Name: Stonehenge | 10 Places That Made England with Dan Snow
Uploaded: 2025-10-31T18:30:45.000Z
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If you ask people to list the most famous historic sites in England, there's a good chance they'll start with something pretty prehistoric.

Certainly one of the most recognizable, the most famous structures, not just in England, in the world.

Stonehenge has been standing like an eternal guardian, watching over English history for well over 4,000 years.

Traditionally, Stonehenge has been the stuff of folklore and legends, created by giants holding hands, the devil himself having a part in it.

But what does modern science and archaeology have tell us about who built this and why?

Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.

There's been a ritual site there for over 5,000 years.

One of the earliest phases is this earth bank and ditch dug with antler bones in the Neolithic period or late stone age, in 3100 BC.

After the earth, bank and ditches came the epic stones we still see today.

These monster uprights here, called Sams, weigh about 25 tons, which is, by the way, considerably more than the blocks used to build the pyramids in Giza.

They were dragged from around 20 miles away.

And really no one knows for sure exactly how they got them here, but

we can be certain it took a lot of manpower.

The people who created these monumental structures were reshaping their relationship with nature.

And with structures like this, they now have the ability to physically change the landscape around them, too.

As well as these gigantic sarsens, they have these slightly smaller stones here, which might look similar, but

they're from a very, very different quarry.

These so called bluestones, believe it or not, are from the Preseli Hills in South Wales, 250km away.

How they got here is one of the great mysteries.

These gigantic stones weren't just quarried and transported here and then erected.

They required a lot of work done for them, a lot of shaping, and

that all took place with stone hammers, of which hundreds have been found by archaeologists near this site.

This would originally have been right up there on top of that giant sarsen.

And you can see this feature here, it's known as a mortise.

that would slot neatly into the little tenum up there like a Lego brick.

You can see an example of it with this one here.

And all of that represented hundreds, if not thousands of hours of labor.

And these people had a lot to be getting on with.

They had to feed their families, provide shelter.

So it just shows how important this task was considered.

Neolithic and Bronze Age people put effort and soul into building and reshaping this colossal structure.

The sheer magnitude of the time and effort given to this project must have meant this space was incredibly important.

They would have put aside their need to farm or hunt, to focus on the construction.

And perhaps the very act of building itself was a spiritual process.

The creation of group spaces like Stonehenge, where artifacts show varied communities, using the site, could mean this time was a period of religious stability and social cohesion.

There's so much we don't know about Stonehenge, but

one thing we can be pretty certain about is it was built to be aligned to the solstice, the summer solstice.

The sun would rise just on the left hand side of the heel stone.

It would come through that gap and that early morning sun would flash on the altar stone, whilst for the winter solstice, the sunset would be just over there, directly opposite.

And this use at solstice could be our best clue of just how important Stonehenge was for our ancestors.

To find out more, I'm meeting Stonehenge curator Heather Sabir.

Well, it gives you a clue that these people were observing the movements of the sun, probably the moon as well, although it's much harder to track.

And they probably had people that we might have called astronomers who might have been observing the length of days.

They would have been able to watch the sun set through the giant trilithon that's only half there.

And the sun would have been so important to them because these people are farmers.

And so the coming of the midsummer and the sunrise, we think it's probably a huge time of celebration.

They probably knew it was like the turning of the year.

The days were going to get longer, it was hopefully going to get warmer, and

And there's evidence too, from the settlement at Durrington Walls, where we think the people who built Stonehenge were living, that they were feasting around the end of what we would call the end of the year in December.

Coming here to Stonehenge highlights how even though our prehistoric ancestors inhabited these spaces over 4,000 years ago, we still have so much in common with them.

I think we humans have always sought to come together, to gather, to mark occasions or the passing of time.

We create places to make those times even more special.

And Stonehenge is the ultimate example of that.

A place that's endured, a place that's now one of the most recognizable sites, not just in England, but