The Mysterious Stonehenge: A Detailed History of the Ancient Monument

Stonehenge is a circular site of standing stones and trilithons surrounded by an earthwork, situated about eight miles north of Salisbury, in Wiltshire, England. Long assumed to have been built by the Druids, Stonehenge in fact predates those people by many hundreds of years. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136) contains one of the earliest references to it, in which the legend is related of the stones being moved to that site from Ireland by the magic of the magician, Merlin. In fact, the enormous blue stones originated in Pembrokeshire.

John Aubrey (1626-97) was the first to mistakenly correlate the site with the Druids. In 1740 William Stukeley later elaborated upon this point.

Most of the site is circular in plan. There is an outer ditch with a bank behind it. Inside the bank is a ring of 56 pits known as the Aubrey holes, named for their discoverer. There are two additional rings of pits, moving inward, facing the main stones in the center. This center location is composed of two circles and two horseshoe shapes of uprights, the first and third capped with lintels. An Altar stone lay southwest of center, two Station stones stand just inside the bank on the northwest and southeast, and the Hele stone stands on the avenue outside the entrance, itself surrounded by a small circular ditch.

The Henge formation belongs to the late Neolithic period, a date that has been confirmed by pottery and other objects carbon-dated to 1848 BCE. Other elements of the site were probably started as early 2800 BCE. The outer horseshoes of the five Sarsen trilithons increase in height from 16 feet at the outside to 22 feet at the center. In 1953 carvings of Bronze Age weapons were discovered on three of the Sarsen stones.

In the 1960s Professor Gerald Hawkins conducted computer-aided research on the site and offered the speculation that the whole complex was, in fact, a giant astronomical observatory, though more recent findings have underscored inaccuracies in the supposed alignments of certain stones with astronomical events.

Two miles northeast of Stonehenge is Woodhenge, an older site that was originally constructed of large wooden elements in much the same manner as the later Stonehenge. Discovered through the use of aerial photography as recently as 1925, Woodhenge is a circular area of 200 feet in diameter, enclosed by an outer bank and inner ditch. It has six concentric rings of holes.

The reason for building Stonehenge, and the uses to which it was put, are a mystery. Modern "Druids" make use of the site for a Midsummer ceremony that is more media event than religious ritual. It has no connection with witchcraft.

Bibliography
Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord: Ancient Mysteries of Britain. 1986.
Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord: Atlas of Magical Britain. 1990.
Hawkins, Geral S. Stonehenge Decoded. 1966.