Stonehenge was designed to frame the sunset on the winter solstice.

Stonehenge at sunset

Humans have long viewed the sun as a crucial part of life. Many early civilizations such as ancient Egypt and Rome, as well as the Japanese and the Maya, even deified the sun. It was so revered by the Neolithic people of modern-day England, in fact, that it’s believed they may have built Stonehenge to frame the rising sun on the summer solstice and the sunset on the winter solstice.

Starting about 5,000 years ago, the prehistoric monument was constructed in several stages on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. Without any written record, many theories about the origin and purpose of the mysterious monolith have emerged over the years. One of the most plausible is that Stonehenge was built as an astronomical observatory to help mark the seasons. On the winter solstice, the sun currently falls behind one of the site’s several trilithons — a structure consisting of two vertical stones with a horizontal one across the top — creating a picture-perfect framing. Although some of the rocks have fallen over the years, affecting the current view, laser surveys have all but confirmed that Stonehenge was designed in relation to the path of the sun on the solstice. On the winter solstice, the sun also sets perfectly in line with an individual stone known as the Heel Stone, about 100 feet away from the main site. On the summer solstice, the sun rises over the Heel Stone.

By the Numbers

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The Black Sabbath and "Spinal Tap" Stonehenge jokes were likely a coincidence.

For their Born Again tour in 1983 and 1984, the metal band Black Sabbath created a replica of Stonehenge, a nod to the track of the same name from their latest album. But the prop ended up being too big for all of the pieces to actually fit on stage, the result of a mixup between meters and feet in the design specs. In 1984, a suspiciously similar mistake occurred in the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. In the film, the fictional rock band decides to create a replica of the prehistoric monument for their own song “Stonehenge,” only the prop ends up being comically small. It has widely been speculated that the joke was inspired by the Black Sabbath mishap, yet it’s possible it was just an unlikely coincidence. This Is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner maintains that the movie’s production timeline would have made a Black Sabbath mockery impossible; according to some reports, Reiner filmed a 20-minute demo reel in 1982 that included early versions of the Stonehenge scenes, a year before Black Sabbath’s tour.