Stonehenge

The Stonehenge temple is perhaps the most famous prehistoric monument in the world dating back 4,500 years. It's a masterpiece of engineering with the stones arranged to line up with the movements of the sun.

The ruins as they are today are the end result of many different stages of construction, which started in the Neolithic Age around 2500 BC and ceased in the early Bronze Age. About 1,000 years prior to the current stones being placed, the Stonehenge Cursus (Latin for racetrack), a rectangular earthwork enclosure was created, although nobody has figured out why yet but it's probably ceremonial.

Two types of stone are used at Stonehenge – the larger sarsens and the smaller ‘bluestones’. The sarsens were erected in two concentric arrangements – an inner horseshoe and an outer circle – and the bluestones were set up between them in a double arc.

What's a henge? It's where tribes in times past buried their cremated dead.

Stonehenge as it probably was.

But the current stones aren't the first installation, as the earliest structures known in the immediate area are four or five pits, three of which appear to have held large pine ‘totem-pole like’ posts erected in the Mesolithic period, between 8500 and 7000 BC. However it's not known how these posts relate to the later monument of Stonehenge.