Quick hit Stonehenge blog

Tis a magic place where the moon doth rise
With a dragon's face
Stonehenge
Where the virgins lie
And the prayer of devils fill the midnight sky
And you my love, won't you take my hand
We'll go back in time to that mystic land
(With apologies to Spinal Tap, as well as our readers, for having to read their awful lyrics.)



Walking among Stonehenge's rocks is mostly forbidden nowadays, because of the graffiti and because they fear the ground is too unstable to take the weight of 1 million visitors a year. But each day, a select group (in our case, 50) that pays extra is allowed to walk among the rocks after hours (and, some days, before hours).


The best preserved section of the outer circle of stones, through which you can see the "heel stone." The heel stone marks the "Sacred Avenue" through which Stonehenge's visitors walked their processional

This was a special experience. Years ago, when I was 4 years old, my family and I traveled to England, and we visited Stonehenge. It's one of the only clear memories I have from that trip. I was disappointed some years back to learn that access to the stones was forbidden and that the most anybody could do was walk the perimeter. So when I learned of the opportunity to walk among the rocks (thanks to a reader--and you know who you are) I was jazzed to do it.



Nobody knows who built Stonehenge, nor how they got the rocks, some of them weighing more than 50 tons, up to 200 miles to the now-desolate location on the Salisbury Plain before the invention of the wheel.


They also don't know what purpose it served, other than as a calendar to mark the two solstices. As Paul, our droll Irish guide, put it, "It could have been a village hall or an ice-skating rink, for all we know."