There are many things one can buy at an auction, especially if you're looking for a good antique. Dining chairs, for example. Maybe a nice set of curtains. When the barrister Cecil Chubb attended an auction in Salisbury, Wiltshire in 1915, his sights were set on something domestic. But in that feverish atmosphere of the auction house – a place where it's easy to get swept up in the thrill of bidding and fear of losing out on something one of a kind – he made an unexpected purchase. He bought Stonehenge for £6,600 (about £680,000 by today's value). It happened, he said, "on a whim". Chubb, who was the last private owner of Stonehenge, only laid claim to the site for three years. In 1918 he passed the stones into public ownership, where they have remained ever since under the care of English Heritage.

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Built 4,500 years ago, Stonehenge is one of the most famous prehistoric monuments in the world. It is a slab of ancient history that looms over Salisbury Plain, as old as the Pyramids and equally fascinating as a feat of construction. It is instantly recognisable: the hulking sarsens, the improbable lintels. This horseshoe of stone – described by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) as "a forest of monoliths" – commands the landscape for miles around.

Described as "a forest of monoliths", Stonehenge continues to fascinate, millennia after it was constructed (Credit: English Heritage)

Given both its age and its scale, it's unsurprising that Stonehenge has been such a constant source of intrigue and obsession, as well as artistic inspiration. From archaeologists to druids, historians to poets, ardent pilgrims to the occasional impulse buyer, its mysterious origins and powerful material presence have captivated people not just for centuries, but millennia. It is a place that immediately poses questions. Where are the stones from? (The short answer: the smaller ones, known as bluestones, are from Preseli in South-West Wales, 220 miles away, while the larger ones originate from Marlborough Downs, which is 20 miles from Stonehenge.) How were they transported and arranged? (Extraordinary human effort, potentially involving land, sea, sledges, wooden tracks and jointed timbers.) What was the purpose of it all?

This last question remains the most open-ended. It is one that the British Museum's current exhibition The World of Stonehenge seeks, at least in part, to answer. By taking a comprehensive look at the artefacts created and materials used by the people from the Neolithic era through to the Bronze Age, the exhibition seeks to unravel the complex meaning of these standing stones. Across the course of the show, Stonehenge figures as many things: a stake claimed to the land, a space for community and ritual, a burial site, art on a vast scale, a monument with great cosmological significance, a magnetic draw for visitors from afar. The show argues for Stonehenge as a place of shifting significance, added to over time and reflecting the extraordinary transformation brought about by the technological transition from stone to metalworking.

"There's something about the way Stonehenge has come to crystallise or symbolise a sense of the deep past," lead curator Neil Wilkin explains, when asked about why the site continues to exert such a hold on us today. This is a past before written records, before easy documentation, a past that marries "the natural and historical" with the speculatively ceremonial and spiritual. The exhibition compares Stonehenge with several other stone circles, as well as Seahenge: a timber circle with a tree stump at its heart built in 2049BC on a Norfolk saltmarsh, which was rediscovered in 1998. Excavated to preserve it from the elements, the timbers are currently on show in the British Museum, ancient wood standing to attention in the gloom.

The power of a stone circle

Although megalithic stone circles appear in other locations including France, they are mostly concentrated in the UK (recent news has focused on Stonehenge's parallels with elaborate pebble circles in Japan). "The henge monument, which is a ditch and bank, those monuments are exclusive to Britain and Ireland, which is a very curious thing – and difficult to explain," Wilkin says. The curiousness of the stone circle has made it an attractive meeting point for all sorts of people, and all sorts of purposes.

Artists Lally Macbeth and Matthew Shaw run Stone Club: a place "for stone enthusiasts to congregate, to muse, and most importantly to stomp to stones". Founded in 2021, they put on events, sell merchandise, organise outings, and encourage a general enthusiasm for all things prehistoric. "The second rule of stone club is that it's for everyone," Macbeth explains. "We really felt like it had to be a space which is completely inclusive, whatever viewpoint you were coming from." What this means in practise is that they are an open house for geologists and folklorists alike. Whether you want to learn about strata formation or hear about how your local circle might be composed of women petrified as punishment for dancing on the sabbath, all are equally welcome.

It is this unique blend of myth and history that also make stone circles such resonant settings for artists, writers, photographers, filmmakers and musicians. From the stark lines of Stonehenge to the lumpen sprawl of nearby Avebury, via the many circles scattered up and down Britain and Ireland, from Cornwall to Cork to Orkney to Shropshire, what these places symbolise goes far beyond a mere memento of the past. Many of these smaller monuments come with their own complex stories: of witches, of magical properties, of secret rituals, of metamorphosed bodies and ley lines and between spaces where the veil separating our present world from other times and places grows thin. Our lack of definitive knowledge over how these circles were originally used only heightens the drama. Imagination rushes in to fill the hollows, age-old explanations for these strange structures solidified into a history that blurs the factual and folkloric. "I think we quite like to play with that idea of drifting between magic and reality," Macbeth adds. "Creating experiences that do feel slightly otherworldly, but then bringing [it] back down to the earth and to the stone."

A stone circle is a useful dramatic device. It is visually striking. Often eerily so. There's a reason why so many stories involving stone circles focus on the idea of people turned to rock. The stones stand, gathered like figures. Tracing some of the lumps and clefts in the sarsens at Avebury, for example, it's easy to find yourself searching for faces. Although such circles are built from the natural world and speak to its rhythms – its seasons, its solstices – they also exist in opposition to the landscape. Their appearance is surreal, sometimes foreboding. Without beginning or end, they suggest all manner of strange possibilities enclosed within their compass.

A timber circle surrounding an upturned tree root, Seahenge was rediscovered in 1998 due to shifting sands (Credit: Wendy George)

Certain genres of work have made particularly effective use of the stone circle. Folk horror, with its revelations of dark and savage things lurking beneath the bucolic rural surface, is especially apt territory. In cult classic movie The Wicker Man (1973), which is set on a remote Scottish island, a circle complete with Stonehenge-style lintels forms the backdrop for naked frolicking and ominous processions. A relic from a pre-Christian world, the stone circle is a ripe reminder of older, pagan beliefs. Though such theories are no longer given much credence, the image of ritual sacrifice still lingers: stones reimagined as alters. In the tragic denouement of Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess's final resting place before she is arrested and executed is "an oblong slab" at Stonehenge. "Did they sacrifice to God here?" she asks her unhappy husband Angel Clare before she falls asleep. "No," he answers. "I believe to the Sun." There she dreams peacefully for a short while, a sacrifice herself to the unwavering cruelties of Victorian misogyny and morality.

Fantasy also frequently features stone circles as portals or sites of supernatural concentration. Take the hugely successful book-turned-TV series Outlander, with its fictive Craigh Na Dun stones that plunge protagonist Claire Randall – a World War Two-era nurse – into 18th-Century Scotland. The stones are a porous place, allowing movement through time for those blessed or cursed enough to tap into their powers at charged times of the year (the TV pilot takes place over Samhain, the Celtic festival we have since replaced with Halloween). There are plenty of precedents for this, including Five Children and It author E Nesbit's story Accidental Magic (1912), which imagines its protagonist Quentin falling asleep on the altar-stone at Stonehenge, and waking up in Atlantis. It's the same fantasy that makes us hope for snowy forests at the back of the wardrobe or a Wonderland down a rabbit hole: a promise of unexpected escape, a mundane doorway to another world.

Children's literature is especially attuned to the bends and loops of chronology and geography. Penelope Lively's The Whispering Knights (1971), Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), and Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) all feature stony settings that blend past, present and distant myth. Arthurian Knights and evil enchantresses are awoken from slumber. The contemporary world is threatened by long dormant evils. We might be able to travel back through history, but, if it finds the right passage, history can also come looking for us.

Children of the Stones was about a village built inside a megalithic stone circle, which exists in a time rift (Credit: ITV)

Similarly, the ITV series Children of the Stones (1977), which is often described as one of the scariest children's TV shows ever produced, treats time as a circle rather than a straight line. Filmed in Avebury, it follows the misadventures of an astrophysicist and his son who move to the village of Milbury. There they encounter an oddly happy, vacant population, and eventually uncover a complicated secret involving ancient pagan rituals, black holes, brainwashing and a time rift that brings the world to the brink of destruction again and again. The stones themselves are natural magnets, focusing and amplifying negative energy. Their power proves nearly impossible to escape.

There is something to be said for the post-War boom in artwork and entertainment featuring stone circles. In his essay The Edge of the Ceiling, Alan Garner writes about the profound effect of World War Two on his childhood and later artistic sensibilities: "Daily life was lived on a mythic plane: of absolute Good against absolute Evil; of the need to endure, to survive whatever had to be overcome." Stone circles are themselves a sort of mythic plane: a symbol of endurance, as well as a handy setting for vast, existential battles between Good and Evil. But in reaching back into the deep past, to a place where kings and monsters co-exist, they also sidestep the horrors of more recent events. They offer not just the threat of history repeating itself, but also the opportunity to redeem the world once more.

What so many of these books, films and shows tap into is the idea of stone as a vessel. In these works, stone becomes something that can hold not just magic or energy – talismans on a vast scale – but time itself. There is an immediate truth to this. Strip away the fantastical parts, and what you have is an accurate reflection of a material that carries its history in its make-up. Wandering around the Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum, it is clear how much one can glean from stone. It's not just about how it is shaped, whether as a sculpture or a spearhead, but what it betrays of itself: its mineral content, its age, its precise geographical origins. It's how we now know that those who built Stonehenge found a way to transport those Welsh bluestones more than 200 miles to the Wiltshire countryside. We just had to learn to read the evidence.

On loan for the first time for the British Museum show, Seahenge is arranged in a 6.6m-diameter circle, and some of the oak posts are 3m tall (Credit: Norfolk Museums Service)

The properties of stone have always been important. "It's not enough, in some ways, to just call it stone, because it's clear that the different qualities and different sources were really meaningful," Wilkin explains, saying that working on the exhibition has given him a much deeper appreciation for the ways in which stone has been used and understood over millennia. "People really did value the stories or the mythologies that might have been bound up in the sources of stones and their properties."

We are surrounded every day by history. From our trees to our cities, our language to our very atoms, we live in a present tense formed from the building blocks of the past. Perhaps a stone circle satisfies our hunger for a deeper connection with what has gone before. "They all possess that liminality," Matthew Shaw tells me. "They were pre-enclosures act, pre-political systems, pre-identification of county lines… Even the sites that have [now] been encroached upon by development still possess this otherness. They're always on the outside." He thinks there's a benefit to that, especially in the face of current political and social turbulence. "You can go there, and you can commune with something that's way older, and survived."

One can't get too sentimental – or superstitious – about these things. Ben Wheatley's black comedy Sightseers (2012) is a macabre reminder of the perils found in tramping the countryside all day writing about ley lines. It captures the slightly gloomy British preoccupation with the ancient and mystical: less flower crowns, more grey caravans and soggy sandwiches. Still, there is darkly funny significance in the scene where Chris, aspiring writer and burgeoning serial killer, bludgeons a Barbour-clad tourist to death with a rock in a National Trust stone circle in retribution for being told to clean up after his (freshly stolen) dog. The quotidian and the ancient collide again, the cycle of life and death impossible to escape even here.

The World of Stonehenge is at the British Museum until 17 July 2022.

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