Stonehenge Private Tour from Southampton

The standing stones you see today are the late-Neolithic phase of a monument that was built and rebuilt over 1,500 years, between roughly 3000 and 1520 BCE. The vast outer sarsens — local sandstone, dragged the 15 miles from West Woods on the Marlborough Downs — were carefully shaped with stone tools and joined using interlocking joints found nowhere else in prehistoric architecture. The smaller bluestones in the inner ring came from quarries in the Preseli Hills of west Wales, and the question of how they were moved 150 miles remains one of the great unsolved problems of British archaeology.

The award-winning English Heritage visitor centre opened in 2013 and is excellent. It includes a 360-degree audio-visual experience that puts you inside the stone circle as it would have looked at midwinter, an exhibition of nearly 300 objects excavated from the surrounding landscape (including human remains and grave goods from one of the largest cremation cemeteries in Neolithic Britain), and a row of reconstructed Neolithic dwelling huts based on excavated foundations from nearby Durrington Walls.

The audio guide is included with admission and well worth using. It runs to about 45 minutes and walks you around the stones in sequence, with commentary from archaeologists who have worked on the site. Listening to the explanation of the solar alignments while you stand at the centre of the avenue is one of those tour moments that genuinely stays with you.

Stonehenge does not stand alone. The surrounding landscape is one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric monuments in Europe — more than 350 burial mounds, the long earthwork enclosure of the Cursus, the timber-circle henge of Woodhenge, and the great Neolithic settlement at Durrington Walls. The visitor centre exhibits explain the relationship between these sites, and on a clear day the burial mounds (called barrows) are visible on the horizon as you walk the path.

“Stonehenge” comes from the Saxon stan-hengen, meaning “stone hanging” or “gallows” — a reference to the lintels balanced across the tops of the upright stones, which appeared to be hanging in mid-air. The Saxons saw these stones a thousand years ago and were as baffled by them as we are. The site has been a legally protected ancient monument since 1882 (the first in Britain), is owned by the Crown, managed by English Heritage, and was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1986.