Unveiling the Mysteries of Stonehenge

Published in Detodo/La Optimista, Ibiza’s good news only newspaper.

It has previously been mooted that the great stone circle in England – Stonehenge - was used as a prehistoric observatory, a sun temple, a place of healing, and a temple of the ancient druids. However, after affording this iconic British monument 10 years of fastidious research, the illustrious Stonehenge Riverside Project’s (SRP) researchers have rejected all these theories - their conclusive findings proving equally, if not more, compelling:

The SRP researchers – consisting of teams from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Southampton, Bournemouth and University College London have concluded that Stonehenge, built between 4,500 and 5,000 years ago, was originally constructed as a monument to unify Britain; after a long period of conflict and regional difference between the east and west of the country.

According to Professor Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, "This was very different to the regionalism of previous centuries. Stonehenge itself was a massive undertaking, requiring the labour of thousands to move stones from as far away as West Wales, shaping them and erecting them. Just the work itself, requiring everyone literally to pull together, would have been an act of unification.”

The fact that Stonehenge's solstice-aligned avenue sits upon a series of natural landforms that form an axis between the directions of midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset caused even more intrigue: “When we stumbled across this extraordinary natural arrangement of the sun’s path being marked in the land, we realised that prehistoric people selected this place to build Stonehenge because of its pre-ordained significance. This might explain why there are eight monuments in the Stonehenge area with solstitial alignments, a number unmatched anywhere else.”