https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/a-brief-history-of-stonehenge-by-aubrey-burl/

I’ve long been fascinated by megalithic monuments in general, and Stonehenge is a very special case, one of the most elaborate stone circles of northwestern Europe. We visited in 2016; it’s pretty crowded these days.

Aubrey Burl was the doyen of British megalithic studies, publishing his first book on stone circles in the 1970s and inspiring many other enthusiasts. This was his last book, published in 2007 when he was already 81 (he died in the early weeks of the 2020 pandemic, aged 93).

It’s a generally lucid explanation of the archaeological sequence of the development of Stonehenge, which (as you possibly know) went through several evolutions over a period of 1500 years from 3100 to 1600 BC, the massive trilithons coming in around 2500 BC, though built on a smaller but much older alignment of stones from maybe 8000 BC. These are barely imaginable timelines on a human scale. There are a couple of churches across the Dijle valley from here which have been in use since the eleventh century, and the oldest church in Belgium claims to have been founded in 823 AD. Across the border, the Protestant church in Trier was built as the emperor’s throne room in 1700, and the Roman gate of the city still stands. But these are individual buildings, rather than an entire sacred landscape. Burl is very good at giving us a sense of how Stonehenge and its setting would have seemed to the people who built it, and rebuilt it.

He also starts well, with a review of how Stonehenge came to popular attention 300 years ago, and often refers back to earlier writers. There’s one chapter, unfortunately, where the prose becomes rambling and disjointed, and it’s the most controversial chapter, in which Burl insists that the older standing stones (the ‘bluestones’) were not transported to Wiltshire from Wales by prehistoric humans, but by Ice Age glaciers long before. This is not well supported by the known evidence of known glaciation, even according to Burl’s own account.

Another curious lapse is his attempt to demonstrate that there is a prehistoric substratum of words in Welsh, Breton and Cornish which are unrelated to other neighbouring languages. He seems to be completely unaware of two centuries of research into Indo-European, which has demonstrated that quite a lot of the Celtic words that he sees as independent are in fact related to similar words in English and Latin: for example Welsh rhew and Cornish rew, meaning ‘ice’, come from the same root as English ‘freeze’ and Latin pruina, meaning ‘frost’; and more crucially for his argument, Welsh haul and Breton heol, meaning ‘sun’, are definitely related to Latin sol. It’s an odd lacuna on Burl’s part.

Apart from that, I found it a fascinating read. ( )

The author passed away while I was reading this. A fascinating, science based overview of the site, not without poetry in the descriptions.
I'll re-post the obituary from the Quietus
https://thequietus.com/articles/28150-aubrey-burl-obituary ( )

more than you wanted to know about Stonehenge and surrounding area, posits shift from moon orientation to sun

I found this a dry but interesting book, which brought together the history and many of the theories on the circle. I thought the biggest shortfall was the lack of diagrams and/or drawings showing what he was talking about. He had lots of old diagrams, from early archaeologists, but without the numbering or the comprehensive view that he tries to explain. ( )

Bit dull and technical in many places. The historical chapters were the best, but did seem to repeat a fair bit of material. I thought the author's theory about taking the origins of Celtic words back to derive the language of Stonehenge's builders was a bit far fetched. There also seemed to be some errors, e.g. in the facing of long barrows, where the table on p99 does not match the plan on p96. On the other hand, the author is convincing in showing that the bluestones were not transported from south Wales, as has been believed for the last 80 or more years. All in all, disappointing. ( )