In the heart of the south west of England  the chalk plateau of the Salisbury Plain  

stretches out over 300 square  miles as far as the eye can see.  

As you step through this landscape, you're walking  in the footsteps of some of our most ancient  

ancestors. Amesbury, a picturesque town thatched  town on the southern fringes of the Plain,  

is the oldest continuously occupied  settlement in the United Kingdom.  

But some of the most dramatic evidence of our  deep history lies just west of Amesbury. There  

stands a ring of enormous stones casting  their shadows over the Plain. The sheer  

physicality of the structure is staggering.  Each stone is said weigh around 25 tonnes.  

This is Stonehenge and it's part of  the most complex network of neolithic  

and bronze age monuments in Britain,  including over 100 burial mounds.

Stonehenge is one of the most iconic  prehistoric sites in the world, if not  

*the* most. Even before the construction of the  first enclosure on the site some 5000 years ago,  

there's evidence of bands of mesolithic  hunter-gatherers in the area. They left  

their mark on the landscape in the form of huge  pine totem poles that were raised near the site.

Stonehenge has been several phases of  construction but the great trilithons,  

these fantastic stone uprights with  the single stone lintel across the top,  

were erected around about 2500 BC or 4500  years ago. This place must have been built  

for a spiritual purpose. While awe-inspiring, it  serves no obvious practical function in terms of  

being a house or a defensive structure.  It marks the passing of the year and the  

changing seasons which would have had a huge  significance for the people at the time.

Over the centuries, countless myths and  legends have grown up around Stonehenge.  

Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the  12th century, tells us that the stones  

were actually originally from Africa  and then transported to Ireland  

by giants. They were finally moved to  their current site through the skill of  

the wizard Merlin and were said to have been  erected over the graves of British warriors.

The stones here tell their own remarkable  story. The larger stones, or Sarsens,  

are made from local sandstone. However  the smaller ones, known as bluestones,  

were quarried 140 miles away in the Preseli  mountains in Wales. It's astounding to think  

that these colossal pieces of rock we  see today travelled for so many miles.

There are countless theories about the function of  Stonehenge but it's certainly a place of the dead.  

From the earliest phases, human remains have  been buried here, sometimes as cremations and  

then later as inhumations where a body itself  is buried. It's even been suggested that the  

stones themselves might represent effegies of the  ancestors. This association with the dead is not  

just limited to the site itself but it stretches  out into the surrounding fields with monuments  

to the dead filling the countryside in the form  of these fantastic barrow cemeteries. So really  

Stonehenge must not be looked at outside of this  wider context. It exists as part of a huge ritual  

landscape and we're finding out more about this  landscape every year and we're even uncovering  

new monuments, some of them on a breathtaking  scale, literally dwarfing Stonehenge itself.

In keeping with Stonehenge's  rich history of ritual,  

we've selected the famous song of John Barleycorn.  It's a primitive tale which contains within it the  

instructions for making beer told via the murder  of a man who personifies the crop of barley.  

However, Barleycorn's brutal assault  also has a deeper meaning. The song  

charts the corn god's cycle of life,  death, transformation and regeneration  

as well as documenting the important role the  brew held in the community in centuries past.