Stonehenge Trivia
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49 free Stonehenge trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Stonehenge trivia for anyone who has stood on Salisbury Plain at dawn, watched a documentary about the bluestones, or just wondered how 25-ton stones got there four and a half thousand years ago. This quiz covers the monument itself: the sarsen circle and its mortise-and-tenon lintels, the trilithons, the Heel Stone, the Aubrey holes and the solstice alignments that draw crowds every June. It then follows the stones back to their sources, from the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire to the 2024 discovery that the Altar Stone came from north-east Scotland, and forward through the people who studied and fought over the site: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Merlin, William Stukeley and his Druids, Charles Darwin and his earthworms, Cecil Chubb's whim at a 1915 auction, the free festivals, the Battle of the Beanfield and the cancelled A303 tunnel. There is even room for Carhenge in Nebraska. Questions range from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. Try our ancient history, archaeology and England quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in which English county?
Wiltshire
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.
Q 02What is the name for the large sandstone blocks that form Stonehenge's outer ring and trilithons?
Sarsens
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.
Q 03What joinery technique, borrowed from woodworking, holds Stonehenge's lintels onto the uprights?
Mortise and tenon
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.
Q 04What is a trilithon?
Two uprights topped by a single lintel
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.
Q 05Stonehenge is aligned to the sunrise on which day of the year?
The summer solstice
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.
Q 06Stonehenge's great stone circle went up within about a century of which other ancient monument?
The Great Pyramid
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.
Q 07Volunteers hauling a bluestone from Wales to Stonehenge to mark the millennium lost it where?
On the seabed
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.
Q 08Which organisation looks after the stone circle at Stonehenge and runs its visitor centre?
English Heritage
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.
Q 09Stonehenge's bluestones were hauled some 150 miles from which upland in the far west of Wales?
The Preseli Hills
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.
Q 10Which Thomas Hardy heroine, on the run after a killing, is arrested at dawn while asleep on a slab at Stonehenge?
Tess Durbeyfield
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.
Q 11Research published in 2024 traced Stonehenge's Altar Stone to which region, more than 400 miles away?
North-east Scotland
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.
Q 12What keepsake, sent back from Florida, let scientists trace Stonehenge's giant stones to their source?
A drilled core
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.
Q 13What did parched grass reveal at Stonehenge in 2013?
Stone sockets
Q 21Who bought Stonehenge at auction in 1915 and later gave it to the nation?
Cecil Chubb
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.
Q 22Under a 1921 deal that moved a footpath, who still gets into Stonehenge free?
People living nearby
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.
Q 23William Stukeley named the Cursus, a long banked enclosure beside Stonehenge, after what he thought Romans had used it for?
Chariot racing
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.
Q 14What did excavators find buried in many of Stonehenge's Aubrey holes?
Cremated bones
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.
Q 15Seen from the centre of Stonehenge, the sun rises close to which outlying boulder on the monument's most famous morning?
Heel Stone
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.
Q 16In Stonehenge folklore, who hurled one of the great stones at a friar who had answered back?
The Devil
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.
Q 17Which 12th-century writer claimed Merlin brought the stones from Ireland?
Geoffrey of Monmouth
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.
Q 18In medieval legend, who led 15,000 men to Ireland with Merlin to seize Stonehenge's stones?
Uther Pendragon
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.
Q 19Which 17th-century architect believed Stonehenge had been built by the Romans?
Inigo Jones
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.
Q 20Which naturalist dug beside Stonehenge's fallen stones to measure how fast objects sink into soil, for a book about worms?
Charles Darwin
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.
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.
Q 24What befell Stonehenge's heir before its 1915 auction?
Killed in the war
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.
Q 25One theory holds that Stonehenge's lasting stone was for the dead; which material marked the matching monument for the living?
Timber
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.
Q 26The builders of Stonehenge feasted at nearby Durrington Walls mostly on the meat of which animal?
Pigs
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.
Q 27Which spoof rock band's grand Stonehenge stage prop arrives far too small in a 1984 mock documentary?
Spinal Tap
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.
Q 28What images did Bronze Age visitors carve on Stonehenge's stone 53, centuries after it went up?
A dagger and axeheads
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.
Q 29Tooth enamel shows the 'Amesbury Archer', buried near Stonehenge around 2300 BC, grew up near which mountains?
The Alps
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.
Q 30Tools in the Amesbury Archer's grave near Stonehenge suggest he practised which craft, rare in his day?
Metalworking
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.