Tess of the D'Urbervilles

It is Stonehenge!' said Clare.

'The heathen temple, you mean?... you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I am at home.'

This description of Stonehenge from Tess of the D'Urbervilles is not merely the poetic imagination at work. Stonehenge is indeed, by any definition, a 'heathen temple'. This great Neolithic monument, situated in an isolated part of Wiltshire in southern England, was constructed between approximately 3100 BC and 1490 BC; it consists of two concentric rings of great undressed stones set upright in the ground, around a horseshoe formed by five huge trilithons (two upright stones with a horizontal stone supported across their top surfaces), with a further arc of smaller upright stones within it, and a flat stone, thought to have been an altar, in the center. Although much about Stonehenge and other such structures remains unclear, as modern...
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