A Thousand-Year Cathedral

Stonehenge was not built once. It was rebuilt, expanded, and rearranged over 1,500 years — longer than the gap between us and the fall of Rome.

Phase 1 (around 3000 BCE): A circular ditch and bank, with 56 pits (the Aubrey Holes) just inside, possibly holding wooden posts or cremated human remains.

Phase 2 (around 2500 BCE): The monument's signature stage. The massive sarsen circle and trilithons go up — each lintel locked to its uprights with mortise-and-tenon joints borrowed from woodworking. The bluestones, carried from Wales sometime in the centuries before, are set up among them.

Phase 3 (around 2300–2200 BCE): The bluestones are rearranged into the circle and inner oval we see today. Someone decided stones from a specific range of hills 150 miles away mattered enough to move — and then to move again.