Back to the Bronze Age calendar

700 years after it was started, Stonehenge was finally completed. It would probably have looked like the picture on the left. It was started in the Stone Age and finished in the Bronze Age. It was a massive piece of work and would have involved thousands of people over all those years. The other picture, further down, shows how Stonehenge looks now.

No one really knows what it was built for and, I suppose, it is possible that the people who started building it may have had a different reason than those who finished it such a long time later. We do know that bits were added at different times. We also know that there was a long avenue leading from the circle to the nearby river.

The circle could have been a type of calendar showing where the sun was at certain times of the year, maybe a place for meetings or burials, maybe a gift to some god or, as Owlbut thinks, just a pretty pattern. Owlbut may not be correct in this idea.

Certainly the avenue from the river points to the idea of it being a place of burial for important people. Their coffins would be transported down the river, carried along the avenue to the centre of the circle and then, maybe, their bodies cremated. Cremation still happens today and is when the dead person is burned in their coffin and the ashes scattered somewhere rather than a person being buried in the ground. Normally these days people can choose.

It is known that at about this time there would be gatherings each year of people who would meet, eat and then throw the ashes of those that had died during the year into rivers. Similar meetings could have taken place at Stonehenge.

People think that the idea of a stone circle was to signify the permanence of death, stone being very long lasting, very permanent. Some of the stones for Stonehenge came all the way from Wales.

Just recently (April 2019), scientists have revealed that the ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge travelled west across the Mediterranean before reaching Britain. These scientists compared the DNA of human remains found in England with those of people that were alive in Europe at this time. This is a history website and I wasn't very good at science so I'll just tell you that DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid and it is the genetic code that determines all the characteristics of a living thing and that means you and me too. The people originally came from Turkey, called Anatolia in those days, and moved west to Spain, known as Iberia then, before heading north to our little island. They reached here in about 4,000BC and were some of the people who introduced farming to England. I put this in here because those scientists also reckon these people may have entered Great Britain through Wales. Maybe they saw these big stones and thought they would make a nice monument, Who knows?

You might like to try and find out more about Stonehenge for yourself. You could also come up with your own ideas as to why it was built when you know more about it. Or even, like my grandson, make your own. Watch the video.



That was pretty easy but can you think how hard it was to put these incredibly heavy stones into place. Lots of people have ideas but we put together this little animation to show how they might have put up the standing stones and then put the big stone, called a lintel, across the top. They could have built up an earth bank around the stone and then …………..oh well see for yourself by clicking the word Stonehenge.

Back to 2200BC
Forward to 1700BC