Wessex Guided Tours

There are many questions surrounding the ancient stone circle of Stonehenge but might sound help in the search for answers?

Virtual reality allows new ways to examine Stonehenge’s history

Thomas Hardy said it had a strange “musical hum”. Tess of the d’Urvbervilles ends at Stonehenge and features the “sound”. Modern-day druids also say they experience something special when they gather at Stonehenge and play instruments within the stone circle.

However, Stonehenge is a ruin. Whatever sound it originally had 3,000 years ago has been lost but now, using technology created for video games and architects, Dr Rupert Till of the University of Huddersfield has – with the help of some ancient instruments – created a virtual sound tour of Stonehenge as it would have sounded with all the stones in place.

Arriving at 07:00 on a decidedly chilly January morning, I was sceptical. Dr Till had arrived with a…

Astronomer Prof. Gerald Hawkins wrote two articles for “Nature” in 1963 and 1964 in which he pointed out several new Stonehenge alignments to the Sun and Moon and proposed that the 56 Aubrey Holes could be used to predict eclipses. His subsequent popular book “Stonehenge Decoded” gave the world the idea that the monument was a Neolithic computer.

Archaeologists were horrified at the thought and the leading authority on Stonehenge at the time, one Richard Atkinson, wrote a rebuttal paper in 1966 called “Moonshine on Stonehenge” which heavily criticised Hawkins conclusions. Atkinson considered the builders of Stonehenge to be “howling barbarians” – a statement he later came to regret.

Prof. Fred Hoyle followed up Hawkins’ work on the eclipse predictor idea and came up with a relatively simple recipe for moving markers around the 56 Aubrey Holes to keep track of the Sun, Moon and the two points in the…

Stonehenge Opening Times and Entrance Prices.
English Heritage advise to expect a visit to last around two hours. Please see the table below for opening times for 2017/18, with some seasonal variability, and entrance prices for adults, children, families, seniors and groups.

The Stonehenge Exhibition and Visitor Centre

There is 10% discount for groups of 11 or more visitors paying together plus a free place for every additional 20 paying passengers. Free entry for coach driver and tour leader.

If you come by car you will park in the car park outside the visitor centre. It is free for people purchasing tickets to enter Stonehenge, there is a charge if you are not. Tour buses have their own separate coach park.

All Members of English Heritage or National Trust must show a valid membership card on arrival to be granted free parking and site access.

To enter the Stonehenge Exhibition…

As you might expect for such an imposing stone monument, people have sometimes associated Stonehenge with Freemasonry.

Oddly there is actually not much in the way of direct evidence that the Brotherhood ever took much interest in it apart from the odd article in ACQ (“Ars Quatuor Coronatorum”) discussing various aspects of its construction and history.

Various attempts have been made down the years to find a link between Druidism and Freemasonry with some authors claiming that the Druids were the original basis for it – notably G.S. Faber (“Origins of Pagan Idolatry”, 1816), Winwood Reade (“The Veil of Isis”, 1861) and Dudley Cory-Wright (“Druidism – The Ancient Faith of Britain”, 1924).

There’s even some graffiti that refers to masons – on the southwest side of the tallest stone still standing these lines appear:

           (J.DAY           )

1802    (                       ) MASONS CAMBERWELL

            (W.LAW         )

… although it’s not clear…

Archaeologists have found new evidence that rewrites the history of the Stonehenge landscape.  One of the newly-discovered sites even predates the construction of the world famous monument itself.

FASCINATING FINDS: Flint arrow heads give a secure early Neolithic date

The remains, found at LarkhillandBulford, were unearthed during excavations being carried out before the building of a series of brand new Army houses.

At Larkhill, the discovery of a Neolithic causewayed enclosure – a major ceremonial gathering place some 200 meters in diameter – dating from around 3650 BC radically changes our view of the Stonehenge landscape. About 70 enclosures of this type are known across the UK, although this is only the second discovery in the Stonehenge landscape, with the other further to the northwest at Robin Hood’s Ball on the Salisbury Plain Training Area. In the Wessex region they occur on hilltops and, along with long…

I was down at Larkhill this morning to visit a large excavation. The Ministry of Defence is building a new housing estate for soldiers and their families, and Wessex Archaeology has found all sorts of interesting things, among them the edge of a new causewayed enclosure, which you’ll be able to read about in the new British Archaeology, out next week.

It was cold, and there’d been a hard frost. Early at Stonehenge you could see scoring in the turf running parallel to the edges of the Avenue earthwork, most clearly between its banks, but also outside them. It’s a curious effect. The Stonehenge Riverside project excavated grooves that run like this in the soil, and interpreted them as natural periglacial structures left over from the ice age, that – because they are aligned on the solstice axis – were partly responsible for where Stonehenge is: neolithic people saw the…

Trethevy Quoit © David Gill

The neolithic burial chamber of Trethevy Quoit in Cornwall was given to the nation in November 1931. It is now in the care of English Heritage and is managed by the Cornwall Heritage Trust.

For other prehistoric sites in the care of English Heritage see here.