The power of awe

Ancient wonders inspire feelings of awe that can help transform your mental health, argues photographer David Abram and scientists, it seems, agree

- David R Abram

The modern Stonehenge 'visitor journey' is surely a far cry from how pilgrims would have experienced the site 4,500 years ago, in its Late Neolithic heyday.

Back then, according to the latest archaeological theories, people would have approached the stones from the woodhenges of Durrington to the east, via the River Avon and a processional pathway that led uphill from the riverbank to the circle itself.

Overlayered by farms, fields and the roaring A303 highway, the chalk 'avenue' is impossible to follow in its entirety on foot today, but you can walk its culminating section over National Trust land from the King Barrow Ridge and down into the dry combe below.

Screened by the slope above, the sarsen trilithons - two large vertical stones supporting a third stone across the top - are not visible at this point. But as you ascend the final section, along the solstitial axis bisecting Stonehenge, they are revealed to dramatic effect.

I'm not a religious person by nature, but the first time I experienced this unveiling, with the stones silhouetted above me against a backdrop of gold-edged cumulus, was a moment I shall remember forever. I fell to my knees, overcome with a feeling that I can only describe as 'awe' - at the scale and power of our ancestors' otherworldly creation, and the glorious setting beneath a sky suffused with sunset colours.

That, of course, was precisely the effect intended by the site's Neolithic architects. Not yet having mastered the mysteries of Gothic vaulted ceilings, as the Normans would do 4,000 years later at nearby Salisbury Cathedral, they exploited the properties of the surrounding landscape to intensify the experience of arriving at the stone circle.

But why? The answer is hinted at in the dictionary definition of awe as "a feeling of reverential respect, mixed with fear or wonder produced by that which is sublime, or extremely powerful".