If you typed us stonehenge into Google, you are probably one of two people: an American curious about the surprisingly long list of Stonehenge replicas scattered across the United States, or a US traveler planning to visit the real thing on a UK trip in 2026. This guide is built for both. We’ll start neighbourly with the homegrown American Stonehenges, then dig into the original on Salisbury Plain — how to get there from London, what tickets cost, the best photo spots, and exactly which paperwork American passport holders need before flying.
Why Americans search “us stonehenge”
The phrase has two distinct intents and search engines mash them together. The first group is locals — Americans hunting for a quirky day-trip stop within a few hours of home, the kind of roadside oddity that ends up on Atlas Obscura, Roadside America, or a TikTok road-trip reel. The second group is people who already know the original Stonehenge sits on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, and want a US-friendly briefing before they fly: travel time from London, ticket prices in dollars-equivalent, and whether their American passport is enough on its own (short answer: no — you’ll need a UK ETA from January 2025 onwards).
If you fall into the first camp, scroll the next section and pick a replica that fits your weekend. If you fall into the second, jump straight to “Original Stonehenge UK” — the deep dive on tickets, transport from London, and the 2026 visitor experience starts there. Most readers, in our experience, end up reading both, because once you’ve seen Carhenge in Nebraska you will absolutely want to compare it with the 5,000-year-old Sarsen circle that started the whole obsession.
One useful disambiguation: the search term “us stonehenge” is sometimes typed by people meaning “USA Stonehenge” (a replica in the United States) and sometimes by people meaning “us, Stonehenge” — meaning a Stonehenge trip for ourselves. Both intents land on the same article, and Google’s search results have settled into a pattern that mixes Carhenge listicles with English Heritage ticket pages. The American replicas existed long before the search term — Maryhill went up in 1918 — but the spike in queries since the UK ETA launched in early 2025 suggests a third audience: Americans planning their first post-ETA visit and double-checking everything before they fly. If that’s you, save this page and treat it as your single reference: replicas first, originals second, paperwork last.
Stonehenge replicas in the United States
Counting unofficial monuments and college pranks, the US has more than thirty Stonehenge-inspired sites. Five of them are worth a detour for almost any traveler.
1. Maryhill Stonehenge, Washington
Built by railroad magnate and Quaker pacifist Sam Hill between 1918 and 1929, the Maryhill replica was America’s first World War I memorial — an act of remembrance for the Klickitat County men who died in the trenches. Hill, mistakenly believing the original was a pagan sacrificial altar, wanted his version to symbolize how “humanity is still being sacrificed to the god of war.” Carved from reinforced concrete, the Maryhill circle is a precise full-scale rendering of how Stonehenge looked when it was new — every Sarsen, every lintel, every trilithon in its prehistoric configuration. It sits high on a bluff above the Columbia River about 100 miles east of Portland and is open daily from 7 a.m. to dusk, free of charge. Pair it with the nearby Maryhill Museum of Art for a full-day stop on US-97.
2. Foamhenge, Virginia (now Centreville)
Sculptor Mark Cline built Foamhenge from giant blocks of polystyrene foam in 2004, originally near Natural Bridge, Virginia. After the original site closed in 2017 the entire monument was relocated to Cox Farms in Centreville, in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. The stones look astonishingly real on camera — Cline used the same gray-white tones and weathered surface texture as the genuine article — and at one-quarter the weight, the relocation took about a week with a flatbed truck and a crane. Foamhenge is open during the Cox Farms Fall Festival and on selected spring weekends; admission is bundled with the farm entry.
3. Carhenge, Nebraska
Probably the most photographed of all American Stonehenges, Carhenge stands in a high prairie field outside Alliance, Nebraska. Artist Jim Reinders built it in 1987 as a memorial to his father using thirty-eight vintage American cars — Cadillacs, Chevrolets, and a Plymouth Roadrunner among them — all spray-painted matte gray and arranged in the exact dimensions of the Wiltshire original. The site is open year-round, free, and stays lit until 10 p.m. in summer. The on-site Car Art Reserve adds a few dozen extra sculptures made of old vehicles, and the gift shop sells some of the better Stonehenge memorabilia in the country. Allow ninety minutes if you’re driving Interstate 80 across western Nebraska — it’s a three-hour detour from I-80 but most visitors say it’s worth the wheel-time.
4. Stonehenge II, Texas
Just outside Ingram in the Texas Hill Country, Stonehenge II is a 60-percent-scale plaster-and-concrete rendition built in 1989 by Doug Hill and his neighbour Al Shepperd. After Shepperd’s death the entire monument was relocated stone by stone to the Hill Country Arts Foundation campus. Two Easter Island moai statues stand watch nearby — Shepperd built those too. Admission is free and the grounds are open daily; it’s about ninety minutes northwest of San Antonio and less than ten minutes off State Highway 39.
5. America’s Stonehenge, New Hampshire
The fifth and most controversial entry isn’t a replica at all. America’s Stonehenge in Salem, New Hampshire, is a sprawl of stone chambers, standing stones, and astronomical sightlines that some researchers date to 4,000 years ago and others dismiss as 19th-century farm construction. Visitors can decide for themselves on the self-guided 30-minute trail, which passes a sacrificial table, a speaking tube, and a stone circle aligned with the summer solstice sunrise. Tickets run about $14 for adults; alpaca paddocks on the property keep kids entertained during the longer geology debate.
Original Stonehenge UK — why it’s worth the trip
The American replicas are clever, weird, and often deeply moving — but they are tributes, not the real thing. The Stonehenge that gave them all their name stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, about 90 miles southwest of London. Construction began around 3,000 BC, making it roughly five thousand years old — older than the Pyramids of Giza, older than written language in most of Europe. The Sarsen stones were dragged twenty miles from the Marlborough Downs; the smaller bluestones were hauled an extraordinary 150 miles from the Preseli Hills in Wales using a combination of sledges, log rollers, and rafts. Nobody is entirely sure why. Burial site, calendar, healing centre, ancestor monument, sound-acoustic instrument — every theory has its champions, and English Heritage’s on-site exhibition does a fine job of presenting the evidence without forcing a single interpretation.
For an American who has just driven past Carhenge or Maryhill, the experience is genuinely different in person. The stones are weather-beaten, lichen-streaked, and carry the kind of physical authority that no replica can copy. The site is also hugely improved since the visitor centre opened in December 2013 — a low, glass-fronted building 1.5 miles from the stones themselves, so you cross the prehistoric landscape on foot or by shuttle bus rather than tumbling out of a car park onto the monument. UNESCO designated the wider area, including Avebury and Silbury Hill, as a World Heritage Site in 1986. The whole landscape is dotted with 350 burial mounds, a long avenue, and a cursus monument older than the stones themselves.
Getting to Salisbury from London
The fastest, cheapest, and most pleasant way to reach Stonehenge from London is by train to Salisbury, then the dedicated Stonehenge Tour bus from outside the station. South Western Railway runs services from London Waterloo to Salisbury roughly every thirty minutes; the journey takes 1 hour 25 minutes and an off-peak return booked seven days ahead can land at £35–£45. Buy tickets through the operator’s website or use the Trainline app — for general UK rail planning VisitBritain’s by-rail guide is the simplest English-language overview for American travelers.
From Salisbury station the Stonehenge Tour open-top bus runs every 30 minutes from late March through October and hourly off-season. The combo ticket — Stonehenge admission, Old Sarum entry, and unlimited bus rides — costs about £45 for adults and is the easiest single purchase for anyone arriving by train. By car, allow two hours from central London on the M3 and A303; parking at the visitor centre is free with a pre-booked admission ticket but fills up fast on summer weekends. Expedited “Stonehenge Direct” coach tours from Victoria run about £75 round-trip and add a stop at Windsor or Bath, but they impose tight 90-minute slots at the stones themselves and lose the spontaneity of going independent.
Tickets and timing for 2026
English Heritage prices for 2026 sit at roughly £24 for a peak-season adult standard ticket, £14 for children aged 5–17, and £62 for a family of two adults plus up to three children. Pre-booking online is essential — walk-up admission is no longer guaranteed, particularly on summer afternoons. American visitors who plan to combine Stonehenge with two or more other English Heritage sites (Old Sarum, Tintagel, Dover Castle, Hadrian’s Wall) should compare the 9-day or 16-day Overseas Visitor Pass at english-heritage.org.uk — both versions include Stonehenge and usually pay back inside three site visits.
Best month to go: late April through early June, when the grass is green, the days are long, and the school-holiday crush hasn’t hit yet. The summer solstice (around June 21) draws 8,000 people for managed open access to the stones overnight — a bucket-list experience but a logistical headache, with car parks closing at midnight and shuttle buses replacing private vehicles. Winter solstice on December 21 is quieter, mistier, and arguably more atmospheric. Avoid the second half of August unless you enjoy crowds and queues. Sunrise and sunset visits are restricted to the standard daytime ticket window — the main exception being four annual special access slots when small groups are allowed inside the stone circle, bookable months in advance.
What you’ll actually see
The visitor experience starts at the glass-fronted visitor centre, where 250 prehistoric objects are displayed in a permanent exhibition: human remains found in the surrounding burial mounds, antler picks used to dig the original earthwork, and a 360-degree video that places you inside the completed monument as the seasons rotate around it. Outside, three reconstructed Neolithic houses based on the foundations excavated at nearby Durrington Walls show what the builders’ homes looked like — circular, thatched, with chalk-rendered walls. From there a free shuttle (or a forty-minute walk across the World Heritage landscape) carries you to the stones themselves.
At the monument, a roped path circles the stones at a respectful distance — about thirty feet at the closest point. You won’t be allowed to touch the Sarsens during a standard ticket, but the path passes the Heel Stone, the Slaughter Stone, the still-standing trilithon archway, and offers an uninterrupted view of the inner bluestone horseshoe. Audio guides are included in admission and come in eleven languages including American-accent English; allow ninety minutes for the full circuit including museum, monument, and the Neolithic houses, two hours if you photograph carefully.
Best photo spots
The classic postcard angle — three Sarsens framing the central trilithon — sits on the southwestern arc of the visitor path, roughly opposite the Heel Stone. Get there in the first hour after opening, when the eastern light rakes across the surfaces and lichen colours pop. Late afternoon in winter produces the dramatic gold-orange backlight you see in National Geographic spreads. For a wider landscape composition, walk the public footpath that climbs the ridge to the southwest of the visitor centre — a thirty-minute stroll puts the entire monument, the surrounding burial mounds, and the chalk downland into one frame. Phones do well; serious photographers should bring a 24-70mm and a polariser.
Day trip vs overnight stay
Stonehenge is doable as a London day trip — leave Waterloo at 9 a.m., be at the stones by 11:30, return on a 6 p.m. service — but you will spend the journey moving rather than absorbing. An overnight in Salisbury itself adds a wonderful evening: the medieval cathedral with the tallest spire in England (404 feet) and one of the four surviving original Magna Carta copies, the river walks at Harnham, and a far better dinner scene than the city’s reputation suggests. Mid-range hotels run £110–£150; the White Hart and the Red Lion are central historic options, while a handful of B&Bs near Cathedral Close land under £90.
Combined with Bath
Stonehenge and Bath are 40 miles apart and pair beautifully into a two- or three-day mini-itinerary that delivers prehistory, Roman history, and Georgian elegance in one swoop. The most practical sequence: London → Salisbury (train) → Stonehenge (bus) → Bath (direct train, 1 hour) → London (90-minute return on Great Western Railway from Bath Spa). Bath itself rewards a full day — the Roman Baths, the Royal Crescent, Jane Austen Centre, and the Thermae Bath Spa for an evening soak with rooftop views — and there’s a strong case for an overnight stay rather than rushing back to London on the same day. VisitBritain’s London guide includes useful day-trip planning if you want to combine even more stops.
FAQ — Stonehenge for US travelers
Do Americans need a UK ETA to visit Stonehenge?
Yes. Since 8 January 2025, US passport holders need a UK Electronic Travel Authorisation before flying to the UK for tourism, business, or transit through a UK airport. The ETA costs £16 per person (rising to £20 from 9 April 2025), is valid for two years or until the passport expires, and permits multiple visits of up to six months each. Apply via the official UK government channel — gov.uk apply for an Electronic Travel Authorisation — typically receiving a decision within minutes, though the official guidance says to allow up to three working days.
How long can I stay in the UK as an American visitor?
With an ETA-approved entry, US passport holders can stay up to six months on a single visit for tourism, family, study under six months, or short business activity. The ETA itself stays valid for two years and covers as many UK trips as you make in that window — useful if you plan to combine the Stonehenge run with subsequent trips to Scotland, Northern Ireland, or the Channel Islands.
How much does Stonehenge cost in US dollars?
At early-2026 exchange rates, the £24 adult ticket equates to roughly $30–$32 USD depending on conversion fees. Add about $20 for the Stonehenge Tour bus from Salisbury station, $50–$60 for a return train ticket from London Waterloo, and a £16 ($20) UK ETA, and the full Stonehenge experience comes in around $130 per adult — comparable to a single-day combo ticket at a major US theme park.
Can I take photos at Stonehenge?
Yes — personal photography and short video clips are welcomed throughout the site. Drone use is prohibited inside the World Heritage Site core area, and tripods over 1.5 metres tall require advance permission for commercial shoots. Phones, mirrorless, and DSLRs handheld are all fine; flash on the audio guide listening posts is not.
Which US replica is closest to the real thing visually?
Maryhill in Washington state is closest by intent — a deliberate full-scale concrete replica of the original Sarsen circle in its prehistoric form. Foamhenge in Virginia is closest visually by surface texture and color, although the foam construction means the stones lack the genuine article’s weather-beaten weight. Carhenge in Nebraska gets the silhouette and dimensions exactly right, but the painted vehicles are obviously different up close.
Is Stonehenge accessible by wheelchair?
Yes. The visitor centre, the shuttle bus, and the path around the stones are all step-free; manual wheelchairs and mobility scooters are available to borrow free of charge from the centre. The grass surface near the monument can be soft after heavy rain, so the gravelled path is the recommended route. Companion tickets for personal assistants are issued at no extra cost.
What should I pack for a Stonehenge visit?
Salisbury Plain is exposed, cool, and breezy even in summer — bring a windproof layer, sturdy walking shoes, and sun protection on bright days. Public toilets are at the visitor centre but not at the stones themselves. The on-site cafe serves cream teas, sandwiches, and a respectable coffee, but bringing a refillable water bottle is wise on warm afternoons. UK plug adapters (Type G) are essential for charging cameras or phones once you arrive in the United Kingdom.
Bottom line
“US Stonehenge” turns out to be two excellent answers, not one. The American replicas at Maryhill, Foamhenge, Carhenge, Stonehenge II, and America’s Stonehenge are all worth a road-trip detour and reward the curious traveler with a particular kind of homegrown wonder. But once you have stood inside the visitor centre on Salisbury Plain — Sarsen stones rising from the chalk downland a thousand yards away, audio guide narrating across five thousand years of conjecture — you understand why the Americans built copies in the first place. Pack your UK ETA, book the Waterloo train, and go meet the original.