Stonehenge Clockface Solstitial Alignments

 

Modified Stonehenge Plan based on Stonehenge Plan by Anthony Johnson, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Stonehenge encodes both winter solstice sunrise and winter solstice sunset in its architecture. The primary axis aligns to midwinter sunset (and midsummer sunrise), while the deliberately skewed central trilithon (stones 55–56 with lintel 156) and Altar Stone align to midwinter sunrise (and midsummer sunset).

The Clockface Model

Imagine the completed outer sarsen circle divided into sixty equal parts, thirty stones and thirty gaps, exactly like the minute marks on a clockface.

Place the main solstitial axis vertically: midsummer sunrise at 12 o’clock, midwinter sunset at 6 o’clock.

At Stonehenge’s latitude (≈51° N) in c. 2500 BCE, the direction to midwinter sunrise was offset from the main axis by approximately 81°.

On the same sixty-point clockface, draw a straight chord from the 15-minute mark to the 42-minute mark. This chord, and other parallel ones, form an angle of exactly 81° with the vertical diameter. The great central trilithon and Altar Stone were oriented along precisely this chord, thereby also aligning the monument to midwinter sunrise in one direction and midsummer sunset in the opposite direction.

By treating the outer sarsen circle as a sixty-point clockface, the builders embedded both winter solstice directions into the monument using only simple straight lines (chords).

Midwinter sunset lies along the vertical 12–6 axis; midwinter sunrise lies along the 15-to-42-minute chord at 81° to it.