Stonehenge has always been a screen we project onto. In my other life as a witch photographer I’ve stood among the stones with historians and dreamers alike, and heard every kind of story. These are the characters who turn up in the pictures — each one a different way of looking at the same five trilithons. Pick the tale that prickles the hairs on the back of your neck.
Plain, no characters
No whimsy, no mythology — just the stones, with a faint ruler or nothing at all. For the purists. The pictures laid bare, and the questions that still won’t let go.
Aliens
Out of place, impossible, and shaped suspiciously like a flying saucer. From von Däniken’s ancient astronauts to the floating orbs caught on camera — the case for visitors from a very long way off.
Druids
The Celts arrived a thousand years too late to have built it, yet Stonehenge became their temple all the same. The tangled story from Caesar’s wicker men to William Stukeley to the modern fight for solstice access.
Fairies
Tune out the wind and the fae come out to play. Fairy orbs, mushroom rings growing circles within circles, and the notion that the builders raised a fairy ring of their own — in stone.
Merlin & giants
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century bestseller had Merlin spirit the stones from an Irish mountain — healing stones that giants first carried from Africa. The only logical answer, naturally, is giants.
Sha-ladies
Priestess, sorceress, shamanka — one who knows. From a 27,000-year-old mammoth-hunter’s grave in Bohemia to the trance rituals of Stonehenge, a line of women who knew.
Shamen
Go deep into the dark, light the torch, enter the trance. From the oldest graves to the cave-painters’ hunting magic, and the spirits the builders may have spoken with here.
Skeletons
At the longest night the veil wears thin and the ancestors draw close. Stonehenge as cremation cemetery and gateway, turning on the great wheel of death and rebirth.
Witches
From the Witch of Endor to skyclad dancers under a red moon — good witches and bad, and why English Heritage would only ever wave the white-hatted ones through.