A monument built in layers
Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, in southern England. What you see today, a ring of huge stones with lintels on top, is the last stage of a story that lasted about 1,500 years, from roughly 3000 BCE to about 1600 BCE. Each phase added to, removed from or rearranged what earlier people had built.
So the question “who built Stonehenge?” has many answers. The people who dug the first ditch and those who placed the last stones were separated by dozens of generations, about as far apart as we are from the fall of the Roman Empire.
Around 3000 BCE: a ditch, a bank and the dead
The first monument had no big stones at all. It was a circular ditch and bank, dug around 3100-3000 BCE. Inside it ran a ring of pits known as the Aubrey Holes, named after John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquarian who noticed them.
Within and around these holes, and in the ditch, people buried the cremated remains of the dead. About 64 cremations have been found, and perhaps as many as 150 people were originally buried here, which makes Stonehenge the largest late Neolithic cemetery in the British Isles. Whatever else it became, Stonehenge started as a place for the dead.
Around 2500 BCE: the great stones go up
About five centuries later, the monument was transformed. Builders raised the large sarsen stones in two arrangements: an outer circle and, inside it, a horseshoe of trilithons, pairs of uprights capped by a lintel. Between them they set the smaller bluestones in a double arc. A typical sarsen weighs around 25 tonnes.
The stones came from very different distances. The sarsens most likely came from West Woods, near Marlborough, about 25 km to the north, as a 2020 study showed. The bluestones were brought from the Preseli Hills in Wales, more than 200 km to the west. And in 2024 a study in Nature traced the Altar Stone, the large slab now lying at the centre, to north-east Scotland, at least 700 km away. How such a stone travelled that far is still unknown.
Built to face the sun
The stone settings were laid out along the axis of the solstices. At midsummer the sun rises behind the Heel Stone, at the old entrance from the ceremonial Avenue, and its rays reach the centre of the monument. In the opposite direction, at midwinter, the sun originally set in the narrow gap between the two uprights of the tallest trilithon, at the head of the horseshoe.
This is where the purpose seems to change. A cemetery of the dead became a monument tied to the turning points of the year. Whether its builders worshipped the sun, used the stones to mark time or both, English Heritage itself calls a mystery. What the alignment shows is a plan, worked out before the stones were raised.
After 2500 BCE: rearranged for centuries
The great stones were not the end. About 200 or 300 years later, the bluestones in the centre were rearranged into a circle and an inner oval, and at the same time people built the Avenue, the ceremonial approach to the entrance. Radiocarbon dates suggest the bluestones reached their present positions between about 2400 and 2200 BCE, though some may have been on site since 3000 BCE. Smaller changes went on until around 1600 BCE.
Why keep changing it? No written source exists, so the answer has to come from the changes themselves. Each phase reused what was already there rather than starting again elsewhere, which suggests the place itself mattered more than any single design. Cemetery, solar monument, gathering place: Stonehenge seems to have been each of these in turn.
Not built by the Druids
One answer you can rule out: the Druids. The idea that Druid priests built Stonehenge became popular from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the monument is far older than the Druids known from Iron Age Britain, by thousands of years. It was built by Neolithic and early Bronze Age communities, the same farming societies that raised other prehistoric architecture across Britain and Europe.
Seen against the wider story of prehistoric monuments, Stonehenge is late. The carved pillars of Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey, are about 6,000 years older. What makes Stonehenge unusual is not its age but its long life, and the stubborn way people kept coming back to the same circle.
Where to see it
Stonehenge is managed by English Heritage and stands on Salisbury Plain, north of Salisbury in Wiltshire. A visitor centre on the site explains the phases before you reach the stones.
Sources
- English Heritage, “History of Stonehenge”, “Description of Stonehenge”, “Stonehenge phased plan” and “Summer solstice”.
- Nash, D. J. et al., “Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehenge”, Science Advances (2020); Bournemouth University research blog (2020).
- Clarke, A. J. I. et al., “A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge”, Nature (2024).
- English Heritage, Stonehenge audio guide transcript (on the Druid theory).
