Even if you think it will survive, the United Kingdom cannot be what it was. We seek such certainties and identities as we can. The blood of those who built Stonehenge is in our bones. The stones speak of a common past to an uneasy present, and, therefore, of a future.

Burl has given his life to exploring Britain’s standing stones. Here he returns to the series of circles that began to be built on Salisbury Plain around 3000BC. As he says: “Stonehenge was never still. Change was continuous.” But “the ghosts of the ring’s builders are as silent as the circle itself”. So one admires Burl's confidence in hypothesis: “If there were farmsteads then their traces are almost certainly where today’s villages are, in sheltered spots, near water and wood.”

Burl seeks these ghosts, and gives them life. Along the way he excoriates the treatment of the site, the “years of indecision and miserly bureaucracy”. His book would have been even better for a chapter on the context of the monument, supreme among its peers for its lintels alone. That aside, this is a meticulous, comprehensive stone-by-stone account of Stonehenge, written in beautiful prose. The site entered written history in AD1129, when Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum (History of the English) first described it as a wonder. Almost 900 years later, this book renews that claim.

ROSS LECKIE

Robinson, £8.99

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