Stonehenge

Who has never heard about Stonehenge? I guess it is one of the most popular mysteries. So, what’s the point about this megalithic wonder? Why does this place cause controversy in the scientific community? 

Stonehenge is a megalithic monument on the Salisbury Plain in Southern England, composed mainly of thirty upright stones (sarsens, each over ten feet tall and weighing up to 45 tons), aligned in a circle, with thirty lintels (6 tons each) perched horizontally atop the sarsens in a continuous circle. There is also an inner circle composed of similar stones, also constructed in post-and-lintel fashion. You can say that there are a lot of great monuments all over the world, many of them are more interesting. What is special about Stonehenge? All those questions that have no exact answers. Who built it, and how?

Some have suggested that Stonehenge was built by Druids, but we don't really know much about the builders. The archaeology points to a construction date between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago, so it was built even before the first metal tools were used by humankind.




Regardless of who built the stone monument, the design and construction involved thousands of people. To drag huge stones from Marlborough Downs, 30 kilometres to the south of Stonehenge, would have been quite a feat. And how was it possible to erect those stones? It is an amazing feat of engineering, and there are many legends that reflect the inability to explain how the heavy stones could have ever been transported by primitive humans. Stonehenge is even mentioned within Arthurian legend, that names Merlin as the engineer.

One more interesting thing is that Stonehenge is angled such that on the equinoxes and the solstices, the sun rising over the horizon appears to be perfectly placed between gaps in the megaliths. This is doubtless not an accident, and probably contributed to the stories of its mysterious origins.