Stonehenge's building and use was longer than that of any great English cathedral; yet
we do not know what it was for, and it refuses to give up its secrets. No echoes bounce
off its stones when you call out; you are surrounded by the stubborn silence of antiquity,
and some power urges you to speak in hushed tones.
George Borrow felt compelled to remove his hat and make obeisance on the ground,
and in Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy laid his heroine on the so-called Altar
Stone here, in the manner of Greek tragedy, before her sacrifice to the idea of Justice.
This building may have been a sanctuary, or it may have been an observatory, but
whatever its purpose, it was a place of great importance to the people who began it
nearly a thousand years before Tutankhamun was King of Egypt. It must have been the
focus of all the most powerful beliefs of the tribes of men, women and children living in
southern Britain.
My own strong conviction is that this building was a temple for worship at a period of
human history when religion and astronomy were virtually the same thing.
Brian Bailey