Thousands of people welcome the winter solstice at the ancient monument of Stonehenge

LONDON (AP) — Thousands of tourists, pagans, druids and people simply hopeful with the promise of spring celebrated the dawn of the shortest day of the year at the ancient monument of Stonehenge on Saturday.

Revelers cheered and beat drums as the sun rose at 8:09 a.m. over the giant standing stones on the winter solstice — the shortest day and longest night in the Northern Hemisphere. No one could see the sun through the low winter clouds, but that did not prevent a flurry of drumming, choirs and singing as dawn broke.

There will be less than eight hours of daylight in England on Saturday. But after that, the days get longer until the summer solstice in June.

The solstices are the only times when visitors can get directly up close to the stones at Stonehenge, and thousands of people are willing to get up before dawn to enjoy the atmosphere.

The stone circle, which required a thousand people to move each of its gigantic pillars, was built approximately 5,000 years ago by a sun-worshipping Neolithic culture. Its full purpose is still debated: Was it a temple, a solar calculator, a cemetery, or a combination of all three?

In a paper published in the journal Archeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University said the site on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of London, may have had political as well as spiritual significance.

This follows the recent discovery that one of the stones at Stonehenge — the only stone that lies flat in the center of the monument, nicknamed the “altar stone” — comes from Scotland, hundreds of miles north of the site. Some of the other stones were brought from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, almost 240 kilometers (150 miles) to the west.

The report’s lead author, Mike Parker Pearson of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, said the geographical diversity suggests Stonehenge could have served as a “unifying monument for the people of the United Kingdom, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos.”