Yeah. my daughter is going to London at New Years with her 7th grade class.
Lets not forget carhenge and fridgehenge.
Hey, that’s cool! The sun rises and sets on every solstice where I live too! 
Bolding mine
Hey, that’s where they made the show Children of the Stones which creeped me out when I was a kid.
My mate Trefor and I went to Callanish in April 1986 (shortly after the Chernobyl disaster). The only reason we went was because Trefor remembered seeing the stones on an episode of “Go With Noakes” a few years earlier.
The stones are just there in a field - no entrance fee, no signs saying “keep off” or anything like that so you can walk among them, touch them, climb onto them even, if you want to (we didn’t). And there wasn’t another soul to be seen for miles. I have to admit it was a fairly spiritual experience.
Did you try to count them?
You saw that too??!? Scared the absolute shit out of me, that did. And thus gave me the creeps when I first went to Avebury too. But glad to hear I’m not alone in having seen it. :eek:
Stonehenge! One of the greatest henges in the world. No one has built a henge like that since then. No one knows what the fuck a henge is. But we’ve got one. [/Eddie Izzard]
I actually went to Avebury and not Stonehenge when I visited Salisbury a few years ago. You can’t even get close to Stongehenge anymore, anyway. Avebury was charming and peaceful and you can hug the stones all you want.
On the Great Family Vacation, at age nine, upon seeing the Grand Canyon, it is said that I remarked, “It’s just a big ole hole in the ground.” :rolleyes:
And that makes me long for the extermination of the hooligans who are responsible.
We and another couple drove down to Stonehenge in 1960. We stopped in Salisbury and bought the makings of a picnic and ate it on one of the stones inside the circle. There wasn’t even anyone around except an exceptionally overweight and half asleep British Army Sergeant in a little building.
When you get right down to the meat of the matter, people are no damned good.
I can only assume that you mean the Italian Chapel on Lamb Holm, built by Italian POWs during WWII. Truly an inspirational place – they took a basic Nissen Hut (the US derivative is the Quonset Hut), and made an impressive house of worship / work of art.
However, my personal Orkney “astonishing” vote would still go to Skara Brae.
[BTW, the Undiscovered Scotland website has a plethora of great destinations that Dopers – and others – would enjoy.]
Well y’know that never occurred to me, can’t think why.
Oh wait! perhaps it was 'cos I was in awe of the place.
It was maybe because I knew about Skara Brae, Maes Howe et al but I’d never even heard of the Italian Chapel until I visited it.
You don’t need to make a henge out of stone,
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/celynog/woodhenge.htm
One of my favourites is the The Hurlers in Cornwall, I was there when we had a solar eclipse a few years back, this was a great place to be at the time.
Its not widely known nationally but its a good place to go.
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/celynog/Cornwall/the_hurlers.htm
Here is a henge that is out of the ordinary
Obligitory link to Carhenge
I might be misremembering something off BBC2, but if there’s an alignment with the summer solstice sunrise, the winter solstice sunset is also aligned in the other direction. And vice versa.
There isn’t an “other direction” in Newgrange, is there? It’s a one-entrance hole in a man-made hill. It’s at winter solstice that the sunrise sends a beam of light through the opening above the doorway (not the doorway itself, IIRC) straight down a tiny hallway to hit a particularly cool spot in the back of the “room”. It’s tiny inside, for such a big hill outside. I was in it with maybe a dozen people, and we were rather cozy. You have to make reservations years in advance to be there on the solstice. I was there sometime in March and they simulated the soltstice sunrise with a lightbulb.
And it’s fucking awesome, in the “awe” some sense of the word!
Ummmm, good point. And now I remember, it was BBC/C4 summat-or-other, at a deserted Stonehenge on the winter solstice.
It has been pointed out that the winter solstice was much more important to ancient man then the summer one. If you stuck in the middle of a dark winter it’s good to know when the days will start to lengthen and you can look forward to warmth and the ability to plant your crops. Hence all the other celebrations that took place around the winter solstice, some of which became our Christmas.
Why is it so important to line up with the summer/winter solstice? Seems like a lot of effort when they could just draw a line in the ground.