Dressed as Druids, Wiccans, hippies, punks or just as regular tourists, nearly 25,000 people gathered Sunday at Stonehenge on Britain’s Salisbury Plain, marking the summer solstice as people have done for thousands of years.
The sun rose at 4:52 a.m. on the longest day of the year, and for the lucky dozens who made it through the crowds to the interior of the neolithic stone circle, the rising sun could be seen in near perfect alignment with the Heel Stone, outside the famous ring.
It is this remarkable alignment, and another that aligns with sunset on the winter solstice, that has inspired such awe and interest in Stonehenge. It shows that whoever built it had a detailed understanding of the celestial path of the sun, but its ritual purpose or meaning has never been fully determined. It is deeply fixed in the British imagination, though, as a place of mystery and spirit, linked (though not necessarily by science) to the Iron Age Druid priestly caste and the foundational myth of King Arthur.
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