![]() It’s also thought midwinter, rather than midsummer, would have been perhaps the most important focus for the people who built Stonehenge. These dates may have been important times of year to remember the dead, as we know that people buried about 150 of their cremated dead at the monument, or to worship a solar deity. So Stonehenge is likely to have been much more than simply a calendar. This was practical – the seasons dictated what they could grow and when – but also probably spiritual. The people who built Stonehenge were farmers, herders and pastoralists and so the changing seasons would have been of immense significance. We can imagine that people gathered at the monument to celebrate the midsummer and the midwinter, although only a few people would have been able to directly observe the important alignment. However, there is very little evidence as to what ceremonies might have taken place here there are few clues from excavations within the stone circle seems to have been kept clean and separate from everyday debris. Marking the movements of the sun was clearly important to the people who built Stonehenge, as they went to such enormous effort to carefully line up the monument. These are natural features from glaciation, but the presence of ridges and gullies that happened to line up with the solstice may have been noticed by Neolithic people, leading them to build Stonehenge on this particular site. Recent excavations across the avenue have found that the earthworks appear to follow the line of some natural ridges, with gullies (known as periglacial stripes) between them. It also has an important link to the movements of the sun, with its final straight stretch close to Stonehenge aligned on the north-east to south-west solar axis. The avenue, made up of parallel banks and ditches, links Stonehenge to the nearby River Avon. The solstice axis is also marked by the Station Stones which are positioned in a rectangle on the edge of the surrounding circular ditch, with the short sides of the rectangle on the same alignment as the sarsen stones. The whole layout of Stonehenge is therefore positioned in relation to the solstices, or the extreme limits of the sun’s movement the word solstice is derived from the Latin sol ("sun") and sistere ("to stand still"). Analysis of a laser survey of Stonehenge has shown that those stones that frame the solstice axis were the most carefully worked and shaped using hammerstones, creating vertical sides that framed the movement of the sun. Today, this effect has been lost because one half of the trilithon has fallen at some point in the history of the monument. It would have dropped down into the Altar Stone, a sandstone block which was placed across the solstice axis. ![]() On midwinter’s day, turning 180° to face towards the south-west, the sun would originally have set between the two uprights of the tallest trilithon, at the head of the sarsen horseshoe. Archaeological excavations have found a large stone hole to the left of the Heel Stone and it may have held a partner stone, the two stones framing the sunrise. ![]() If you were to stand in the middle of the stone circle on midsummer’s day, the sun rises just to the left of the Heel Stone, an outlying stone to the north-east of the monument. The sarsen stones, put up in at the centre of the site in about 2500 BC, were carefully aligned to line up with the movements of the sun.
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