22/09/2026
Interesting reading..A place many healers and soothsayers love to be ..
Who would have thought Stonehenge would be so closely guarded 💂♂️ in the 21st century..
On this day in 1915, Stonehenge was sold at auction in Salisbury for £6,600, going under the hammer at the Palace Theatre as Lot 15, described as the stones with about 30 acres of adjoining downland.
The buyer was Cecil Chubb, a local barrister born in nearby Shrewton, the son of a saddler. He had not gone there to buy a prehistoric monument. Accounts differ on his errand, with some saying his wife Mary had sent him for dining chairs and others for curtains, but either way he went home with something rather different.
The stones came on the market through two deaths in quick succession. Lieutenant Edmund Antrobus, heir to the family baronetcy, was killed in Belgium on 24 October 1914 in the opening months of the war. His father, Sir Edmund Antrobus, 4th Baronet, died at Amesbury Abbey the following February, and the estate passed to his younger brother Sir Cosmo, who broke it up into lots for auction.
Stonehenge was in a sorry condition by then. Visitors had been chipping pieces off as souvenirs and scratching their names into the rock for years, timber props held up several of the uprights, and in December 1900 a sarsen stone fell and snapped its lintel in two.
Chubb told a reporter he had thought a Salisbury man ought to buy it, and that was how it was done. In October 1918, sixteen days before the Armistice, he gave Stonehenge to the nation, stipulating that visitors should never pay more than a shilling and that local people should get in free.
He was made a baronet for it and took the motto "Saxis Condita", founded on the stones. Locals preferred their own title for him: Viscount Stonehenge.
