Circle of light: how Stonehenge shapes a landscape

Stonehenge is a circle that shapes a landscape. The hills and valleys around it seem to radiate from it. Shaped and mounted between 3,000 and 2,500BC in a powerful architecture of pillar and lintel, its stones define geometry, mathematics, the power of the mind. It has haunted the British imagination. The medieval chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed Merlin brought the stones from Ireland; the romantic artists Blake and Constable powerfully pictured this mystic place Illustration: Patrick Eden /Alamy