Stonehenge

Worshipped by everyone from pagans to ravers, the world’s most iconic prehistoric site is all things to all people: a 5,000-year-old place of mystery on which to project human ideals.

The stones are shrouded. A dense dawn fog lingers defiantly over Salisbury Plain, obscuring the prehistoric monument. We pick our way across its cursus — the ceremonial earthworks that rise to encircle Stonehenge’s arrangement of monoliths. At the outlying lone Heel Stone, I have the perfect sight line along the solstitial axis around which the stone circle is aligned, its familiar toothy tomb silhouette now cutting unmistakably through the haze some 70 metres away.

The legendary circle of trilithons forms a familiar figure. Of the UK’s hundreds of stone circles, these lintel-topped upright stones have become a universal symbol for Stone Age man. But they’re far from a dead icon. At their epicentre, the stones loom so very large, a startling collective presence watching and encircling, a joining of monolithic limbs. At look-butdon’t-touch distance, their thick coating of a hundred-plus lichen species renders them curiously alive: barnacled, creviced, prehistoric pachydermic creatures.

Their sheer weight bears down in both magnificent tonnage and crackling gravitas: what dedication, what shared ritual drove them into being?

Erected by a succession of Neolithlic generations spanning over a thousand years, this staggering, devotional feat of collective human action pulses powerfully across five millennia. Standing in their midst, time collapses,

replaced by the keenest, skin-prickling sense of being plugged deeply into the past. I’m shown Bronze Age dagger shapes carved into the stone, as well as the marks made by more recent visitors, including the 17th-century signature of Sir Christopher Wren — the letters so sharply defined they could’ve been carved yesterday. “You’d have thought he’d have known better,” laughs English Heritage’s Heather Sebire.

The sun streams triumphantly through the mist; a crow’s call rings through the stones’ amphitheatre.

I’ve surely stepped into a cathedral. A temple; a place of ceremony and burial is Stonehenge’s most-agreed-upon purpose, but its role is the speculation of centuries. It’s become a sypher for human memory, a canvas for human need — variously, a druid church, an alien landing site, a funereal monument constructed by Merlin and a curative pilgrimage spot. The smaller ‘bluestones’ (said to possess healing properties) were somehow rolled, floated (magicked?) from a Welsh spiritual site. And it was constructed, according to recent assertions by author Robin Heath, using exact, albeit wildly pre-emptive, Pythagorean geometry. “I don’t know about that,” smiles Heather. “But they certainly knew what they were doing.”