Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Stonehenge trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Stonehenge trivia for anyone who has stood on Salisbury Plain at dawn, watched a documentary about the bluestones, or just wondered how 25-ton stones got there four and a half thousand years ago. This quiz covers the monument itself: the sarsen circle and its mortise-and-tenon lintels, the trilithons, the Heel Stone, the Aubrey holes and the solstice alignments that draw crowds every June. It then follows the stones back to their sources, from the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire to the 2024 discovery that the Altar Stone came from north-east Scotland, and forward through the people who studied and fought over the site: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Merlin, William Stukeley and his Druids, Charles Darwin and his earthworms, Cecil Chubb's whim at a 1915 auction, the free festivals, the Battle of the Beanfield and the cancelled A303 tunnel. There is even room for Carhenge in Nebraska. Questions range from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. Try our ancient history, archaeology and England quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in which English county?
Wiltshire
It lies about two miles west of Amesbury, in the densest cluster of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England.
Q 02What is the name for the large sandstone blocks that form Stonehenge's outer ring and trilithons?
Sarsens
Each upright is around 13 feet high and weighs about 25 tons; the smaller inner stones are the bluestones.
Q 03What joinery technique, borrowed from woodworking, holds Stonehenge's lintels onto the uprights?
Mortise and tenon
The lintels are also linked to each other with tongue-and-groove joints, a combination unique among monuments of the era.
Q 04What is a trilithon?
Two uprights topped by a single lintel
Five of them stand in a horseshoe at the centre of Stonehenge, the largest almost 25 feet tall.
Q 05Stonehenge is aligned to the sunrise on which day of the year?
The summer solstice
The reverse alignment marks sunset on the winter solstice, which some archaeologists think was the more important event.
Q 06Roughly when was the great circle of sarsen stones erected?
Between 2600 and 2400 BC
The earliest bank and ditch date to about 3100 BC, and the last construction, the Y and Z holes, to around 1600 BC.
Q 07In which year was Stonehenge added to UNESCO's World Heritage list?
1986
It had already been a legally protected scheduled monument since the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882.
Q 08Which organisation manages Stonehenge on behalf of the Crown Estate?
English Heritage
The National Trust owns the surrounding downland but not the stones themselves.
Q 09The bluestones are generally accepted to have come from which upland area, 150 miles away?
The Preseli Hills
A megalithic quarry found at Craig Rhos-y-felin in Pembrokeshire in 2011 is the most probable source of some of the stones.
Q 10In which country is Pembrokeshire, the source of the bluestones?
Wales
They lie almost entirely within Pembrokeshire, mostly inside the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.
Q 11Research published in 2024 traced the Altar Stone to which region, some 430 miles from Stonehenge?
North-east Scotland
The Curtin University team matched fragments to the Orcadian Basin, implying links between southern England and the far north.
Q 12The 30 great uprights of Stonehenge's outer circle came from a quarry 16 miles north in which woodland?
West Woods
A 1995 experiment saw more than 100 people drag a 40-ton slab on a sleigh across the Marlborough Downs.
Q 13How many sarsen uprights formed the complete outer circle?
30
The full monument would have needed 75 stones: 60 for the circle and 15 for the trilithon horseshoe.
Q 21Who bought Stonehenge at auction in 1915 and later gave it to the nation?
Cecil Chubb
He paid 6,600 pounds for Lot 15 on a whim, reportedly to keep the stones out of overseas hands, and was made a baronet in 1919.
Q 22How much did the winning bidder pay for Stonehenge at the 1915 auction?
6,600 pounds
That is roughly 587,000 pounds in today's money; his deed of gift capped admission at one shilling.
Q 23On what date was Stonehenge formally handed to the nation by its last private owner?
26 October 1918
Just over two weeks later the First World War armistice was signed.
Q 14How many Aubrey holes ring the inside of the enclosure bank?
56
They are named after John Aubrey, the 17th-century antiquary thought to have first spotted them, and may once have held a bluestone circle.
Q 15The outlying monolith over which the midsummer sun rises, seen from inside the circle, is known as what?
Heel Stone
Older names include 'Friar's Heel' and 'Sun-stone'.
Q 16In the folk tale explaining the name 'Friar's Heel', who threw the stone that struck the friar?
The Devil
The Devil had bought the stones from a woman in Ireland and boasted that nobody would ever know how they got there.
Q 17Which 12th-century writer claimed Merlin brought the stones from Ireland?
Geoffrey of Monmouth
His History of the Kings of Britain says giants had originally carried the healing stones from Africa to Ireland.
Q 18In the medieval legend, who led the 15,000 men sent with Merlin to fetch the Giants' Ring from Ireland?
Uther Pendragon
Uther was Arthur's father; the stones were re-erected in Britain exactly as they had stood.
Q 19Which 17th-century architect believed Stonehenge had been built by the Romans?
Inigo Jones
Later antiquaries such as William Stukeley preferred to credit the Druids.
Q 20Which naturalist experimented at Stonehenge in 1877 on how fast objects sink into soil, for a book about worms?
Charles Darwin
The book was The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms.
Q 24Which family had owned the Stonehenge estate since 1824 before the 1915 auction?
Antrobus
Sir Cosmo Gordon Antrobus put it up for sale after inheriting the estate from his brother.
Q 25Which archaeologist led the Stonehenge Riverside Project, calling the site a 'domain of the dead'?
Mike Parker Pearson
He proposed that nearby Durrington Walls was the land of the living, with the River Avon linking the two.
Q 26Animal teeth suggest up to how many people gathered at Durrington Walls for solstice feasts around 2500 BC?
4,000
Parker Pearson thinks the site was the builders' camp; the animals had been slaughtered nine or fifteen months after spring birth.
Q 27A 2013 excavation recovered cremated remains of how many individuals from Aubrey Hole 7?
63
William Hawley had dug them up in 1920, thought them unimportant, and reburied them all together in 1935.
Q 28The bluestones may have first stood in a dismantled circle at which Welsh site?
Waun Mawn
The circle was the same 110-metre size as the first Stonehenge, and one stone hole matched a Stonehenge bluestone 'like a key in a lock'.
Q 29What images are carved on sarsen stone 53?
A dagger and axeheads
There are 14 axeheads on that stone alone; laser scanning suggests they resemble late Bronze Age weapons.
Q 30The 'Amesbury Archer', buried near Stonehenge around 2300 BC, grew up in which region?
The Alpine foothills of Germany
His grave, found in 2002, held England's oldest known gold objects; the press dubbed him the King of Stonehenge.