STONEHENGE, a celebrated monument of antiquity, stands in the middle of a flat area near the summit of a hill six miles distant from Salisbury. It is enclosed by a circular double bank and ditch near thirty feet broad, after crossing which we ascend thirty yards before we reach the work. The whole fabric consisted of two circles and two ovals. The outer circle is about 108 feet in diameter, consisting, when entire, of sixty stones, thirty uprights and thirty imposts, of which remain only twenty-four uprights, seventeen standing and seven down, three and a half feet asunder, and eight imposts. Eleven uprights have their five imposts on them by the grand entrance. These stones are from thirteen to twenty feet high. The smaller circle is somewhat more than eight feet from the inside of the outer one, and consisted of forty smaller stones (the highest six feet), of which only nineteen remain, and only eleven standing: the walk between these two circles is 300 feet in circumference. The adytum or cell is an oval formed of ten stones (from sixteen to twenty-two feet high), in pairs, with imposts, which Dr Stukeley calls trilithons, and above thirty feet high, rising in height as they go round, and each pair separate, and not connected as the outer pair; the highest eight feet. Within these are nineteen smaller single stones, of which only six are standing. At the upper end of the adytum is the altar, a large slab of blue coarse marble, twenty inches thick, sixteen feet long, and four broad; pressed down by the weight of the vast stones that have fallen upon it. The whole number of stones, uprights, imposts, and altar, is exactly 140. The stones are far from being artificial, but were most probably brought from those called the Gray Weathers, on Marlborough Downs, fifteen or sixteen miles off; and if tried with a tool, they appear of the same hardness, grain, and colour, generally reddish. The heads of oxen, deer, and other beasts, have been found on digging in and about Stonehenge; and human bones in the circumjacent barrows. There are three entrances from the plain to this structure, the most considerable of which is from the north-east, and at each of them were raised on the outside of the trench two huge stones, with two smaller within, parallel to them.

It has been long a dispute among the learned, by what nation and for what purpose these enormous stones were collected and arranged. The first account of this structure we meet with is in Geoffrey of Monmouth, who, in the reign of King Stephen, wrote the history of the Britons in Latin. He tells us that it was erected by the counsel of Merlin the British enchanter, at the command of Aurelius Ambrosius, the last British king, in memory of 460 Britons who were murdered by Hengist the Saxon. The next account is that of Polydore Virgil, who says that the Britons erected this as a sepulchral monument of Aurelius Ambrosius. Others suppose it to have been a sepulchral monument of Boadicea, the famous British queen. Inigo Jones is of opinion that it was a Roman temple; from a stone sixteen feet long and four broad, placed in an exact position to the eastward, altar-fashion. Dr Charlton attributed it to the Danes, who were two years masters of Wiltshire. A tin tablet, on which were some unknown characters, supposed to be Punic, was digged up near it in the reign of Henry VIII., but is lost; probably that might have given some information respecting its founders. Its common name, Stonehenge, is Saxon, and signifies a “stone gallows,” to which these stones, having transverse imposts, bear some resemblance. It is also called in Welch choir gour, or “the giants’ dance.”

Mr Grose thinks that Dr Stukeley has completely proved this structure to have been a British temple, in which the Druids officiated. He supposes it to have been the metropolitan temple of Great Britain, and translates the words choir gour “ the great choir or temple.” The learned Mr Bryant is of opinion that it was erected by a colony of Cuthites, probably before the time of the Druids; because it was usual with them to place one vast stone upon another for a religious memorial; and these they often placed so equably, that even a breath of wind would sometimes make them vibrate. Of such stones one remains at this day in the pile of Stonehenge. The ancients distinguished stones erected with a religious view by the name of amber; by which was signified any thing solar and divine. The Grecians called them πετϑαι αμϐϑοσιαι , petroe ambrosia. Stonehenge, according to Mr Bryant, is composed of these amber Stones: hence the next town is denominated Ambresbury; not from a Roman Ambrosius, for no such person ever existed, but from the Ambrosia petroe, in whose vicinity it stood. Some of them were rocking stones; and there was a wonderful monument of this kind near Penzance in Cornwall, which still retains the name of main-amber, or the sacred stones. Such a one is mentioned by Apollonius Rhodius, supposed to have been raised in the time of the Argonautae, in the island Tenos, as the monument of the[7:20:738] two winged sons of Boreas, slain by Hercules; and there are others in China and other countries.