What Exactly is Stonehenge?

For many people Stonehenge is a carefully arranged pile of very old stones in the West Country of England, on Salisbury Plain in the county of Wiltshire; for those that don’t know England see the map below, the water along the bottom is the English Channel, if you go diagonally down and left from London (the big orange bit on the right), about an inch above Bournemouth, you can see Salisbury. As well as being the world’s most famous pile of rocks, Stonehenge has been an ancient temple, burial grounds and a whole lot more in its long history of about 4000 years. All those years of pilgrims’, Druids, sight seers and visitors from around the world worshiping, praying and gathering at Stonehenge have saturated the sacred site with mystical vibes. In our modern world we are used to seeing big numbers all the time; $10000 spent here, £45000 owed there, but when you visit a place with 4000 years of history, thinking of all the things that have happened in the world during that time, and stand beneath these megaliths that have survived through it all, one can’t help but feel a high concentration of cosmic energy and be filled with it.

Stonehenge is built on a ley line vortex; vortices are points of power or energy on the Earth, and ley lines are the relationships between those points, like Earth’s acupuncture points are the vortices and the ley lines between them are meridians on the skin or surface of the Earth. There is an ancient avenue that runs for 22 miles between Stonehenge and the river Avon that follows a ley line and connects up with other sites such as castles and burial grounds, one can already see why so many ‘new age’ world travellers are attracted to the place; it’s literally buzzing with energy, both magical and historical. The heel stone is situated along this ley line and is the first stone to be erected; we know this because the first rays of Midsummer (summer solstice June 21st) always rise exactly over it and shine through the open arms of the horseshoe arrangement of Stonehenge, showing that the henge was constructed with a purpose and that the heel stone would have to have been placed there first to line everything else up.

The Druids are well renowned for worshipping at Stonehenge, but they are not the ones that built it; they came and commemorated the changing seasons at Stonehenge as if it were a temple, their beliefs may have, however, have stemmed form the original people that did actually build it. The ones that did build it were different groups of people over a very long time period; something along the lines of 2000 years by 25 generations, it was the late Neolithic (new stone-age) people that first dug the henge, that is the ditch surrounding the site plus 56 holes. The Aubrey Holes, named for John Aubrey, circle around the "Y" and "Z" holes. They were first noticed by Aubrey, and thus carry his name. They consist of small, barely visible, manmade cavities filled with rubble and probably held posts at one time that were used for astronomical calculations; they were later used to bury cremated human remains.

Stonehenge is probably the world’s earliest computer; it is thought to have been used as a type of calendar, certain key stones line up with the solstices and equinoxes and modern computer images have shown that the Aubrey Holes can be used to predict eclipses. The arrangement of two stones with another laid across the top is called a trilithon; they are seven feet tall and weigh about 50 tonnes, they were brought to the site from miles away, pushed, dragged and rolled by teams of men, after been transported around the coast and up rivers – The Bluestones of the inner circle were the first parts to be built from 60 rocks in about 2200 B.C. by the Beaker People, maybe to show off their superiority to the locals, they began the process of building a double ring of stones inside the henge, the original ditch dug hundreds of years earlier.

The bluestones themselves are thought to be from the Preseli Mountains in Wales, around 240 miles away. No one is really sure how or if they moved the stones that far, there has been speculation about glacial drift during this period which may have moved the stones closer to the site than the Preseli Mountains. In mythology Merlin, King Arthur’s magician, is said to have moved them using his powers. The rocks used to build Stonehenge are an important source of quarts, which contain such crystals as spotted dolerite; scatterings of quarts have been found at other stone circle sites around the British Isles and have always been associated with healing and rituals and being able to increase psychic experiences.

Even though it can be used to predict some astronomical phenomena and it lines up with first rays of the Summer Solstice, no one is really sure what it was originally used for before the Druids came along; archaeologists, scientists, and spiritualist come up with new ideas concerning its original purpose all the time; ranging from it being a multi-purpose ceremonial site, through to being a portal to open the world into a gateway to our origin, and, like most things seem to be about in our post-modern post-Freud world, a sculpture representing sex, birth and the female sexual organs – perhaps we’ll never know?