Stonehenge facts | What you never knew about the mysterious prehistoric monument

It's one of the oldest things humans have ever built. We still don't know for sure why this circular arrangement of huge stones was made in the first place. It's also way older than the Egyptian pyramids. No wonder it's one of the most popular places to visit in Europe!

Archaeologists believe its construction started around 3000 BC, and they kept adding to it until around 1500 BC, with the bluestones rearrangement and the digging of additional pits. Even before that, people were using the area for ceremonies as early as 8000 or 7000 BC.

Stonehenge is made of two kinds of stones. The Sarsen megaliths are from the region, possibly the Marlborough Downs, 30 miles away. But the smaller bluestones came from Wales, which is over 150 miles away! Some geologists think they were carried to the Salisbury Plain by glaciers during the ice age.

More than 600 new-age travelers were on their way to celebrate the Stonehenge Free Festival when over 1300 police stopped them about 7 miles away. A huge fight broke out lasting several hours. In the end, the police arrested almost 537 people, making it one of the biggest mass civilian arrests ever in England!

Even though Stonehenge is super old, it has not lost its acoustic properties and still sounds amazing! When you hit the stones, they make a really loud clanging noise. People used to think that this sound had healing powers in ancient cultures. It's like a natural instrument.

Stonehenge has intrigued visitors for centuries because it lines up perfectly with the sunrise on the summer solstice and the sunset on the winter solstice (the shortest and longest days of the year respectively). Considering how old Stonehenge is, it would have been a great architectural feat at the time it was built.

Around Stonehenge, there's a ring of 56 pits called the ‘Aubrey Holes’, named after John Aubrey, a 17th-century antiquarian, who identified them in 1666. They were probably used to hold bluestones from Wales according to excavation research, and human cremation burials were found within and around most holes too.

Archaeologists and historians think Stonehenge used to be a giant graveyard! In 2013, they found the cremated remains of 50,000 bones, the majority belonging to adult males, dating to 3000-2500 BC. It's the biggest known cemetery from the 3rd millennium BCE in all of Britain.

Stonehenge is enclosed by a big circular ditch that is 6 feet deep, with special tools made from deer antlers. You can actually see some of these tools in the exhibition today. The ditch was the probably first thing built. Antler picks and bones of cattle and deer are deposited at the bottom, already centuries old when they were placed inside.

We don't know for sure who built Stonehenge. Different groups of people probably used it over thousands of years for ceremonial purposes, and some of them might have come from other places like Wales or even the Mediterranean regions, based on DNA analysis of the bodies buried nearby.

People broke many of the original sarsens and bluestones apart and took some of the stones away, probably during the Roman and medieval ages. The ground has also been disturbed by digging since the 16th century - George Villiers dug here in 1620 looking for treasure while Charles Darwin dug 2 holes to study earthworms.

Modern-day Druidic societies claim Stonehenge as their temple. But it's not really clear if the original Druids had anything to do with it. The first such society, the Ancient Order of Druids, was formed in 1781. There are a lot more Druid groups now, especially with the decline of conventional religious beliefs.