Stonehenge

A 5,000-year-old stone calendar

Stonehenge is a ring of huge stones — older than the pyramids! Each stone weighs 25 tonnes — like 4 elephants. People dragged them 30 km without wheels. Most amazing: on the longest day of summer the Sun rises exactly over the main stone. Nobody knows for sure why Stonehenge was built — a calendar, a temple or a cemetery.

Stonehenge (3000–2000 BC) is a Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monument on Salisbury Plain in England. The outer ring has 30 sarsen stones (25 t, 4 m, from the Marlborough Downs 30 km away); the inner 'bluestones' (2–5 t) came from the Welsh mountains 250 km away — how is still debated. The axis aligns with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset — an astronomical calendar. More than 400 burial mounds surround it; DNA analysis shows the builders were farmers who came from Anatolia. The link to Druids is wrong (they lived 2,000 years later). A UNESCO site (1986); 10,000 people gather at the summer solstice.

Fun facts

• Stonehenge is 500 years older than the pyramids.
• The bluestones were brought 250 km — without wheels or horses!
• On the longest day of summer the Sun rises exactly over the Heel Stone.