Stonehenge
The sarsen circle goes up, and bluestones are dragged 250 kilometres from Wales.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 300 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
Stonehenge develops over 1,500 years, but the great sarsen trilithons — some over 25 tonnes, jointed with mortise and tenon copied from carpentry — are raised around 2500 BCE. The smaller bluestones come from the Preseli hills in west Wales, and recent work identified the specific quarries and suggested some may have first stood in a Welsh circle before being moved. The monument is aligned on the solstice axis, and people were buried there for centuries.