Summer Solstice: The 10 best stone circles in the UK

Summer Solstice or midsummer is the longest day of the year when, weather permitting, we can enjoy up to 17 hours of sunlight.

Friday 21 June is officially the start of summer for those of us living in the western hemisphere, but it also has another meaning for pagans and druids.

Advertisement

The day signifies rebirth and is also an opportunity to acknowledge the power of the sun, which is at its highest point in the sky.

Castlerigg

As well as a time to celebrate life and growth, it’s also the time when the sun begins its slow descent towards shorter and cooler days.

Stonehenge, the ancient stone circle in Wiltshire, is inundated by revellers every year who arrive in droves to watch the sun set on Midsummer Day. In 2017, over 13,000 people attended the site.

Although the exact purpose of Stonehenge is unknown, it is believed to be a prehistoric temple aligned with the movements of the sun. Other theories as to its role include a Druid temple, an astronomical calculator for predicting eclipses and solar events, a place where ancestors were worshipped and a centre of healing.

 Even if you’re not inspired to get in touch with your spiritual side, many of the UK’s stone circles are located in beautiful and remote locations, so if the stones don’t move you, the surroundings might. 

Avebury

Avebury stone circle is the largest in the world

Avebury is one of the great wonders of prehistoric Britain and the largest stone circle in the world. It consists of an inner circle of upright stones, enclosing a further two stone circles, and was built and altered over many centuries from about 2850 BC until about 2200 BC.

It is believed that the circle may have been developed as a public “theatre” for rites and rituals for the local community.

In the Middle Ages, many of the stones were buried or destroyed due to an association with paganism. Building and agricultural improvements also led to others being removed.

Castlerigg

Castlerigg stone circle has an incredible backdrop

Located in the atmospheric Lake District National Park, Castlerigg has possibly the most dramatic location of any stone circle. The ancient monument overlooks the Thirlmere Valley with the mountains of High Seat and Helvellyn, the second highest peak in England, as a backdrop. Castlerigg is also believed to be one of the oldest stone circles in the UK and is estimated to date from 3000 BC.

One of its most unusual features is a rectangle of standing stones in the centre of the circle.

Swinside

Swinside has 55 stones

The Swinside stone circle, which is occasionally known as Sunkenkirk, consists of 55 stones set in a 90ft diameter circle. Situated on the south-west edge of the Lake District, this circle is located on private land, but can easily be viewed from a nearby footpath.

Merry Maidens

Merry Maidens was built in the Stone Age

Located between the pretty Cornish towns of Mousehole and Porthcurno, this perfectly circular site is comprised of 19 stones. Built in the late Stone/early Bronze age era, its name is believed to originate from the Cornish “Dans Meyn”, which means dancing stone. The title was given to all recorded Cornish stone circles pre 1900 and has led to an association with dancing rituals.

Ring of Brogadar

The Ring of Brogadar can be found on the Orkney islands

Sitting in a natural amphitheatre of hills, the Ring of Brogadar can be found in the Orkney islands. Similarly to other stone circles, the monument is believed to have been a religious shrine and a place of ritual. The ring is the third largest stone circle in the UK and is overlooked by the solitary Comet Stone. Just a mile away sit the four Standing Stones of Stenness, which are 6m in height. These date back to 3100 BC, making them one of the oldest stone circles in Britain.

Stanton Drew

Stanton Drew is often quiet

Despite being the third largest group of prehistoric standing stones in England, this collection is often overlooked and, consequently, very quiet. Consisting of 26 standing stones, the site is less than 10 miles from the bustling city of Bristol, making it an ideal spot for a day trip and relaxing walk in the surrounding countryside.

Beaghmore

Beaghmore is one of Northern Ireland’s best dark sky sites

Discovered during peat cutting in the 1940s, this monument consists of seven stone circles. Located in the heart of Northern Ireland, 10 miles from Cookstown, the site is considered to be one of the best dark sky sites in Northern Ireland.

Moel Ty Uchaf Stone Circle

Moel Ty Uchaf has incredible views of the Dee valley 

To the west of Snowdonia National Park in Wales sits Moel Ty Uchaf. While it’s not the most easily accessible circle, visitors who make the journey will be rewarded upon arrival with incredible views of the Dee valley below. Situated on the summit of a hill, the circle is comprised of 41 standing stones.

Rollright Stones

The Rollright Stones are said to be a petrified monarch and his courtiers

Less than five miles from the picturesque Cotswolds town of Chipping Norton lie the Rollright Stones. Comprised of three groups, legend says that the stones are a monarch and his courtiers who were petrified by a witch.

Stonehenge

Stonehenge is one of the most popular stone circles in the world

The daddy of stone circles, this archaeological site is one of the most important in the world. This year marks a century since this ancient monument was given to the nation. While visitors are unable to roam free, you can get close enough for a good look at the mighty rocks. The site is one of the UK’s most popular tourist attractions with more than a million visitors every year, meaning booking in advance is essential.

Sunrise at Stonehenge will now be visible around the world

For thousands of years people have made the pilgrimage to Stonehenge to gaze in wonder at the interplay with the monument of the sun, moon and stars, but from Thursday a virtual version of the looming sky above the circle will be available to people from around the world.

A live feed from a camera set up close to the stones is being set up – appropriately enough on the summer solstice – to allow people to tune in to the monument whenever they want.

After dark, the live feed is replaced by a computer-generated image of the night sky as it would be at the moment a viewer clicks on the link to the website.

English Heritage hopes that the feed will allow those who cannot make the trip in person to experience sunrise, sunset and the ever-changing night sky, and even make them feel closer to the ancient people who created the stone circle.

The Stonehenge Skyscape project may also be used as a method of worship for those who believe that the stone circle and landscape is a deeply spiritual place.

Stonehenge Skyscape

Susan Greaney, a senior historian at English Heritage, said: “Stonehenge was built to align with the sun, and to neolithic people the skies were arguably as important as the surrounding landscape.

“At solstice we remember the changing daylight hours, but the changing seasons, cycles of the moon and movements of the sun are likely to have underpinned many practical and spiritual aspects of neolithic life.

“Stonehenge’s connection with the skies is a crucial part of understanding the monument today and we are really excited to share this view online with people all over the world. If someone can’t travel to Stonehenge, they will still be able to witness what is happening there from wherever they are. People on the other side of the world will be able to see sunrise at Stonehenge.”

As part of the project, English Heritage has joined forces with the space scientist and science educator Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who will host a star and moon-gazing event next month.

She said: “Imagine our neolithic ancestors sitting around a fire looking up at the heavens and telling stories inspired by the movement of the planets, the patterns of the stars and of course the sun and the moon.

“Stonehenge Skyscape offers a mesmerising insight into our ancestors’ lives and hopefully, beyond visiting the website, it will inspire people all over the world to go outside and look up.”

This year, the summer solstice falls on June 21. Celebrated across the world, the solstice heralds the beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the onset of winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Here are some interesting facts about the day when the Earth is the farthest from the Sun.

 Aderin-Pocock said the project could help people who were were losing their connection with the night sky because of light pollution. “People who are aware of Stonehenge but not able to make the trip can see the sunrise, the sunset and the stars there. It gives global access to something really amazing. It could also help people who are stressed. There’s something very peaceful about gazing at the sky.”

Stonehenge Skyscape is a composite representation of the sky above the stones accurate to within a window of approximately five minutes. After dark it switches from a photographic depiction to a computer-generated one, which accurately displays the live location of the stars and visible planets.

Neptune, Uranus and Pluto are consciously not included because, being invisible to the naked eye, they were undiscovered until the 18th century or later.

Stonehenge Has Attracted Summer Solstice Visitors for Centuries, But Some Historians Worry About Its Future

People celebrate the midsummer sun as it rises over the megalithic monument of Stonehenge on June 21, 2005 on Salisbury Plain, England.

Every year around June 21, thousands of visitors from around the world gather at Stonehenge in southwest England to celebrate the summer solstice. It’s a tradition that is thought to go back thousands of years, ever since Neolithic peoples created what is believed to be a temple aligned with the movements of the sun.

Stonehenge is the only neolithic monument in the U.K. to use stones not from the local area. While some were most likely taken from the neighboring Marlborough Downs, the “bluestones,” weighing around 3.6 tons each, were transported from quarries in Wales that are 180 miles away. Historians still struggle to explain how, in pre-wheel Britain, humans could have managed this architectural feat.

Though its exact purpose remains a mystery, Stonehenge is still sacred to members of Britain’s Druid and Pagan communities, who observe various rituals at the site, including on the summer and winter solstices. But these days, historians, archeologists and local residents worry for the landmark’s future, as digging for a tunnel motorway past the site could start in 2021.

Wild summer solstice festivals from around the world

This year, the summer solstice falls on June 21, and people from across the Northern Hemisphere are flocking to celebrate the longest day of the calendar. From yoga and bonfires to neolithic stones and strawberries, discover how cultures across the globe celebrate Midsummer by clicking through this gallery.

The A303, one of the main routes between London and rural southwest England, passes through the World Heritage Site of Stonehenge and Avebury, creating what many see as a blemish on an important landscape. In December 2014, the U.K. government announced plans to invest in a two-mile-long tunnel to upgrade the road, hiding the section closest to Stonehenge from view — the latest in a series that have been proposed since 1995 to solve the notorious traffic jams around Stonehenge, where the road narrows to a single lane.

The National Trust and English Heritage, who between them manage the central core area around Stonehenge, welcomed the proposal, describing it as a “momentous decision” that would remove much of the traffic from the landscape. But anti-tunnel campaigners warn the scheme could cause irreparable harm.

The Stonehenge Alliance, a group made up of NGOs including Friends of the Earth and the Council for the Protection of Rural England, have warned that building a tunnel there would risk destroying the site. “It would betray millennias’ worth of history,” says Tom Holland, a historian and president of the Stonehenge Alliance. “It’s Europe’s most precious prehistoric landscape, and that’s because it’s not just Stonehenge itself, but the entire surroundings that give those stones their significance.”

Rising sun viewed through the stones at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, UK

In addition to the stone circle, the area recognized as a World Heritage Site comprises several complexes of Neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial and funerary monuments that indicate that hundreds of people were buried there in ancient times.

The main concerns about the tunnel have to do with the damage that could be made to archeological remains. “If we start messing around, drilling things, then we don’t know what will happen. We’ll end up not even knowing what it is that we have lost,” says Holland.

Not all archeologists, however, oppose the tunnel. Mike Pitts is an author and archeologist specializing in British prehistory, and one of a few to have excavated within Stonehenge itself. He says that aside from the traffic problem, the road is a “major scar in the middle of the World Heritage landscape” and “the only acceptable solution is to hide it on its existing course.”

Stonehenge at sunset, Wiltshire, England.

“It’s sad, but there is no alternative,” he says.

David Bullock, Highways England project manager for the A303 Stonehenge scheme, says the tunnel will be aligned very carefully, especially on the Western side, where recent discoveries of Mesolithic material provided information about very early settlers. “We’re confident that the route doesn’t disturb any archeology at all,” says Bullock. “But we will do further investigation during the project to add to the overall knowledge of the archeology in the area.”

Still, those who fear for the future of the site remain determined that the project poses a danger to the historical and archaeological record. And the concerns are not just about the impact on remains. Some worry about the impact that the construction, which is likely to last around five years, could have on various celebrations at Stonehenge. 

Asian man in corn field raising his arms holding the sun at sunset in summer solstice day. Hope and pray. Achievement concept

Amanda Hart, one of the elders at the British Druid Organisation, says the roadworks would massively affect the celebrations, and could result in people moving them to a different site, such as the Neolithic henge in neighboring Avebury. “We could move it to Avebury, but it just wouldn’t be the same,” she says. “There is such a deep connection with the site.”

The monument is usually cordoned off, but the summer solstice is one of the rare occasions that the inner circle is open to the public. Though several other festivals take place at Stonehenge throughout the year, the summer solstice attracts the largest audience, which gathers to watch the sun rising through the ancient entrance to the stone circle.

“It would be quite sad if we couldn’t meet together to celebrate the solstice,” says Hart. “It’s a very moving and beautiful event.”

Saint John's Eve, Spain

Fireworks are set off, bonfires lit, and special food and drink consumed as revelers go a little crazy and party the night away! A curious pagan tradition in the town of Soria even sees men walking barefoot over hot embers...

This robot fish has robot blood

If decades of science fiction movies have taught us anything, it’s that when the eventual robot uprising happens, the bots that purge mankind from Earth are going to bleed. Sure, they might spew robo-body-fluid in hues of green or blue, but the dangerous AI-powered robots of the future always seem to have some kind of blood. 

Modern robots don’t really have much in the way of blood. A robot powered by some kind of hydraulic system might come close, but let’s be honest, the vast majority of robots today don’t bleed. A team of researchers from Cornell University working in tandem with the University of Pennsylvania thinks they might be able to change that.

In a new paper published in Nature, the research team describes what it calls an “electrolytic vascular system” that it developed for soft robotic applications. The scientists set out to make a multi-purpose system that could solve two rather complicated problems in robotics: power and movement.

In the animal world, many bodily systems perform not just one or two, but many different duties at the same time. Over millions and millions of years, evolution has hammered out some rather efficient organisms. Robots, by contrast, pale in comparison, with dedicated systems to solve individual problems with little overlap.

The scientists attempted to remedy that by engineering a robotic fish equipped with what can be described as a crude circulatory system. The “blood” in this case is fluid that not only acts as a battery for storing energy, but is also used by a hydraulic system to allow the fish to move its fins.

As you can see in the video, the robo-fish isn’t exactly a speed demon, but by using the robot’s blood to store its energy, the machine is more efficient from a standpoint of mass, and one tiny step closer to being animal-like.

A Robot Has Been Stuck on Mars for Months

Sue Smrekar wishes she could be on Mars right now.

Specifically on Elysium Planitia, a smooth plain in the planet’s northern hemisphere, where a NASA spacecraft called InSight resides. InSight touched down on the surface last November and used its robotic arm and five-fingered hand to unpack. The cider-colored ground was soon littered with scientific instruments, like a well-arranged picnic spread. Once the spacecraft had settled in by late February, one of the instruments, a probe designed to burrow deep into the Martian ground, started hammering away.

Then, suddenly, it stopped. After traveling 300 million miles to Mars, the probe got stuck just inches below the surface. It has remained wedged there since, but NASA hopes a delicate rescue operation could soon free it.

“We’d hoped to be well into the ground by now,” Smrekar, the deputy principal investigator of the InSight mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me.

NASA dispatched InSight to Mars to study the interior of the Red Planet, which, even after many decades of missions, scientists still know little about. The mission would help scientists determine what Mars is like on the inside, and whether its guts resemble another rocky planet—our own.

The probe, made up of a spike and a sensor-studded tether, is designed to burrow nearly 16 feet into the surface. That’s deeper than previous instruments have gone “on any other planet, moon, or asteroid,” according to NASA (excluding Earth, of course). The tether was supposed to follow the spike down and measure the heat coming from the planet’s interior. The machine only made it 12 inches. “It initially was making fabulous progress, and then just abruptly stopped moving forward,” Smrekar said.

The team was stunned. Maybe the instrument had hit a rock, they thought. The scientists and engineers of the InSight mission had prepared for such a scenario; during testing before launch, the heat probe, which they call “the mole,” had shown it could break some rocks and even maneuver around others. The team instructed the mole to keep hammering, in case the force shattered the obstacle, but that didn’t help.

Scientists now suspect another culprit: the Martian soil itself. As the probe hammered, loose dirt was supposed to swirl around it, providing friction for its back-and-forth movements. But the soil might have clumped together instead and moved away from the instrument. Eventually, a moat of empty space could have emerged between them. “Some friction is essential for the mechanism to work, as the recoil produced by the mechanism during hammering needs to be absorbed,” says Matthias Grott, a scientist at the German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Planetary Research, which built the instrument for NASA. Without that friction, the probe just bounces in place.

Spacecraft have never encountered such difficult soil on Mars before, and the probe wasn’t designed to handle it. Scientists have since recreated these conditions back on Earth, with a replica of the heat probe and stickier sand; the experiment, in an outcome that is both reassuring and disheartening, showed that the probe could indeed become stuck like this.

The circumstances are certainly unexpected, but not insurmountable. The team could generate some friction by using a scoop on the robotic arm to drop some soil into the space around the probe or apply pressure to the ground.

If only they could see anything.

InSight’s cameras can take pictures of its surroundings to send home, but they don’t have eyes on the problem. The probe arrived in a cylindrical case that holds it steady until it drills itself free, but only made it out so far before becoming stuck. The case now blocks InSight’s view of the probe and the surrounding regolith.

So the InSight team has devised a rather clever plan. They will use the robotic arm to lift the case, little by little, to get a better look at the probe beneath.

It’s a risky operation. If they end up pulling the probe out of the ground, they can’t stick it back in. InSight’s robotic arm was designed to clutch the case, not handle the probe. So they will command the spacecraft to move carefully, like a stop-motion animator adjusting clay after every take: Lift a little, back off, take a picture, beam it home. The spacecraft is scheduled to attempt this maneuver for the first time tomorrow, raising the case a mere five inches. More attempts are planned for next week. With a better view, the team can confirm the problem and determine a fix.

Here’s a look at the robotic hand unfurling in preparation for the procedure, seen in shadows across the Martian surface:

For now, mission staff are trying to look on the bright side. InSight’s other instruments are working fine; in April, the seismometer detected, for the first time in history, a Marsquake. It has even pitched in to provide data about the probe’s unlucky surroundings, recording the rumbling that resulted from its failed hammering attempts. And besides, it’s better to have a jammed probe now, when one end of it is still sticking out of the ground and within reach, than after it goes subterranean. “If the mole were in the ground and hit a rock, there’s nothing we could do to help,” says Troy Hudson, a scientist and engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The arm isn’t powerful enough to excavate it.”

And the team has already learned something new about the Martian landscape. “If you asked somebody, ‘What’s the soil on Earth like?’ Well, it depends greatly on where you are. Is it beach sand on Hawaii or loamy soil in Arkansas?” Hudson says. “Mars is a lot more homogenous than Earth, but it’s still an entire planet and soil types are going to be different in different locations.”

InSight’s heat probe is not yet lost, but if the rescue mission goes south, it won’t be the first NASA spacecraft to succumb to Mars and its surprises. In 2009, the Spirit rover became trapped in a sandpit and was unable to reach a slope from which to charge its solar-powered panels. Last year, Opportunity, Spirit’s sister rover, met a similar fate when a dust storm of unprecedented size swept across the planet and blocked sunlight from reaching its panels.

Any time a mission doesn’t go exactly as planned, there are scientists and engineers worrying and troubleshooting and pacing back home, wishing they could be there to help. Before Opportunity was declared dead, Keri Bean, a science planner on the mission, told me she dreamt about saving it. “Sometimes I’ll have dreams in the middle of the night. I’m standing there on Mars next to her, and wiping the dust off her lenses,” she said.

The reality is far more frustrating. This week, at a meeting of InSight scientists in Paris, Smrekar listened to a colleague describe a recent test with a replica of the heat probe. It had rained, and a box of sand, playing the role of Martian soil, became damp and sticky. The instrument couldn’t move, so the scientist stuck a finger in the sand, wiggled it around, and made some room. That’s all it took—on Earth. On Mars, NASA needs a breakthrough.