Stonehenge

Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, about two miles west of Amesbury. The monument, now in ruins, features an outer ring of upright sarsen stones—each roughly 13 feet tall, 7 feet wide, and 25 tons in weight—topped by horizontal lintels secured with mortise and tenon joints, a construction method not seen in other monuments from the same period. Inside this ring is a circle of smaller bluestones, and within those are free-standing trilithons: two thicker sarsen uprights linked by a single lintel. The entire structure is oriented toward the sunrise at the summer solstice and the sunset at the winter solstice. It sits within earthworks at the heart of England’s most concentrated grouping of Neolithic and Bronze Age sites, which includes hundreds of burial mounds.

Construction occurred over several phases, starting around 3100 BC and continuing until about 1600 BC. The large sarsen circle was erected between 2600 and 2400 BC. The earliest phase—a circular bank and ditch—dates to roughly 3100 BC. Radiocarbon dating indicates the bluestones were placed in their current positions between 2400 and 2200 BC, though they may have arrived at the site as early as 3000 BC. From its earliest days, Stonehenge may have served as a burial ground; human bone deposits appear from around 3000 BC, when the ditch and bank were first dug, and continued for at least 500 years.

The name “Stonehenge” likely comes from Old English: *stān* meaning “stone,” combined with either *hencg* (“hinge,” referring to the lintels pivoting on the uprights) or *hen(c)en* (“to hang,” “gallows,” or “instrument of torture”). The 10th-century glossary of Ælfric uses *henge-cliff* to mean “precipice” or stone, and 11th-century writers recorded *stanenges* or *Stanheng* as “stones supported in the air.” In 1740, William Stukeley noted that “pendulous rocks are now called henges in Yorkshire” and suggested the Saxon name meant “the hanging stones.” The “henge” part later gave its name to a class of monuments defined by archaeologists as circular earthworks with an internal ditch—a term carried over from antiquarian usage.

Stonehenge is one of the UK’s most famous landmarks and a British cultural icon. It has been a legally protected scheduled monument since the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882. The site and its surroundings became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986. The Crown Estate owns Stonehenge, English Heritage manages it, and the National Trust owns the surrounding land.