Summer solstice at Stonehenge
Dressed as Druids, Wiccans, hippies, punks or just as regular tourists, nearly 25,000 people gathered Sunday at Stonehenge on Britain’s Salisbury Plain, marking the summer solstice as people have done for thousands of years.
The sun rose at 4:52 a.m. on the longest day of the year, and for the lucky dozens who made it through the crowds to the interior of the neolithic stone circle, the rising sun could be seen in near perfect alignment with the Heel Stone, outside the famous ring.
It is this remarkable alignment, and another that aligns with sunset on the winter solstice, that has inspired such awe and interest in Stonehenge. It shows that whoever built it had a detailed understanding of the celestial path of the sun, but its ritual purpose or meaning has never been fully determined. It is deeply fixed in the British imagination, though, as a place of mystery and spirit, linked (though not necessarily by science) to the Iron Age Druid priestly caste and the foundational myth of King Arthur.
Some theories have it as primarily a ceremonial place to mark for the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Others see it as related to a nearby ritual feasting site, with burial mounds and a large building, long since rotted away. Much effort has gone into explaining how the stones got here from a quarry almost 400 kilometres away in Wales, and still it is not precisely clear whether they came by glacial movement, or by raft, or sled, or dragged on rollers, or even by an elaborate process of wobbling them along with ropes.
The welcoming of the solstice, one of the few occasions when visitors are allowed to walk among the stones, was a peaceful affair, with only nine arrests for drug offences, far fewer than last year.
One person wore an elaborate feather headdress, another wore a tiger print blazer, and another was dressed as a mime. One woman with a ring of white flowers in her hair pressed her cheek against the ancient rock. There were yoga classes and marriage vows and plenty of drums.
Stonehenge was built in stages between about 5000 and 3500 years ago, but there is archeological evidence a nearby spring was a site of pilgrimage since the end of the last ice age, almost 10,000 years ago.
It has become a major tourist draw worth millions to Britain, visited recently by U.S. President Barack Obama, and its upkeep has been a political headache since the land was donated to the state during the First World War.
Last year, the British government resurrected plans to build a highway tunnel through Stonehenge to conceal the road that currently passes close by.
Traffic on the famously congested highway has been an irritant to people who would prefer a more peaceful and historically authentic experience of this ancient landscape, on chalk downs southwest of London.