This attractive book is the latest publication produced and marketed by Stonehenge’s official guardians. It began in 1919 with a fat little booklet written by Frank Stevens, FSA and illustrated by Heywood Sumner, FSA, on sale at Stonehenge within months of the monument’s gifting to the nation. Newly published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, it had first been privately printed in 1913. It was replaced by a standard issue government guide in 1953, written by Robert Newall, FSA, which continued for decades in revised editions. Throughout most of the last century, visitors to Stonehenge were offered a guide with origins predating almost all excavations at the site and (although Newall had been present during major work in the 1920s), becoming ever more out of date.
The first significant change came in 2005, when English Heritage, now responsible for Stonehenge, launched a well-illustrated colour guide written by Julian Richards, FSA, who had directed fieldwork in the landscape in the 1980s. The offer has since multiplied, boosted by the opening of a visitor centre in 2013. You can still buy Richards’ guide, reissued in 2026 in smaller format and lightly updated. You can also find a 280-page illustrated book by the same author, Stonehenge: the story so far (Richards Reference Richards2007) published first by English Heritage in 2007 and now, revised, by Historic England. English Heritage’s website contains a great deal of further illustrated material, some of it already showing its age. It includes an interactive 360-degree photographic view from inside the stones, with short pop-up videos presented by Susan Greaney, FSA, at the time of recording, English Heritage’s senior properties historian.
Greaney is now a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Exeter. She used Stonehenge as a case study for her doctoral thesis, was lead archaeologist and curator for the Stonehenge visitor centre and continues to research and publish about Neolithic Britain; she has long been well positioned to follow Stonehenge investigations, of which there have been a great deal since 2005 and that colour guide. She has used her time well. This latest publication from English Heritage is an up-to-date introduction to the site, and its wider context and current thought. In a book dominated by superb photography, the text is deceptively smart.
Photography first (there are no site plans, for those you will have to buy the guidebook). A full page of credits testifies to good picture research, but one name dominates: James O Davies. Lead photographer at Historic England, master of slow looking and architectural compositions, Davies contributes forty or fifty pages of photos taken in all seasons and light conditions. Many of them are new and full page or larger, and fourteen are from the air. There are two quite lovely cover gatefolds. You have to be alert to spot Davies’ presence, however: he is credited simply for ‘Principal photography’. I was able to identify his images only by eliminating all the others singled out for named attribution. He deserves a higher profile when the book is reprinted.
Greaney’s text is informed, clear and arranged in easy-to-read short segments, with introductory summaries and subheadings. Mostly it is about the monument and its immediate landscape, told chronologically from Before Stonehenge (Mesolithic 9700–4000 bc and Early Neolithic 4000–3200 bc), through The Time of Stonehenge (three sections, 3000–2400 bc), to the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age (two sections, 2400–1500 bc). In five sections, After Stonehenge then covers the Middle Bronze Age, Romans, medieval myths, antiquaries, excavations and free festivals, up to the present. There are occasional wider excursions, into global context (cue Göbekli Tepe, pyramids and the Italian Ice Man) and the workings of ancient societies.
Stonehenge, says Greaney, is ‘no longer … a place of mystery, but a place of discovery’. Her goal, she says, is to ‘allow the archaeology to tell the story’. The publication of many excavations and surveys of recent years at and around Stonehenge, and developments in understanding prehistoric Britain, allow her to describe both a monument with a complex history of building and meanings, and wider events and societies, with breadth, wonder and empathy unimaginable a generation ago. That is some achievement for a coffee-table book.
It’s not perfect. A reader attempting to match dates or eras in the text to a six-page Timeline appendix (would only reviewers try this?) could be confused by entries such as Middle Neolithic (3400–3000 bc) and Early Monument (3000–2600 bc) in the text, and Middle Neolithic (3200–2800 bc) in the Timeline. A gorgeous gatefold illustration showing Stonehenge being built, drawn by Bob Marshall, has some scenes that appear to differ with engineering suggestions in the text: as Marshall sides with proposals in my own book, How to Build Stonehenge (Pitts Reference Pitts2022), I naturally approve of his work.
Someone buying The story of an icon ahead of their first visit to Stonehenge, and then expecting the remote rural grandeur and beauty it shows, would be hit hard by the reality of intense tourism, roads and fences – a long-term management issue with which some may have little patience. A different concern reflects more on the status of Stonehenge thinking. Greaney conveys a vision of Neolithic and Bronze Age societies so well, not just as a succession of monuments and events, but as critically imagined living communities, that the final part – After Stonehenge – suffers by comparison. Here we have traditional big-man, one-thing-after-another history, with little of the deeper trends and forces that a more theoretically engaged overview would offer. In this area, the archaeological profession still has work to do.
