Thousands of people made the pilgrimage to Stonehenge in southern England for the summer solstice and to greet the sunrise on Wednesday, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
A seemingly curious alliance of druids, pagans, hippies, local residents, tourists and costumed witches and wizards are gathering around a prehistoric stone circle on a plain in southern England to express their devotion to the sun, or to have some communal fun.
For the thousands making the pilgrimage to Stonehenge, approximately 80 miles southwest of London, it is more thanFor druids, modern-day spiritualists linked to the ancient Celtic religious order, Stonehenge has a centuries-long importance, and they will be there to perform dawn rituals around the solstice in their traditional white robes. It’s effectively all about the cycle of life, of death and rebirth.started at 7 p.m. Tuesday and ran through 8 a.m. Wednesday.
It’s a symbol of British culture and history and remains one of the country’s biggest tourist draws, despite the seemingly permanent traffic jams on the nearbyStonehenge, one of the world’s most famous prehistoric monuments and a World Heritage Site, was built on the flat lands of Salisbury Plain in stages starting 5,000 years ago, with the unique stone circle erected in the late Neolithic period about 2,500 B.C.
English Heritage, a charity that manages hundreds of historic sites, notes several explanations — from Stonehenge being a coronation place for Danish kings, a druid temple, a cult center for healing, or an astronomical computer for predicting eclipses and solar events.
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