Stonehenge is not a single design but the outcome of more than a millennium of building, rebuilding and reordering on one patch of Salisbury Plain.
The sequence of construction
The earliest phase, around 3000 BCE, was a circular earthwork bank and ditch enclosing a ring of pits, some holding cremated human remains, making the site one of the largest cremation cemeteries of its period in Britain. The famous stones came later. The bluestones, several tonnes each, were brought from the Preseli hills of west Wales some 200 kilometres away, an extraordinary feat whose method and motive are still debated. The great sarsens, the largest weighing over 20 tonnes, were dragged from about 25 kilometres north and raised around 2500 BCE into the trilithons and the outer circle with their curved, jointed lintels. Recent work has traced most of the sarsens to West Woods near Marlborough.
Alignment and purpose
The axis of the monument is aligned on the midsummer sunrise in one direction and the midwinter sunset in the other, and the winter alignment may have been the more important, tying the site to the turning of the year. Beyond that, its purpose is genuinely uncertain and probably plural: a temple, a cemetery, a place of healing, a solar calendar and a gathering place have all been argued, and the astronomical claims range from the sober to the extravagant. It stood within a wider ceremonial landscape linked to nearby Durrington Walls, where the builders seem to have feasted.
Druids, solstice and stewardship
Stonehenge has no demonstrable connection to the ancient Druids, who belong to a much later Iron Age; the association was invented by antiquarians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It has nonetheless become the principal gathering place for modern Druids, Pagans and solstice-goers, and access at the solstices is negotiated between those communities and the site's managers. It is a World Heritage site in the care of English Heritage.