What makes Stonehenge so special? Some folk are disappointed by the ruins. Nathaniel Hawthorne, visiting the site from his native New England in the mid nineteenth century, wrote that Stonehenge was 'not very well worth seeing… one of the poorest of spectacles; and when complete it must have been even less picturesque than now'. Perhaps, yet most visitors do find the stones awe-inspiring. For some people it is the association, over ten thousand years, of one spot of our planet with humankind's spiritual longings. For others, it is the marvel of the lintels, unique for their time and still breathtaking in their architectural daring. That the monument survived at all is a miracle; over the years some stones were broken and taken away for building projects, while other stones, insufficiently buried, toppled in gales. Yet the temple stands to this day, the names of its gods forgotten and the nature of its rituals a mystery, yet still a shrine for whatever aspirations we cannot answer by technology or human effort. Long may it remain.