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Hundreds celebrate end of longest night of year at England’s Stonehenge

London, Dec 22 (EFE).- Nearly 1,000 people on Wednesday marked the end of the year’s longest night at England’s prehistoric monument of Stonehenge, in what was the first large gathering allowed at the historical landmark since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

Visitors, who were not subjected to capacity limits, gathered in the middle of the monument’s circular alignment of standing stones at dawn to appreciate the sunrise that marks the official beginning of when daylight will start getting longer in the northern hemisphere.

People familiar with the Druidic pagan sect of ancient Celtic cultures were also present at Stonehenge, a landmark declared as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

“The people who built Stonehenge were agriculturalists, they were growing their own food, they probably knew that the days would get longer, things would get better and with any luck their crops would grow again,” Heather Sebire, the curator of Stonehenge, told BBC Radio Wiltshire.

Several recent studies suggest that the monument was originally erected in the present-day Welsh town of Pembrokeshire, about 150 miles to the west before it was transported to where it stands today on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.

Additionally, a 2018 study published by the University of Oxford explains that human remains buried next to Salisbury’s stones do not match the population’s ancestral lineage of present-day England, but that of west Wales. EFE

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