Stonehenge a Great Place to Visit
Stonehenge
Situated on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, Stonehenge is likely to be on the sightseeing list of any traveler planning a trip to the UK. Before planning your pilgrimage to the ancient monument, read this brief account of its history. Being familiar with the site’s past will intensify the moving effect it’s sure to have on you.
Stonehenge was actually built in four phases, the first of which began about 5,000 years ago (around 3100 B.C.). This first stage includes a ditch, bank and the Aubrey holes, which are round pits in the chalk. Each hole measures approximately one metre wide and one metre deep. Steep sides lead to flat bottoms. A circle of nearly 285 feet in diameter is formed by the Aubrey holes.
Archaeologists speculate that the holes were used as part of a religious ceremony—and not as graves, although some human remains have been discovered in some of the chalk filling. At the conclusion of this first stage, no further construction was done at Stonehenge for over 1,000 years.
In about 2150 B.C., Stonehenge’s second building phase began. It was during this stage that the impressive bluestones were brought to the site from the Preseli Mountains in southwest Wales.
Some of these stones weigh as much as four tons, and while it is impossible to know for certain how they were transported to Salisbury Plain, it is believed that they were dragged on rollers and sledges to the headwaters on Milford Haven where they would’ve been loaded onto rafts. After traveling by water along the south coast of Wales and up the Avon and Frome Rivers, the massive stones would have been dragged over land to Wiltshire. It is