Stonehenge looked like a 15 to 20 mile blast up the A303 from Stourhead on our map, so we hopped in our little street racer and made for it before the afternoon slipped into evening.

We’ve all seen pictures of Stonehenge. They universally depict a huge megalithic ruin standing completely alone on the wide, green Salisbury Plain of Southern Wiltshire. I had always assumed that it was in the middle of nowhere, that we’d have to drive for miles down unpaved country lanes, crossing streams and pastures, dodging lines of druids along the way. Then, finally, it would appear almost magically before us. It would be massive, full of mystery, beckoning us nearer with its ancient spiritual authority.

My first glimpse of Stonehenge wasn’t so dreamy. We were flying down the A303, looking for a road sign, anything that might tell us where the hell we were. Finally, I spotted a strange assemblage of stones a few hundred yards off the road, sandwiched between the A303 and another large “A” road. I was sure it was something else. One of the lesser stone circles that dot the English countryside, perhaps.

Even as we approached the ruin I didn’t recognize it as Stonehenge. The scale and color was all wrong. It shone a stunning greenish blue in the sun, and it wasn’t nearly as big as I had imagined (only about twice my own height).

I speak heresy, I’m sure, when I say that I wasn’t particularly impressed with Stonehenge…at first. We strolled around it a couple times, taking the obligatory photos, sure that the images would be as underwhelming as the place itself seemed.

Perhaps it was because of the trucks motoring loudly down the big roads on either side of us, or maybe it was because of the crowd, but, I had a hard a time feeling even a tinge of the spiritual potency that people so often attribute to the place. I have to admit to leaving a little disappointed.

It wasn’t until we had gotten home and started picking through the hundreds of images we had captured of our trip that I began to understand the magic of Stonehenge. The place is incredibly photogenic…the world seems to shrink around it in pictures. And I noticed something else…the flat gray color of the rocks in our photos (in every photo I’ve ever seen of the place) is nothing like what I saw in person. Somehow our 1,500 dollar camera had utterly failed to pick up the brilliant bluish-green hue that I had seen so clearly. That I had thought so strange when I first laid eyes on it.



I think Stonehenge has imprinted on my subconscious. It’s crept into my dreams with increasing frequency since our return. The dream is always the same, too. I find myself wading through tall grass, across open fields until I see it glowing in that unnatural bluish-green color in the distance. I walk towards it in great anticipation, knowing that when I get there I’ll learn some great secret about my future…about the future in general. I never reach it, though. Instead, I just wake up with a terrible sense of foreboding.

I don’t know, maybe there’s something to Stonehenge after all…