Stonehenge

Today, visitors experience Stonehenge as a wonder of ancient achievement and an enduring symbol of mystery, but Stonehenge was built as a temple for ceremonies, burials and celebrations.

The first Stonehenge was very simple and was constructed about 5000 years ago in the Neolithic or New Stone Age period. By about 2500 BC timber structures had been built and rotted away and the first stones started to arrive. Huge Sarsen stones came from north Wiltshire and smaller blue stones from west Wales. This marked the beginning of over 800 years of construction and alteration stretching into the Bronze Age period when the first metal tools and weapons were made. 

By this time Stonehenge was the greatest Temple in Britain. Its banks, ditches and standing stones are arranged in sophisticated alignments to mark the passage of the sun and the changing seasons, making you wonder how human kind could have already had such a wealth of knowledge so long ago. The main entrance was carefully aligned to face the midsummer sunrise in one direction and the midwinter sunset in the opposite direction.

However Stonehenge was only one part of a remarkable ancient landscape. Hundreds of burial mounds clustered on the surrounding hilltops, while smaller temples and other ceremonial sites were built nearby. Stonehenge an these other ancient structures all form part of a archaeological landscape so rich that it was classified as a World Heritage Site.

These stones have inspired scholars to study and interpret it for centuries. Medieval writers used magic as a explanation of how it was created; antiquaries, like William Stukeley in the early 18'th century, guessed wrongly that the Druids had built it. Archaeology provides the best hope of answering some of these fundamental questions about Stonehenge; how and when it was built, who built it and most difficult of all why it was built in the first place.

Even with the evidence that archaeology and modern science provide, not all these questions can be answered. Stonehenge will for many more centuries keep some of its secrets.

You can see from a distance that not all the surfaces of the stones at Stonehenge have the same appearance. They are mottled with a wide variety of colours, created by different species of Lichen.

Lichen is a fungus and algae combination living together in symbiosis. The algal partner contains chlorophyll and, like plants, has the ability to convert the sun's energy into sugar. The fungal partner constitutes the body of the lichen, protecting the algae from harsh environments in which lichens live. 

Most lichens grow very slowly, increasing by between 0.5 and 5mm a year, depending on the species.

At Stonehenge 77 different species of Lichen can be found.  

Although lichens can be found in every climatic zone, from the arctic to rain forests -as they can adapt to a specific type of environment, the lichens found at Stonehenge usually only grow on exposed coastlines. Stonehenge not being anywhere near any coastline this is quite a mystery and no-one has ever been able to explain it to this day.

Some scientists says it is possible for these types of Lichen to grow here due to the prevailing winds at Stonehenge, blowing in from the Atlantic. They believe that these winds might have encouraged these species to grow, but specialists in the field has never been happy with this explanation alone.