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The stones used are sarsens or blocks of sandstone, such as are to be found lying about in many parts of the district round Stonehenge. Each trilithon, as the name implies, consists of three stones, two of which are uprights, the third being laid horizontally across the top.
Twyford Church was believed by Dean Kitchen to be built on the site of a Stone circle. Two large "Sarsens" or megaliths lie by the side of the building, and a magnificent yew stands in the churchyard.
The diameters of the outer circles of these two pairs are 350 and 325 feet respectively. In the centre of the northern pair was a cover-slab supported by three uprights, and in the centre of the southern a single menhir. All the stones used are sarsens, such as are strewn everywhere over the district.
These excavations made it clear that the blue-stones had been shaped on the spot, whereas the sarsens had been roughly prepared at the place where they were found, and only finished off on the spot where they were erected. What is the date of the erection of Stonehenge?
These extraordinary stones, thickly scattered over the southern slopes of the Marlborough Downs, are generally known as the "Grey Wethers," or "Sarsens." At one time supposed to have been brought to their present position by glacial action, they are now said to be, and undoubtedly are, the result of denudation.
A circle of sarsens once surrounded the base, but these have almost all disappeared. Pepys repeats an old tradition that a King Seall was buried upon the hill; but it is extraordinary that Avebury and Silbury were less known to our forefathers than Stonehenge, and the first mention of these two places, as being of antiquarian or historic interest, is in the seventeenth century.
The temple is circular and uncovered, and the situation fixt astronomically the grand entrances here, and at Abury, being placed exactly northeast, "as all the gates of the old cavern temples are." How came the stones here, for these sarsens or Druidical sandstones are not found in this neighborhood?
Near the centre is the so-called "altar stone," over fifteen feet long; in a line with this, through the opening of the ellipse, is the "Friar's Heel," a monolith standing outside the circles. The larger stones or "sarsens" are natural to the Marlborough Downs, but the unhewn or "blue" stones are mysterious. They are composed of a kind of igneous rock not found anywhere near Wiltshire.
The height of the trilithons varies from 16 to 21-1/2 feet, the lowest being the two that stand at the open end of the horseshoe, and the highest that which is at the apex. Here again all the stones are sarsens and all are carefully worked.
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