Stonehenge

Stonehenge

I last visited Stonehenge when I was a boy, but having passed by a few times on the A303 in recent years, I have been nurturing a desire to see it again. Our son Will was staying for a few days and I persuaded him (quite easily) to join me.

You arrive at the Visitor Centre and car park. The Visitor Center consists of two elements: a very good museum, which sets the scene very well and the inevitable shop. It is actually quite an interesting building, best seen from the back.

We decided to eschew the shuttle bus in favour of walking the mile and a half to the site. This led us part the re-creation of a Stone Age village which was quite interesting.

We followed the road to the site and because of a large tour party to our left decided to circumnavigate the site anti clockwise.

Below was our first clear view, from the south west, more or less on the line of the Summer and Winter solstices. The tall stone in the centre is known as the Tenon and the slab resting on two pillars on the left is a Trilothon. To the right of the Tenon is the sarsen horseshoe and on the extreme right is a sarsen circle.

Off to the left (taken from close up) was the 40 ton Heel Stone.

There are two types of stone: bluestones and sarsens (the sarsens are bigger). When you see them up close the main question is inevitably "how on earth did they get the sarsens to near Salisbury?" The sarsen stones are thought to have come from the Marlborough Downs, 19 miles away, but nearest source of bluestones is in the Preseli Hills in west Wales, 150 miles away.

As we walked round it was interesting to see how different Stonehenge looks from different angles. Here is a different perspective, with the Tenon on the left.

We also noticed a number of isolated smaller stone standing outside the main circle. All these have names. The Heel Stone has already been mentioned but there were also the Slaughter Stone and the Station Stones. The Slaughter Stone sounds grim and prehistoric but is only an imaginative Victorian name for a stone which was once upright but is now more or less flat.

Here, finally, is an aerial view. The sarsen horseshoe is especially clear.

As we completed our circuit I spotted this milestone and realised that the route from the visitor centre to here was the original road.

We headed back across a large grassy area flanked by a number of Round Barrows.

These are scattered all around the edges of the site and were used for burials.

Distance: about three miles.

Rating: five stars. A real wonder.