbed flint arrowheads, flint-knapping and metalworking tools, cushion stones used as a portable anvil, boar tusks, a worn piece of iron pyrite for striking sparks, a black stone wrist-guard on his forearm, a red wrist-guard by his knees, a shale belt ring, and a pair of gold hair ornaments, the oldest gold objects known from England. Oxygen isotopes in his teeth suggest he grew up in an alpine region of central Europe, and another account places that childhood near the Alpine foothills of Germany. He had a jaw abscess, a missing left kneecap from an injury that left a bone infection, and skeletal traits including an unfused shoulder tip and a hidden form of spina bifida. A younger man buried nearby, sometimes called the Archer’s companion, shared a rare fusion of foot bones and seems to have been raised in a more local climate. He died in his early twenties. The graves lie a short distance from the Boscombe Bowmen, excavated the next year, who probably came from Wales or Brittany. The press called the Archer the King of Stonehenge and guessed that he helped to build the circle. Archaeologists have rejected that. The sarsens and trilithons may already have been standing when he was born, though a new bluestone circle may have been raised around the time of his birth. His mourners still thought him important enough to bury near the monument. Tim Darvill has suggested he may have been a pilgrim who came for healing powers attributed to the bluestones. His grave matters because it ties southern Britain to the Continent and to early copper and gold working. His skeleton is displayed at the Salisbury Museum. From about 2400 BC, other well-furnished Beaker graves appear nearby. A teenage boy buried about 1550 BC had been raised near the Mediterranean. In the early Bronze Age one of the greatest concentrations of round barrows in Britain was built around the circle, many of them on hilltops that can be seen from the stones, including King Barrow Ridge and the rich graves of the Normanton Down cemetery.

What the circle was for is still debated, because its builders left no writing. The alignment on the solstices is not in doubt, and a natural landform on the same line may have suggested the plan. Gerald Hawkins in the 1960s set out a case that the monument observed the sun and moon over a 56-year cycle. Animal bone from the wider landscape suggests gatherings at midwinter as well as midsummer. Geoffrey Wainwright and Timothy Darvill have argued that Stonehenge was a place of healing, accounting for the number of burials and for signs of injury in some graves, while allowing that it was also used to honour ancestors. Igneous bluestones ring when struck. Rocks with that property are common on the Carn Meini ridge, and the village of Maenclochog used local bluestones as church bells until the eighteenth century. That acoustic quality has been offered as one reason for hauling them so far, and as support for the healing idea. Mike Parker Pearson has instead read the landscape as a journey from life to death. At Durrington Walls, about two miles away, a timber circle and a second avenue were built at the same broad period, the timber circle aimed at midwinter sunrise and the avenue at midsummer sunset, leading from the Avon to the timber circle. Huge fires on the riverbank between the two avenues suggest the circles were used together, perhaps as a procession on the longest and shortest days. He treats Durrington Walls as a land of the living and the stone circle as a land of the dead, with the river as the passage between them. Analysis of animal teeth from Durrington Walls, which he has called the builders’ camp, suggests that in some period between 2600 and 2400 BC as many as four thousand people gathered for the midwinter and midsummer festivals. The animals were killed about nine or about fifteen months after a spring birth. Strontium in the teeth shows that some cattle were brought from as far as the Scottish Highlands. Houses of timber and chalk stood there, and the pottery and bones have been used to study feasting and movement. Both the healing reading and the funerary reading were already present in the twelfth century, when Geoffrey of Monmouth praised the curative power of the stones and also said the monument was a tomb. Parker Pearson has also suggested that the circle was a sign of peace and unity, built when Neolithic Britain was drawing together culturally. The design, the two kinds of stone, and the labour of moving them show a society able to plan and to organise work on a scale that still impresses. Durrington Walls is the largest known henge in Britain, about 500 metres across. The investment of time is itself evidence that the complexes mattered to the people who made them.

The legend that names Aurelius Ambrosius is a medieval story, not a building record. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the History of the Kings of Britain, wrote that the stones were healing stones which giants had brought from Africa to Ireland and raised on Mount Killaraus as the Giant’s Ring. Aurelius Ambrosius, in that tale a fifth-century king, wished to build a memorial to British nobles killed by the Saxons at Salisbury. Merlin told him to fetch the Giant’s Ring. The king sent Merlin and Uther Pendragon, the father of King Arthur in the same legend, with fifteen thousand men. They defeated an Irish army under Gillomanius but could not shift the stones until Merlin helped. The circle was rebuilt in Britain as it had stood in Ireland. Mount Killaraus may be the Hill of Uisneach. Parker Pearson has said the fiction may hold a grain of truth, because the bluestones probably came from Waun Mawn on the Irish Sea coast of Wales, a memory of stones brought from the west later dressed in Irish clothing. Another legend says the Saxon leader Hengist raised the circle in remorse after murdering British guests at a feast. The historical Ambrosius Aurelianus, called Aurelius Ambrosius in Geoffrey’s book, is a different sort of figure. Gildas, in the oldest surviving British account of the fifth century, names him as a war leader of the Romano-British who gathered the survivors after a Saxon assault and won a battle against the Anglo-Saxons, though not a decisive one. Gildas says his parents had worn the purple and were slain in the storm. Later legend made him the uncle of King Arthur and, in another guise, the prophet who became Merlin. None of that fifth-century warfare built the circle, which was already ancient. The story does show how medieval writers explained a monument whose real makers were forgotten. A fourteenth-century manuscript of Wace shows a giant helping Merlin raise the stones. Geoffrey’s explanation was widely accepted until the sixteenth century. The earliest surviving written references belong to the medieval period, and from the fourteenth century the drawings and descriptions multiply. Eleventh-century writers already knew the stanenges, or Stanheng, not far from Salisbury, as stones supported in the air. Ælfric’s tenth-century glossary gives henge-cliff the sense of a precipice or a stone. William Stukeley, in 1740, took the Saxon name to mean the hanging stones. Another derivation links the Old English words for stone and for hinge, because the lintels hinge on the uprights, or for a gallows.

After the last pits were dug, communal effort shifted. From the middle Bronze Age, people put more work into fields than into great ceremonial monuments. Field systems near Winterbourne Stoke belong to that change. Probably about 700 BC, a major hillfort later called Vespasian’s Camp was built about a mile and a quarter east of the circle, overlooking the Avon. The name is misleading. It is not a Roman fort. In the Roman period, from AD 43, the circle was visited often. Many Roman objects have been found there. Coins of the late fourth century, a large amount of Roman pottery, and bones of food animals buried in pits suggest a ritual or ceremonial use, not casual camping. An excavation in 2008, read with earlier digs, found a large pit or shaft dug in the Roman period, and the end of a square-cut trench that held a bluestone slab and a Roman coin, interpreted as a grave. In 1979 Richard Atkinson used stratigraphy to set aside the idea that the Roman army had tried to slight the monument as a centre of druid resistance. Stone chips he had once placed in fourth- or fifth-century layers he reassigned to the original dressing of the stones, or to quarrying in the Middle Bronze Age.

A small town at Amesbury is likely to have grown up around the sixth century AD at a crossing of the Avon. A decapitated man was buried inside the circle in the Saxon period. William Hawley found him near one of the Y holes, on the central axis. One account dates the excavation to 1923 and another to 1926. He was about 28 to 32 years old. Radiocarbon dates put the burial between 600 and 690 AD. The grave was too shallow, most of the ribs were broken as the body was forced in, and the head was set on top. He may have been a criminal. Mike Pitts reads the burial as a sacrificial or judicial killing and as evidence that the place still mattered in the early medieval period. Postholes near the grave suggested a gallows to him, which would tie the name of the monument to hanging. Aubrey Burl contends instead that the name refers to the shape of the trilithons, which look like a gibbet built to hang more than one person. From this time, sheep farming dominated the open downland.

Antiquaries then took the place over. The first known excavation, in the centre, was made in the 1620s by the Duke of Buckingham after a visit by King James I. The king asked the architect Inigo Jones to survey it. Jones, struck by the geometry, decided the builders were Roman, and his published restoration even added an extra central trilithon. John Aubrey surveyed the circle in the late seventeenth century, with a plan of 1666, and was the first to record the ring of pits later given his name. Comparing stone circles elsewhere in Britain, he concluded that native people had built them, not Romans or Danes. Because classical texts mentioned the Druids as the priests of prehistoric Britain, he gave the monument to the Druids. William Stukeley continued that work in the early eighteenth century, recorded the Avenue and the Cursus, though not always correctly, and dug many barrows. He too thought it a Druid temple, and he was so taken with the Druids that he first called disc barrows Druids’ barrows. The most accurate early measured plan was made by the Bath architect John Wood the Elder in 1740, before the southwest trilithon fell in 1797. It was raised again in 1958. In the early nineteenth century William Cunnington excavated about twenty-four barrows and then dug among the stones, finding charred wood, animal bones, pottery, and urns, and the socket of the Slaughter Stone. Richard Colt Hoare supported him and opened hundreds of barrows on the plain, leaving initialled metal tokens so later diggers would know the mounds had been opened. Cunnington’s finds are in the Wiltshire Museum. In 1877 Charles Darwin studied how worm action buried objects at the stones. In 1874 and 1877 William Flinders Petrie surveyed the circle and invented the numbering of the stones that is still used. Stone 22, in that numbering, fell in a storm on 31 December 1900.

Sir Edmund Antrobus, the owner, with the Society of Antiquaries, had the leaning great trilithon straightened in 1901. William Gowland directed the excavation at its base and, from the finds, dated the monument to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. The upright he straightened was moved about half a metre from its original position and set in concrete. It was the most careful dig the site had yet seen. Between 1919 and 1926 William Hawley, during restoration, excavated much of the southeastern half, including the bases of six stones and the outer ditch. He found a bottle of port that Cunnington had left in the Slaughter Stone socket, rediscovered the Aubrey holes, and located the Y and Z holes. From 1950 to 1964 Richard Atkinson, Stuart Piggott, and J. F. S. Stone excavated again, partly to answer questions Hawley had left and partly because stones were being re-erected. They found the carved axes and daggers. Atkinson proposed three main phases of building. No full report appeared at the time. The excavations were published in 1995 as a landscape monograph that rephased the monument. In 1958 three fallen sarsens were put back in concrete. In 1963 an upright of the outer circle that had fallen was re-erected, and three more stones were concreted. A heritage account says the last stones were consolidated in 1964. Later scholars pressed for the public to be shown how much of the circle is restored, and photographs of the work were published in 2004.

In 1966 and 1967, before a new car park, Faith and Lance Vatcher excavated to the northwest and found the Mesolithic postholes, dated between 7000 and 8000 BC, and a length of palisade ditch. In 1978 Atkinson and John Evans found the Stonehenge Archer in the outer ditch, a burial slightly later than the sarsen phase. In 1979 a cable trench cut by mistake beside the road revealed another stonehole next to the Heel Stone, a possible partner. In the early 1980s Julian Richards led the Stonehenge Environs Project, which dated the Lesser Cursus, Coneybury Henge, and smaller sites. In 1993 a parliamentary committee called the public presentation of the monument a national disgrace. The response was a two-year collation of all the digging, published in 1995.

The Stonehenge Riverside Project, led by Parker Pearson from 2003 to 2009, tested the idea that the circle was linked to Durrington Walls by the Avon. The diggers found an avenue from the Southern Circle at Durrington Walls to the river, and small houses. They also examined the Greater Cursus, a long barrow, the Cuckoo Stone, and the Stonehenge Avenue, including a small circle where the Avenue meets the river, probably once marked by four stones. In 2008 Richards and Pitts re-opened Aubrey Hole 7 and lifted the cremations Hawley had reburied. A licence required that the remains be reburied within two years and kept decently in the meantime. In the same year Darvill and Wainwright opened a small trench inside the circle for the SPACES project, dated some bluestone settings to about 2300 BC, which may not be the earliest stone erection, and found organic material of about 7000 BC, beside the evidence of the Roman shaft. In 2009 a shallow mound between the inner and outer stones, rising about sixteen inches and shown on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drawings, was recognised as an old feature rather than spoil from a modern dig. It may have been built into the monument at the start because it was an unusual piece of ground. Low banks near the Y and Z holes may be spoil from those pits, or, more speculatively, the remains of hedges that screened the interior.

From 2009 to 2013 analytical surveys of the major monuments in the World Heritage property, including a laser scan of the circle, found more Bronze Age carvings and showed working traces on virtually every stone. Parch marks in the hot summer of 2013 reopened the question of whether the sarsen ring was complete. Removal of the old roadbed in 2013 revealed parts of the Avenue ditches and a little of the Heel Stone ditch. Geophysical survey found round barrows, small henges, and two large pits in the Greater Cursus. In 2010 a henge-like monument was detected less than a kilometre away, at the site of a round barrow in the Cursus barrow group. In 2011 two huge pits in the Cursus were reported, aligned on midsummer sunrise and sunset as seen from the Heel Stone. Vince Gaffney suggested a direct link between ritual, astronomy, and activity in the Cursus. In December 2011 the rhyolite fragments in the debris, which do not match the standing stones, were traced to the outcrop of Craig Rhos-y-felin. In 2014 survey around Durrington reported adjacent stone and timber structures and burial mounds that may go back to 4000 BC, and as many as seventeen previously overlooked monuments. In 2020 the Hidden Landscapes Project announced a large circuit of shafts around Durrington Walls, which may be natural sinkholes or artificial pits. In February 2021, digging on the line of a proposed road tunnel found Bronze Age graves, late Neolithic pottery, a C-shaped enclosure, a shale object in one grave, burnt flint, and the burial of a baby. In January 2022 an electromagnetic survey reported thousands of prehistoric pits around the monument. Philippe De Smedt concluded that people had dug six of the nine large pits. One of the oldest, about ten thousand years old, held hunting tools. DNA of early Bronze Age people buried at Porton Down, Wilsford, and Amesbury Down shows close kinship among groups who had come from continental Europe and continued to marry among themselves, apart from the local Neolithic population.

The land around the stones has its own modern history. Henry VIII took Amesbury Abbey and its estates, and in 1540 granted them to the Earl of Hertford. They later passed to Lord Carleton and the Marquess of Queensberry. The Antrobus family of Cheshire bought the estate in 1824. On 21 September 1915 Sir Cosmo Gordon Antrobus sold Stonehenge at auction in Salisbury, lot 15, with about thirty acres of downland. Cecil Chubb, a local man, bought it for £6,600. He later said he bought it on a whim, believing a local man should own it, not as a present for his wife. In 1918 he gave it to the nation, with conditions. The duty of conservation then fell to the state. Since 1897 the army has trained on a vast tract of the plain, and barracks, ranges, hospitals, airfields, and light railways have marked the area. A First World War airfield stood about three hundred metres from the stones. Its hangars dominated the skyline until a public subscription, opened in 1927 and led by George V, raised enough to buy the western plot and demolish them. By October 1927 about £8,000 had been raised. The National Trust took the surrounding land to keep it and to return it to grass. The last large hangar came down in 1930. Further purchases continued, including a grant in 2022 for another 170 hectares. Visitors had been able to walk among the stones and even climb them until 1977, when the stones were roped off because of erosion. Visitors may no longer touch the stones, but they may walk around them at a short distance. Access among the stones is allowed at the summer and winter solstices and at the spring and autumn equinoxes, and by special booking at other times. About thirty thousand local residents are entitled to free admission under an agreement of 1921.

Through the twentieth century the circle became a place of worship again, this time for Neopagans and for New Age groups, especially Neo-Druids. Ronald Hutton later called it an uncomfortable irony that modern Druids arrived just as archaeologists were removing the ancient Druids from the story. The Ancient Order of Druids held a mass initiation there in August 1905, admitting 259 members, and the press mocked the white robes and false beards. The Stonehenge Free Festival, loosely organised by the Polytantric Circle, ran from 1972 to 1984, and midsummer crowds rose to about thirty thousand. In 1985 a High Court injunction closed the site to the festival. Police then blocked a convoy of New Age travellers in the clash known as the Battle of the Beanfield. For nearly fifteen years after 1985 no one was allowed into the stones for religious purposes at the solstices or equinoxes. An exclusion zone of about four miles was set up each summer.

Arthur Uther Pendragon, born John Timothy Rothwell on 5 April 1954, was the most visible campaigner in that dispute. He served in the Royal Hampshire Regiment, later took the name of King Arthur by deed poll after reading a book on the legend, and formed the Loyal Arthurian Warband. He was battle chieftain of the Council of British Druid Orders. Angered that the heritage body charged for entry and spent the money on restoration, he picketed the site daily between 1990 and 1991. With that council he campaigned for open access at the solstices, and he was arrested repeatedly. On 19 October 1998 his case reached the European Court of Human Rights, with counsel from a civil liberties organisation. He argued that the exclusion zone broke his freedom of thought, religion, expression, and assembly. One account says a ruling he and other campaigners obtained lifted the restrictions, and that the ruling recognised a right of genuine religions to worship at the circle. His own course of the case is told differently: the court decided for the government, and the exclusion zone was lifted the following year after a separate decision in the House of Lords that the public have a right of assembly on a public highway. Open access at the solstice was in place in 2000. That summer about seven thousand people came, and in 2001 about ten thousand. In 1998 a party of about one hundred, including astronomers, archaeologists, Druids, local people, pagans, and travellers, had been allowed in while the arrangements were discussed. In June 2008 Pendragon camped on a byway for ten months, demanding free access, the removal of the fences, and the closure or diversion of the two nearby main roads. He gathered about eight thousand signatures. A county court ordered him to leave in April 2009. He left in May after plans were announced to put a section of road in a tunnel and to build a visitor centre about a mile and a half away. In August 2011 he asked the High Court to order the immediate reburial of cremated remains of more than forty people exhumed in 2008 and taken for study. The appeal was rejected.

The roads had pressed on the monument for decades. One passed within a few metres of the Heel Stone. Plans to move the visitor buildings and to close that road were argued from 1979 onward, cancelled more than once on cost, and at last carried out when the road was closed in June 2013 and a visitor centre, about a mile and a half to the west, opened in December 2013. A scheme for a longer tunnel that would have hidden much of the trunk road was supported by some as a way to restore the grassland setting and opposed by others who feared for buried remains and for the stability of the stones. Planning consent was given, overturned, and given again. A heritage account says the government cancelled the tunnel in July 2024 after a spending review. A later account says that in March 2026 the development consent was formally revoked, after a large sum had already been spent, on the ground that the scheme no longer matched transport policy, and that the revocation lifted the planning blight on the area. In March 2025 planning permission was granted for a learning centre and a classroom near the visitor buildings, due to open in the autumn of 2026.

The stones have also been chipped, painted, and sprayed. Until the seventeenth century stones were taken away for building. Nineteenth-century visitors cut souvenirs with chisels. The circle was fenced from 1978 after festival damage, and in 1984 it was sprayed with purple paint. In 2008 two men hammered a chip the size of a small coin from the Heel Stone. In June 2024 protesters sprayed coloured powder on the stones. The powder was removed and left no visible damage. Barry Cunliffe, professor of European archaeology at Oxford from 1972 to 2007, co-edited the 1997 volume Science and Stonehenge with Colin Renfrew, and his name also stands among the authors of the genetic study of the Beaker arrivals. In September 2008 he served briefly as interim chair of the state heritage body. Bernard Cornwell, an English author of historical novels, is named as the writer of a novel called Stonehenge. He is best known for a long series about a rifleman in the Napoleonic Wars and for a series of thirteen novels about the unification of England. Those books are fiction. They sit beside the medieval romances as a reminder that the circle has been retold for as long as it has been studied.

What remains is the ruin of a monument built in stages across the third and second millennia BC, altered by fall, by restoration, and by the careful putting back of stones in the twentieth century. The earthwork Avenue still leads toward the river. The barrow cemeteries still crown the ridges. The questions that excavation has not closed are the ones the stones were raised to answer: who was entitled to be buried there, why the bluestones had to come from Wales, why a sandstone slab may have come from the far north of Britain, and what the gatherings at midwinter and midsummer were believed to do. The work of Aubrey, Stukeley, Gowland, Hawley, Atkinson, Parker Pearson, Darvill, and Wainwright has replaced the Roman and Druid attributions with a Neolithic cemetery, a sarsen monument of extraordinary engineering, and a landscape of avenues, timber circles, and barrows. It has not produced a single purpose. Healing, astronomy, ancestor rites, and a political union of distant communities all remain readings that the finds can support, and more than one of them may be true at once.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/stonehenge