Stonehenge audio guide,
five stops, free.

Look up before you go looking for the stones. The roof over your head is a thin sheet of steel punched with small square holes, carried on a thicket of slender grey columns set at angles, and from under it the monument is nowhere in sight. That is deliberate, and it is recent. Until 2013 the car park and the ticket office sat right beside the circle, and a main road, the A344, ran within three metres of the Heel Stone. In 1993 a committee of the House of Commons called the way Stonehenge was presented to the public a national disgrace. The cure took twenty years. The road beside the stones closed in June 2013 and was dug up and grassed over, and this building, by the architects Denton Corker Marshall, opened that December, two kilometres to the west.

The old car park had already given up something older than Stonehenge itself. When it was being laid out in the 1960s, archaeologists found four or five huge postholes that had held pine posts about three-quarters of a metre thick. English Heritage dates them to between 8500 and 7000 BC. Hunter-gatherers were marking that spot thousands of years before anyone dug the first ditch.

The ground between here and the stones has a story too, and almost nobody on the bus knows it. You cross the site of a First World War airfield. Stonehenge Aerodrome opened in November 1917 to give bomber pilots and observers their last training before the Western Front. Its night camp, with hangars for Handley Page bombers, stood close to what is now the Fargo Plantation stop, and its main camp was only about 300 metres west of the circle. You may be told that the Royal Air Force asked for the stones to be pulled down as a hazard to low flying. That story first appeared in print in 1956, and when Martyn Barber of Historic England went through the files, he found nothing to support it.

What removed the airfield was a public appeal. In 1927 a fund, with King George the Fifth as its lead subscriber, bought the aerodrome and the farmland around it, the land went to the National Trust, and by the early 1930s every building had been taken down. The open grass you are about to see was paid for by people who wanted the stones to stand alone.

From this side of the path you are looking at the best-preserved stretch of the outer ring, and the first thing to notice is the one thing no other stone circle has. Lintels. Horizontal stones laid across the tops of the uprights, still sitting where they were put about 2500 BC. Stonehenge is the only stone circle in the world with them.

The builders treated sarsen as if it were timber. Each upright was finished with a knob on top, a tenon, and each lintel had hollows cut into its underside, mortices, that dropped over the knobs. Then the lintels were locked to each other end to end with tongue and groove joints. They are carpenter's joints, cut in stone, before there was any metal in Britain. The shaping was done by pounding the surface with hammerstones, lumps of sarsen, and the waste chips and broken hammers turn up in quantity in the field to the north, where the stones were dressed. Find an upright that has lost its lintel and you can see its tenon, a bump on the top.

Now look at the shapes. The ring is about thirty metres across, and the tops of the lintels are four point nine metres off the ground. The uprights widen slightly towards the top, so they do not seem to taper as you look up, and the lintels curve, very slightly, to follow the circle. The faces pointing inwards are smoother than the faces pointing out. A laser survey found that this north-east side, the side that faces the Avenue and the way people arrived, was the most finely finished of all. Whoever planned it knew where the audience would stand.

For a long time the source of the sarsens was given simply as the Marlborough Downs. In 2020 a team led by David Nash of the University of Brighton matched fifty of the fifty-two surviving sarsens to one area, West Woods, near Marlborough, about twenty-five kilometres to the north. The key was a core that had been drilled out of one of these stones during repairs in 1958, and that had only recently been returned.

On average a sarsen here weighs twenty-five tons. To raise one, people dug a pit with one sloping side, lined the back with wooden stakes, slid the stone to the edge and hauled it upright with ropes of plant fibre, probably over a wooden A-frame. The lintels were probably raised on timber platforms, and the tenons were trimmed last, to fit. English Heritage's estimate is hundreds of people at the stones, and more behind them growing food, minding children, making rope and cutting timber.

The ring has gaps, and not all of them are ancient. In a storm on the last day of 1900 one of the outer uprights came down with its lintel. That fall worried the owner enough to act, and it began a century of propping, straightening and concrete that you will see for yourself at the end of this walk.

Look at your feet before you look at the stones. Set into the path here is a small marker, and there are two more in the grass on either side of it. Each marks a hole dug about five thousand years ago, part of a ring of fifty-six pits running just inside the bank all the way round the monument, five hundred years before any of the big stones arrived. What stood in them, a timber post or a stone, is still argued over. What went into them afterwards is not. In and around these holes, and in the ditch, archaeologists have found about sixty-four cremation burials, and English Heritage thinks as many as a hundred and fifty people may once have been buried here. That makes this the largest late Neolithic cemetery in the British Isles. The holes are named after John Aubrey, who recorded them on his plan of the monument in 1666.

The dead have had an unsettled time since. William Hawley dug the cremations out in 1920, decided they were unimportant, and in 1935 reburied the lot together in a single hole, Aubrey Hole 7. In 2008 they were dug up again. More than fifty thousand fragments turned out to belong to sixty-three people, men and women in almost equal numbers, with children among them, and strontium in the bones suggests that many had lived near the bluestone quarries in Wales.

Now look at the bases of the stones nearest you. One of the big inner uprights has a flat, dark block filling the hollow at its foot. That is concrete, poured during the restoration of 1958 and 1959, and English Heritage leaves it in plain sight on purpose, because the repairs are part of the monument's history too. More concrete is hidden under the grass. Restorers straightened leaning stones from 1919 onwards, put back the trilithon that had fallen in 1797 after it had lain on the ground for 161 years, and returned in 1964 after an outer stone blew down on the morning of 10 March 1963. The most recent work was gentler. In September 2021 conservators replaced the old cement on the lintels, which traps water, with breathable lime mortar, taking care not to damage the lichens.

And the rope along the path? Visitors could walk among the stones until 1978, when vandalism and graffiti closed the circle, and in 1984 someone sprayed it with purple paint. With about a million visitors a year, English Heritage says, the ground inside would soon turn to mud. Nearly half of Stonehenge has now been excavated. The other half is still under the turf a few metres from where you are standing.