That aura of mystery has helped to generate many myths and legends about the monument. As speculation has gone on over the centuries, a whole host of colourful stories has arisen – and the search for explanations is still going strong today.

In the Roman period, it was believed that the British rebel queen Boudicca had been buried at Stonehenge. The Roman campaign of AD61 to stamp out the Druids was particularly savage, and is mentioned in the works of two Roman historians, Tacitus and Cassius Dio.

Cassius writes that the British buried Boudicca in a lavish ceremony properly befitting a Celtic monarch, hailing her as a heroine of the resistance to Roman occupation. This gave rise to a story that she was buried at Stonehenge, and that the mystical stone circle was built by the Druids to mark her tomb. It is now believed, less romantically, that Boudicca’s burial site is probably somewhere under either platform 8 or 10 at King’s Cross railway station in London.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the 12th century AD, retells the story that the legendary wizard Merlin commanded an Irish monument called the Giant’s Dance to be transported all the way to Salisbury Plain. There, it was reconstructed to mark the site of a massacre of British noblemen by a large group of Saxons under the Kentish king Hengest.

Druids

Despite the centuries-old idea that the monument was built by ancient Druids, it is only relatively recently that Druids have tried to claim Stonehenge as part of their heritage. One famous modern Druid was Sir Winston Churchill, who was initiated into the Albion Druid Lodge at Oxford. A photograph exists of him hosting a gathering of the Ancient Order of Druids at Blenheim Palace in August 1908. The modern Druids were outraged when the last-but-one private owner of the site, Sir Edward Antrobus, began charging admission a century ago.

By the 1960s, Stonehenge had become the focus of an annual midsummer solstice festival, in which the hippies tended to outnumber the Druids. A photo taken in 1966 shows people standing and sitting on the lintels – public access was limited to a pathway around the circumference from 1978.

Faces and circles

In 1997, British archaeologist Terrence Meaden claimed to have spotted a face carved into the side of one of the sarsen stones.

“He could be the patron of the monument or even its architect,” he suggested. “Perhaps the designer of Stonehenge has been looking at us for four thousand years and we didn’t see him.”

Crop circle researcher Colin Andrews claims to have found a symbol carved into one of the bluestones, which looks almost exactly like one of the crop circles that appear in nearby fields.

A cure for what ails you?

Many consider Stonehenge to have healing powers. If you sit under the stones while water is poured over them, it is believed, your wounds or afflictions will be healed.

Another legend says that the stones were once ancient dancing giants who were petrified when they were caught in a beam of sunlight. Looking at what remains of the uprights and lintels, it is just possible to imagine them as giants holding hands, and the monument was indeed known in the folklore of the past as the Giant's Ring.

It was also once thought that it was impossible to count the precise number of the stones. The inhabitants of a nearby village were said to have been made a wager by Satan that they wouldn't be able to arrive at the right answer. His bluff was called when a monk gave the reply, 'There are more stones than can be told'. Incensed, the devil picked up one of the stones and threw it at the clever monk, but it bounced harmlessly off his heel. This is how the Heel Stone (the one over which the sun rises at the summer solstice) supposedly got its name.

Alien landings?

One of the most popular alternative explanations for Stonehenge is that it was built by extra-terrestrial visitors in ancient times.

The immense popularity of Erich von Däniken’s books in the 1960s and 1970s was the inspiration for many of these theories.

The Swiss author proposes that various prehistoric sites around the world could be the handiwork of alien intelligences. He can’t accept that primitive societies where there was no written language, and only rudimentary technology, could have produced such impressive feats of engineering without outside assistance.

Von Däniken’s Mystery Park, a theme park devoted to the author’s work, opened at Interlaken in Switzerland in 2003. As you would expect, it includes a replica of Stonehenge.