Stonehenge, Wiltshire · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

The huge outer stones at Stonehenge were dragged from twenty miles away, which is impressive enough. The real puzzle is the smaller inner ring, the so-called bluestones. Those came from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, in Wales, roughly 150 miles to the west. Neolithic people quarried them and somehow moved them all that way, each one weighing a few tonnes, around five thousand years ago, and nobody has ever worked out how. It remains the single greatest open question in British prehistory. There is a lovely footnote too. In the 1130s the chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that the wizard Merlin had magically carried the stones to Salisbury Plain from the far west of Britain. For centuries that was dismissed as pure fantasy. Then, not long ago, archaeologists digging at Waun Mawn in the Preseli Hills found the remains of an older stone circle, dismantled and gone, its stones apparently taken away. An old legend of stones moved from the west, and a real emptied circle in exactly the right place. Make of that what you will.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.