Stonehenge travel guide, in your ear

On an open plain in southern England stands the greatest mystery of prehistoric Europe: a ring of colossal stones, raised nearly four and a half thousand years ago by people who left no writing behind. We know how old it is, and roughly how it was made. What we still do not truly know is why. Stonehenge keeps its secret.

It was built in stages, over centuries, by farming peoples of the Stone and Bronze Ages, long before the Romans, and two thousand years before the Druids it is so often wrongly linked to. The largest stones are local sarsens, each weighing as much as several cars. The smaller bluestones were dragged from the Preseli hills of Wales, some two hundred and forty kilometres away, by means we still cannot fully explain. The builders even locked the stones together with joints borrowed from carpentry.

Whatever its purpose, it was tied to the sky. The great circle is aligned on the sun: at midsummer the sun rises in line with its axis, and at midwinter it sets there. It was almost certainly a place of ceremony, and of the dead, holding one of the largest cremation cemeteries of its age. Every solstice, thousands still gather to watch the sun keep its four-thousand-year-old appointment.

And it does not stand alone. Stonehenge sits at the centre of a vast sacred landscape, scattered with burial mounds, ancient avenues, and other circles, including the enormous stone ring of Avebury nearby, all protected together by UNESCO. Not far off rises Salisbury Cathedral, with the tallest spire in Britain and one of the four surviving copies of Magna Carta from 1215.

Come to the plain as the light goes low and the crowds thin along the path. The wind moves over the grass, the great stones throw long shadows, and the whole thing feels impossibly old and impossibly deliberate. Stonehenge has stood here through the entire span of recorded history, and it still asks the one question no one can answer: who did this, and why?