Last week we took a trip down to Wiltshire with the SU to see the ancient wonder that is the Stonehenge. It was around an hours drive from the university campus to the visitor centre, on the way we passed right by the stones but couldn’t stop there! We arrived to a lovely visitor centre on the edge of the UNESCO World Heritage Site which was the gateway to access the Stonehenge and many other unusual discoveries in the surrounding landscape.

There was a choice to either walk the 30 minutes to the Stonehenge or to take a shuttle bus, I opted for the bus considering how warm it was! This took us straight to the stones, with information about the surrounding landscape we were passing through. Once we arrived at the stones I began the audio tour which gave a very detailed history of the stones discovery and the theories behind how they were transported and why they were put there in the first place. A lot of the theory is about the sun, the people who constructed the Stonehenge cleared thought the rising and setting sun was important as the stones line up with exactly where the sunset and sunrise is. Additionally it became important to remain near the stones even after life, with many burial grounds emerging in sight of the Stonehenge. These mounds were visible from all around but were many centuries newer than the stones themselves.

After visiting the stones we headed back to the visitor centre to look at the exhibition there with further information about the construction of the stones. Here they had recreations of the accommodation people would have lived in and detailed plans of how the area would have looked around the time of Stonehenge’s construction.

The transport of the stones was also fascinating, the going theory is that they were transported on wooden rollers, probably with hundreds of people pushing and pulling the stones after they were floated in from the river nearby. Some stones came from the local area, especially the larger stones, but some came as far as Wales!

After seeing all of this it was time to head home, it was a great trip out to see the wonder of the Stonehenge, and incredible weather. I look forward to the next Union Trip to the Cotswolds!