49 Fun Facts About Stonehenge

Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in which English county?

Wiltshire's chalk downs around the stones hold one of the greatest clusters of Bronze Age burial mounds in Britain, many of them placed on ridges within sight of the circle.

What is the name for the large sandstone blocks that form Stonehenge's outer ring and trilithons?

Sarsens are silcrete, the broken remains of a hard sandstone crust that once capped much of southern England; boulders of it still lie scattered over the Marlborough Downs.

What joinery technique, borrowed from woodworking, holds Stonehenge's lintels onto the uprights?

Mortise and tenon joints pin each lintel to its uprights, and tongue-and-groove joints lock the lintels end to end; no other prehistoric monument is known to be jointed like this.

What is a trilithon?

Two uprights topped by a single lintel; Stonehenge had five, set in a horseshoe, and three stand complete today, one only because it was put back up in 1958 after falling in 1797.

Stonehenge is aligned to the sunrise on which day of the year?

The summer solstice sunrise lines up with the main axis, but the same line run backwards marks the midwinter sunset, which many archaeologists now think mattered more to the builders.

Stonehenge's great stone circle went up within about a century of which other ancient monument?

The Great Pyramid and the great stone circle both date from about 4,500 years ago; by the time the Parthenon went up, Stonehenge was already some two thousand years old.

Volunteers hauling a bluestone from Wales to Stonehenge to mark the millennium lost it where?

On the seabed: the stone was slung between two replica ancient boats and being rowed off the Welsh coast when it slipped loose and sank, and the modern trek never reached Stonehenge.

Which organisation looks after the stone circle at Stonehenge and runs its visitor centre?

English Heritage runs the circle and its visitor centre, but the National Trust owns more than 800 hectares of the downland around it, so the monument and its setting have different keepers.

Stonehenge's bluestones were hauled some 150 miles from which upland in the far west of Wales?

The Preseli Hills match: geologists have tied individual bluestones to particular crags there, and excavators at two of those outcrops report traces of Neolithic quarrying, though some geologists read them as natural.

Which Thomas Hardy heroine, on the run after a killing, is arrested at dawn while asleep on a slab at Stonehenge?

Tess Durbeyfield, of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, lies down on a fallen stone; when the police close in at sunrise, Angel Clare begs them in a whisper to let her finish her sleep.

Research published in 2024 traced Stonehenge's Altar Stone to which region, more than 400 miles away?

North-east Scotland: a Curtin University team matched mineral grains in the slab to the Orcadian Basin, overturning the long-held belief that it had come from Wales with the smaller bluestones.

What keepsake, sent back from Florida, let scientists trace Stonehenge's giant stones to their source?

A drilled core, taken out during 1958 repairs and kept for 60 years by a worker who later moved to Florida, matched the chemistry of boulders at West Woods near Marlborough, about 15 miles north.

What did parched grass reveal at Stonehenge in 2013?

Stone sockets, it seems: parched patches beyond the reach of the hosepipe mark where missing uprights may have stood, adding weight to the idea that the circle was once complete; a steward spotted them.

What did excavators find buried in many of Stonehenge's Aubrey holes?

Cremated bones lay in many of the pits, burials that make the first Stonehenge, begun centuries before the great stones arrived, one of the largest cemeteries of its time in Britain.

Seen from the centre of Stonehenge, the sun rises close to which outlying boulder on the monument's most famous morning?

Heel Stone: a huge unshaped boulder standing apart from the circle; a stone hole found beside it when a cable trench was dug may have held a partner, and if so the pair would have framed the sunrise.

In Stonehenge folklore, who hurled one of the great stones at a friar who had answered back?

The Devil, the tale says, bought the stones from an old woman in Ireland and boasted that nobody would ever know how they reached the plain; a passing friar answered back and had one thrown at him.

Which 12th-century writer claimed Merlin brought the stones from Ireland?

Geoffrey of Monmouth has Merlin explain that giants once carried the stones from Africa to Ireland, where the sick were bathed in water poured over them to be cured.

In medieval legend, who led 15,000 men to Ireland with Merlin to seize Stonehenge's stones?

Uther Pendragon beat the Irish king in battle, but his men could not shift a single stone with their ropes and ladders until Merlin took them down with devices of his own.

Which 17th-century architect believed Stonehenge had been built by the Romans?

Inigo Jones, asked by James I in 1620 to explain the stones, thought the ancient Britons far too savage for such elegant proportions and declared the monument a Roman temple.

Which naturalist dug beside Stonehenge's fallen stones to measure how fast objects sink into soil, for a book about worms?

Charles Darwin dug beside three fallen stones and found that worm castings had banked turf around them and buried one base ten inches deep; the results went into his 1881 book on earthworms.

Who bought Stonehenge at auction in 1915 and later gave it to the nation?

Cecil Chubb, a local barrister, paid 6,600 pounds on what he called a whim, though one story has his wife sending him to the sale for curtains; he was made a baronet the year after his gift.

Under a 1921 deal that moved a footpath, who still gets into Stonehenge free?

People living nearby gave up a right of way that ran beside the stones, and in return the surrounding parishes were promised free admission; about 30,000 residents still qualify.

William Stukeley named the Cursus, a long banked enclosure beside Stonehenge, after what he thought Romans had used it for?

Chariot racing was his guess, and cursus is Latin for racecourse; in fact the enclosure, nearly two miles long, is several centuries older than Stonehenge itself and nobody knows what it was for.

What befell Stonehenge's heir before its 1915 auction?

Killed in the war: Lieutenant Edmund Antrobus fell in Belgium in October 1914, and within a year the estate his family had held since the 1820s was split into lots and sold.

One theory holds that Stonehenge's lasting stone was for the dead; which material marked the matching monument for the living?

Timber rots while stone endures: Mike Parker Pearson reads the wooden circles at Durrington Walls, two miles away, as the domain of the living and the stone circle as a home for the ancestors.

The builders of Stonehenge feasted at nearby Durrington Walls mostly on the meat of which animal?

Pigs supplied most of the bones, and many were killed at about nine months old; born in spring, they point to great feasts held at midwinter.

Which spoof rock band's grand Stonehenge stage prop arrives far too small in a 1984 mock documentary?

Spinal Tap order a Stonehenge megalith for a lavish new stage show, but a slip over the measurements delivers it in miniature and makes the band a laughing stock.

What images did Bronze Age visitors carve on Stonehenge's stone 53, centuries after it went up?

A dagger and axeheads: four of the stones carry such carvings, mostly axeheads, some of them spotted only when the stones were laser-scanned, and they may have been cut as symbols of power.

Tooth enamel shows the 'Amesbury Archer', buried near Stonehenge around 2300 BC, grew up near which mountains?

The Alps: the chemistry of his teeth places his childhood in Switzerland, Austria or Germany; his was the richest grave of its age found in Britain, and the press crowned him King of Stonehenge.

Tools in the Amesbury Archer's grave near Stonehenge suggest he practised which craft, rare in his day?

Metalworking: a small stone anvil lay beside him, and being among the first people in Britain who could work gold may explain why so many fine things were buried with him.

Which henge, listed with Stonehenge, holds Britain's largest stone circle?

Avebury is so large that part of a village sits inside it; many of its stones were toppled and buried in the Middle Ages, until marmalade heir Alexander Keiller stood them up again in the 1930s.

Woodhenge, two miles from Stonehenge, was identified in the 1920s by what means?

An aerial photograph by pilot Gilbert Insall showed rings of dark spots in a wheat field; digging proved them to be post holes, on a site that had long been taken for a burial mound.

Victorian tourists at Stonehenge often used which tools to take home a souvenir?

A hammer and chisel let tourists chip off a fragment to take home; the habit was stamped out around 1900, when the landowner decided the monument needed protecting and fenced it in.

Several of Stonehenge's fallen or leaning stones were set upright again in the 20th century, with their bases bedded in what?

Concrete holds many of them: leaning stones were straightened and fallen ones put back up in campaigns from 1901 to the 1960s, so the monument visitors see is partly a modern restoration.

Which ancient group did the 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey wrongly credit with building Stonehenge?

The Druids: John Aubrey filed Stonehenge among his 'Templa Druidum', druid temples, and William Stukeley spread the idea, but the stones were already ancient before any Druid is recorded.

Which leftover of the First World War stood beside Stonehenge until a public appeal in 1927 paid to clear it away?

An airfield for training bomber crews was built about 300 metres from the stones in 1917; part of it later became a pig farm, until the appeal bought the land and handed it to the National Trust.

What name was given to the violent 1 June 1985 clash between police and travellers heading for Stonehenge?

The Battle of the Beanfield began when police stopped the travellers' convoy seven miles short of the stones and ended in hundreds of arrests; in 1991 a jury awarded 21 of them damages.

Under a scheme scrapped in 2024, where was the A303 to go past Stonehenge?

Into a tunnel about two miles long, which would have taken much of the road out of sight of the stones; the government cancelled the scheme in July 2024 after a spending review.

Carhenge, a replica of Stonehenge built from old cars, stands on the plains of which US state?

Nebraska: Jim Reinders, who had got to know Stonehenge while working in England, built it near Alliance in 1987 as a memorial to his father, with relatives raising the cars at a family reunion.

Long before Stonehenge, hunters at nearby Blick Mead feasted mostly on which wild animal?

Aurochs, the giant wild ancestors of cattle, supplied most of the cooked bones at the spring; hunters kept coming back for thousands of years, which its excavators think may help explain why Stonehenge was later built nearby.

The 'henge' in Stonehenge most likely comes from the same Old English root as which modern verb?

Hang: the oldest spelling, Stanenges, may have meant 'stone gallows', perhaps because its great stone frames recalled the gallows of the day; another reading is stones hanging in the air.

Stonehenge's builders dug its first ditch out of the chalk with picks made from what?

Deer antlers made tough picks, and some were left where the digging ended, which lets radiocarbon dating put the first ditch near 3000 BC and the last pits at about 1600 BC.

The Stonehenge Avenue's parallel banks and ditches run for nearly two miles to which river?

The Avon: at the riverbank end of the Avenue, excavators found a small henge that had ringed a vanished stone circle, suggesting the river was part of the ceremonial way to Stonehenge.

Stonehenge's fallen Slaughter Stone got its name from people who imagined it had been used for what?

Human sacrifice was only ever a fancy: the slab is one of the big stones that once stood erect in the gateway to the circle, and nothing suggests anyone died on it.

Roughly how much does each of the giant standing stones in Stonehenge's outer circle weigh?

About 25 tons is the average, and the builders hauled each one from the Marlborough Downs, some 15 to 20 miles to the north, a task that needed hundreds of people.

Mesolithic postholes dating to about 8000 BC were found beneath what part of the Stonehenge site?

The old tourist car park: work on it in the 1960s uncovered pits that had held great pine posts, raised by hunter-gatherers some 5,000 years before the stone circle.

What did William Hawley find under Stonehenge's Slaughter Stone in 1920, left there by a digger of 1801?

A bottle of port wine: William Cunnington had dug there in 1801, and Hawley supposed he left it out of consideration for future excavators; the cork had decayed and let nearly all of it out.

Researchers testing rocks in the part of Wales that supplied Stonehenge's bluestones found that many do what when struck?

Ring like bells: thousands of rocks on the Carn Menyn ridge were tested and a high share chimed or clanged, which the team suggested is why such stones were thought worth hauling so far.

After a stone fell in 1900, Stonehenge's owner fenced it and introduced what?

An entrance fee: the fall caused a public outcry, so Sir Edmund Antrobus fenced the monument, posted a policeman and began charging visitors, who until then had wandered among the stones at will.