Stonehenge: Neolithic builders, Merlin and the druid myth

Few monuments in the world have been questioned for as long as Stonehenge, the circle of stones that rises on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. For centuries travellers, antiquarians and scholars have asked who built it, how and why. The answers of modern archaeology are increasingly precise, but alongside them lives on a rich heritage of legends, from the wizard Merlin to the druids, which forms a full part of the monument's history.

A building site that lasted centuries

Stonehenge was not built all at once. The first phase, around 3000 BC, consisted of a circular ditch with a bank and a series of pits, now called the Aubrey Holes after the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey who noticed them. Some of them contained cremated remains, a sign that the site was also a cemetery.

The great sandstone blocks, the sarsens, were raised around 2500 BC, forming the outer circle with its lintels and the inner horseshoe of trilithons. The smaller stones, known as bluestones, come from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, more than two hundred kilometres away. Recent studies have indicated that the so-called Altar Stone even comes from north-east Scotland.

The sun of the solstices

The main axis of the monument is aligned on the point where the sun rises at the summer solstice and, in the opposite direction, on the sunset of the winter solstice. Many archaeologists believe that the winter solstice was of particular importance, as suggested by the remains of feasts with pigs slaughtered in winter at the nearby settlement of Durrington Walls.

This orientation does not make Stonehenge an observatory in the modern sense, but it reveals a deep attention to the cycles of the sky. For the farming communities of the Neolithic, the return of light after the shortest day probably had a value at once practical and sacred, linked to life, death and rebirth.

Merlin, the giants and the druids

In the twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his Historia regum Britanniae, told how the stones, called the Giants' Dance, had been brought from Ireland through Merlin's arts to honour the fallen Britons. It is a legend, but it is striking that it arose many centuries before the discovery that some stones really did come from far away, though from Wales rather than Ireland.

The link with the druids, by contrast, goes back to John Aubrey and above all to William Stukeley, who in the eighteenth century attributed the monument to the Celtic priests. Today we know that Stonehenge is many centuries older than the druids recorded by Greek and Latin authors. The idea has nonetheless inspired modern druid movements, which gather among the stones at the solstices.

Stonehenge, declared a World Heritage Site in 1986 together with Avebury, thus remains a place where science and imagination converse. Archaeological discoveries do not erase the myth, but they place it in its own age and allow us to admire all the more the achievement of those who, five thousand years ago, raised those stones. The path that leads to the stones, now away from the road, helps to restore the relationship with the landscape of burial mounds that surrounds them.