Stonehenge

On the last day of 1900, one of the great upright stones at Stonehenge leaned, gave way, and went down, snapping the lintel it had carried for four thousand years. Nobody had touched it. The Antrobus family, who owned the field, responded the way landowners do: they put up a fence and started charging admission. Fifteen years later the heir to the estate was dead in the First World War and the whole thing went under the hammer at a theatre in Salisbury. A local barrister named Cecil Chubb bid £6,600 and won. In 1918 he handed the stones to the nation with a few conditions attached, among them that the public should always be let in at a fair price. That gift is still the legal basis for your ticket.

What Chubb actually bought is a question archaeologists are still working through. The short version: the first thing on this patch of Salisbury Plain was not stone at all but a circular ditch and bank, dug around 3000 BC. Just inside it sit fifty-six pits, named after John Aubrey, who spotted them in the seventeenth century. The pits held cremated human bone. Before it was a monument, Stonehenge was a cemetery, and the ashes of dozens of people are still in the ground. Chemical analysis of some of those remains suggests they had spent their lives far to the west, in Wales.

Wales keeps coming up. The smaller stones of the inner setting, the so-called bluestones, were quarried in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, roughly 140 miles away. Each weighs two to five tons. How a society without wheels or draught animals moved them that distance is still argued about. The big sarsens are more local: a 2020 study traced most of them to West Woods, about fifteen miles north. The heaviest run to around thirty tons. They went up around 2500 BC, and the builders joined them with woodworking techniques, carving tenons on the uprights and matching sockets in the lintels, as if stone were timber.

The whole arrangement sits on a line. At midsummer the sun rises over the Heel Stone; at midwinter it sets in exactly the opposite direction. The winter end may have mattered more. At Durrington Walls, the settlement nearby where the builders seem to have lived, the pig bones show that most of the animals were slaughtered in midwinter. People gathered, feasted, and then, perhaps, walked to the stones.

After that, a long silence. Romans dropped coins here. Medieval writers had Merlin flying the stones over from Ireland. In 1620 the Duke of Buckingham dug a hole in the middle and found nothing worth keeping. Inigo Jones decided the place was a Roman temple. Then William Stukeley, in the eighteenth century, tied it to the druids so persuasively that the idea has never gone away. The trouble is that druids belong to the Iron Age. The stones are roughly two thousand years older. Whoever the druids were, they inherited Stonehenge as a ruin, just as we did.

The twentieth century did a good deal of tidying up. A wobbling stone was set in concrete in 1901. There were further campaigns in 1919-20, 1958-59 and 1963-64, when fallen stones were raised and several were bedded in concrete. Part of the circle you see today was arranged by engineers within living memory. The guidebooks tend not to dwell on this.

Here is the detail worth repeating at dinner. Lying flat at the centre of the circle is a six-ton slab of sandstone called the Altar Stone. For a century it was assumed to be another Welsh import. In 2024 a mineral analysis matched it instead to the Orcadian Basin in north-east Scotland, more than 450 miles away. Someone in the Neolithic moved a six-ton stone from the far north of Britain to the south coast, almost certainly by sea, for reasons nobody can reconstruct.

In the 1970s a free festival grew up around the stones every June. Access inside the circle was stopped in 1978, and the festival itself was broken up by police in 1985. Today the only time you can walk among the stones without a special booking is at dawn on the solstices.

Stonehenge is owned by the state, run by English Heritage, and surrounded by land held by the National Trust. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986 and draws more than a million visitors a year. The long-running argument is about the A303, the trunk road that passes within sight of the stones. A plan to bury it in a tunnel spent years bouncing through the courts, drew warnings from UNESCO about damage to the wider landscape, and was finally cancelled in 2024. So the lorries still go by, and the stones still stand there, and the question of who exactly they belong to has never quite been settled.