Megaliths

📖 In short

Megaliths are very old monuments built thousands of years ago from giant stones. People stood the stones up in rows or circles, or built rooms with them to bury their dead. The most famous is Stonehenge in England.

🤩 Did you know?

Most of these monuments were built in Europe between 4000 and 1500 BC.
A single stone weighs roughly 23 to 91 tonnes.
Stonehenge is on Salisbury Plain in England.
A big stone standing alone is called a “menhir”.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 Very heavy stones

In some of these monuments a single stone weighs more than ten elephants! People had no machines or trucks, so how did they move them? Maybe by rolling them on tree trunks and pulling them with ropes, with hundreds of people working together.

🔍 Stonehenge

Stonehenge is a circle of big standing stones, with flat stones laid across some of them like doorways. On the longest day of the year the sun rises at an exact spot between its stones.

💡 Long rows

Near the village of Carnac in France, thousands of standing stones are lined up in long rows stretching more than 3 kilometers.

🎯 A mystery not yet solved

Scientists don't know exactly why these monuments were built. Maybe they were places of worship, places for watching the sun and moon, or for remembering the dead.