It is smaller than you’d imagine. You can get closer to it than you think. And aside from the other people and the ropes and whatever curious, cosmic thing the location was doing to my camera lens, this isn’t a bad little atmospheric video:
Here we are:
Nearby are early Bronze Age burial mounds, knowns as Cursus barrows. The people buried in those mounds lived a few centuries after the stones were put in place. A huge earthwork enclosure was built about a millennia before the stones were raised. You can walk the Cursus enclosure, and if you figure out their purpose, you’ll be the first one. No one knows for sure why the early Neolithic people put in the effort.
If you know how to look for it, you can see the Avenue, which are parallel banks of ditches. It links Stonehenge to the river Avon. (One of the four Avons, as we learned in the previous post‘s video.) The Avenue was put into place around 2300 BC, around the time the bluestones were being rearranged. The part nearest the stones are still low earthworks, the rest are plowed flat. The section lines up nicely with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.
Click to embiggen this one in a new browser tab:
The ruins you and I know are several different stages of work, starting about 5,000 years ago, with the big circle. A few centuries passed before the sarsen stones were placed in the horseshoe and then a circle with the bluestones put between them. Some time later the bluestones were rearranged. Some have fallen since then, some have been removed. Then, during the middle of the 20th century some were reinstalled during a 45-year restoration project.
Cowslip flowers are all over the region:
