Stonehenge

Construction spanned from about 3000 to 1520 BCE, with the iconic stone circle erected around 2500 BCE. Recent research revealed the Altar Stone's shocking Scottish origin.

Around 3000 BCE, people began creating a monument on Salisbury Plain. They dug a circular ditch and bank (a henge) and erected wooden posts or early stones in a ring of 56 holes. Around 2500 BCE, the transformation began. Massive sarsen stones from the Marlborough Downs were shaped and transported to the site, where they were raised into the iconic trilithon arrangement. The smaller bluestones came from the Preseli Hills of Wales, 150 miles away across difficult terrain. In 2024, research revealed that the central Altar Stone came not from Wales but from northeastern Scotland, 750 kilometers distant. Dr. Robert Ixer called this 'a genuinely shocking result.' The discovery suggests connections spanning the entire island and transport possibly by sea. The monument continued to evolve for another thousand years, with stones being moved and rearranged, meanings presumably shifting across generations. By around 1520 BCE, construction ceased. The monument entered a long silence broken only by folklore and antiquarian speculation.