"A sacred site" Stonehenge by Sjalen

Stonehenge Travel Guide: 133 reviews and 545 photos

Stonehenge is a place all visitors to England want to see - a World Heritage which is known throughout the world. I had of course wanted to go here for a long time before it finally happened, but at the same time I was afraid that it would all be the tourist trap people speak of, where you can get nowhere near the stones themselves and where tourists trample all over the path there is. I don't know if it was because we visited in early April, but I saw none of this. Sure, there were plenty of tourists there but nowhere near as many as I had expected. I am sure there will be many more in summer, but I still found the whole setup much more pleasant than bored guide book authors describe it. To me, it was just what I had come for and I was amazed by it all. The only thing that was annoying was of course the two roads on either side of the henge, but English Heritage claims that one of those will be tunnelled in future and a visitors centre will be built which explains more than the audio guides do today. If you do go to Stonehenge, make sure you don't make it a daytrip from London. Stonehenge is worth so much more of your time, not for the stones themselves only, but because this is an area that has been sacred for a long time and the surrounding fields are all full of other burial mounds and barrows.

Yes, Stonehenge certainly impressed me. The sheer size of the stones is amazing, especially when you consider that the main stones came from Wales and other parts, rather than Wiltshire itself. How were the stones moved all the way here then? The answer might be at the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum in Salisbury which has an exhibition on Stonehenge. This includes different theories on how the top stones where put on the other stones and how they were held in place. Quite an amazing engineering success whichever way they did it, considering that it was around 4500 years ago! Scattered around the henge are other "Sarsen" stones. Sarsen is an abbreviation of Saracen and even if it has nothing to do with crusades, the name simply means "foreign" as these stones ended up here after the ice age rather than being a part of the local Wiltshire geology.