Stonehenge belongs to the years before the Common Era — dated here to c. 2500 BCE at Salisbury Plain. The date is a scholarly centre of gravity, not a foundation-stone timestamp.
Sarsen trilithons and bluestones from Wales form a solar machine whose midsummer and midwinter axes still work.
How it was made
Mortise-and-tenon joints in stone, a horseshoe of five trilithons, and a landscape of barrows and the Avenue.
Why it still counts as a wonder
It never needed a Greek list to be a wonder: the labour, the alignment, or the survival is enough.
It is Britain’s pyramid: fewer blocks, more sky, endless argument about who and why.
On dating
BCE in this series means years before the traditional birth of Christ, counted backward. A monument listed as c. 2500 BCE may have been founded earlier, rebuilt later, or famous only in one phase. Where ancient writers disagree — as they do for Babylon’s gardens — we say so.
This is story 75 of 100 in The Trend Ledger’s illustrated desk on world wonders raised before the Common Era.