Last summer I went with some friends to visit a thirty-five-hundred-year-old stone burial mound in southern England, a site known as the West Kennet Long Barrow.

The sky is overcast, threatening rain. We walk up a hill along a path through a farmer’s field, past chamomile and red poppies on the edge of an expanse of ripening wheat. One of our companions notes that the hedgerows here have gone since last he visited.

At the top of the hill huge standing stones, eight-to-ten feet high, guard the entrance to a long, low shelter made of more gigantic stones. We enter; a central corridor leads to a sort of main chamber at the end; on each hand are two side chambers. The air is cool, slightly damp, and smells of earth and roots. Someone has left an offering—wild flowers and a small, green apple—on a rough ledge.

We speculate about the people who planned and strained and sweated to bring these stones from miles away, drag them up this hill, and construct walls and a roof. They also aligned the entire structure so that the sun would shine directly between the two entrance stones into the central, inner chamber on the morning of the summer solstice.

The most important members of a local clan were buried here, over a period of about a hundred years. This structure surely implies some kind of division of labor, some kind of organization, of authority, we tell each other. And we also feel sure that these stones tell us of some kind of belief system. Why was it so important to memorialize these dead? Were they thought to be powerful? Dangerous? Were ceremonies performed here? Or was there perhaps a need to insist on the continuity of the dead with the living, a sense that those who are gone remain yet in some way? Do we see here the beginnings of worship?

We cannot possibly know—this place evokes only mystery upon mystery.

Outside again, we look across a tiny valley to a strange, grassy mound called Silbury Hill. It is a pyramid made of chalk and earth, now covered with soft grass, one of the largest artificial hills in Europe. It was constructed a thousand years after the barrow beside us, about the time of Stonehenge, and for no purpose anyone can guess. No one is buried in it, yet there it stands, another monument to labor and . . . what? Superstition? Gratitude? Hope?

We return to the car and drive through rolling hills, occasionally marked by small burial mounds, to Avebury, a carefully groomed little village of hanging flower baskets, neat cottages, a small church with Saxon windows, a long thatched wall along the manor garden, a Renaissance dovecote, shops, a pub—and a ring of standing stones about one thousand feet in diameter encircling its lanes and pastures. These stones were probably put in place by the same Neolithic people who constructed the pyramid of Silbury Hill.

Again we are astounded by the energy and determination required to drag these monoliths—ninety-eight in the outer circle, fifty-six in two smaller, inner circles—to this site and anchor them, upright, in the earth. Sheep graze here now, the church bell tolls, bees buzz among nettles and Queen Anne’s Lace; families stroll by with ice cream and babies in backpacks.

But what can it possibly have been like here fifty-five hundred years ago? Did these stones draw worshipers with offerings? Did they celebrate, perhaps, the first fruits of the harvest? What emotions would these stones, gathered and placed at such cost to these people, have evoked? Fear? Awe? When the pale sun touched these monoliths on the shortest day of the year, did these people worship it, entreat its return?

We linger here in Avebury, ambling through its lanes, poking curiously about the gardens and churchyard, enjoying the contrasts of ancient stones, medieval arches, Victorian almshouses, contemporary shops and vehicles, and timeless sheep. But the sun is westering; we drive on to Stonehenge.

Despite crowds and traffic jams and chain link fences, we are struck by the weight of these stones, transported for hundreds of miles, lifted impossibly to the tops of other stones, set inevitably in a ring on this plain. The sight is so familiar, yet nothing can reduce it to a cliché or silence its voice: we worshiped here, it says. We brought these stones here, to catch the sun on the morning of the summer solstice, the turning of the year. Standing by the Heel Stone, which aligns with the sunrise on the longest day of the year, we ponder the mystery and beauty of the place.

It is mid-July, and the day is long; yet sunset approaches. We head for Salisbury Cathedral, where we arrive in time for Evensong; quietly we enter and sit. As we listen to the reading of the evening Psalm and the responses of the choir our eyes are drawn to the deep blue stained-glass window far away, beyond the altar; it is the "Prisoners of Conscience" window, installed in 1980. It creates an eerie backdrop to the mysterious strains of Poulenc, sung by a visiting choir. As we sing a hymn and recite the Apostle’s Creed, the light of the setting sun streams through the clerestory windows.

The distance from that long, cold barrow is immense—fifty-five hundred years, years of revelation and incarnation, of light shining into the darkest places of the soul and victory declared over Death itself. Yet they have also been years of sorrow and pain, of war and cruelty and loss. And so we also sense a connection, a continuous line, from the makers of the long barrow and Silbury Hill, of Avebury circle and Stonehenge, to this massive cathedral here and now, and these worshipers—a line of humanity trying to make visible through sun and stones their desire to worship; these worshipers who are ourselves, as we, too, thank our God that we are alive, and plead for a blessing upon us and upon our children.

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