The next phase began with the arrival of the Bluestones, somewhere around 2 400 BC. These stones, weighing up to four tonnes, were sacred to the Beaker people, so called for the distinctive pottery found in their graves. The Beakers were responsible for the stone stages of Stonehenge; they were in prehistory between 2 400 BC and 1 800 BC, a transitional people between the end of the New Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age. They were travellers who sought metals, and the Preseli mountains of South Wales had special significance for them. These mountains, 130 miles from the monument site, were the source of the Bluestones, which came from ten sites within an area of a few kilometres. There is reason to suppose that some of them were erected in a circle elsewhere, either in Wales or on Salisbury Plain, before their final resting place was reached.

A henge has two meanings; in the archaeological sense it is a bank and ditch enclosure, found only in Britain. The German word “hengen” means a gallows or a hanging place. In both of these contexts Stonehenge qualifies. The first stage, some five millenia ago was a bank and ditch enclosure, and the great Sarsen Circle, called in legend “The Giant's Dance” resembles a stone gallows. Sometime between 3 000 BC and 2 800 BC the first stage of the monument began. It was a great, circular bank, six feet high with an opening in the direction of the sunrise. The ditch, unique in a henge enclosure, was outside the bank. It may have had practical rather than ritual significance, and its purpose solely that of a quarry for the chalk mound.

To appreciate Stonehenge properly it needs to be approached leaving the twentieth century and its modern expectations behind, and viewed through the eyes of our imagination.