English Audio Request

Eight miles north of Salisbury is a large circle of stones which is called Stonehenge. Stonehenge is the best known prehistoric monument in Britain. Nobody knows why it was built, or what it was used for.
Was it an ancient cemetery? There are many graves around the monument. Was it a temple? Were the ancient Britons worshipped the Sun? Was it a place where witches and magicians offered human sacrifices to gods? Was it a kind of observatory, were astronomers studied the stars and the planets? Maybe it had served as astronomical calculators since the monument faces the point on the horizon where the sun rises on Midsummer’s Day.
The development of Stonehenge took about four centuries. The monument reached perfection around 1500. It originally consist of two circles of upright stones joined by a continuous line of horizontal stones which lay on top of them. But most of these have fallen down. One of the most puzzling questions is why Stonehenge builders went to immense trouble of bringing the heavy stone from distant places. Some stones were brought some 200 miles from Pembrokeshire, probably being moved on land by sledges and rolled over three trunks. Others were brought from nearby Downs. We will never know the real answer.