Stonehenge Opens the Gate for the Longest Night. Bring a Torch.

It's 7 a.m. on Salisbury Plain and you can't feel your feet. The field is full of strangers in wool and waterproofs, somebody near the bluestones is playing a hand drum, somebody else has brought a fiddle, and nobody has slept much. In front of you, black against a sky that hasn't decided what it's doing, are stones that were already old when Rome was a village. Everyone here is waiting for the same thing. The sun is late, the way it always is in December, and the whole crowd is willing it up.

The builders of Stonehenge raised the first earthwork around 3000 B.C. and dragged the big sarsens into place a few centuries later, and they lined the whole thing up on the solstices: midsummer sunrise one way, midwinter sunset the other. Nobody wrote down why. That hasn't stopped five thousand years of people from turning up with theories, robes and, more recently, thermoses.

Rock and roll has its own Stonehenge history, and it's mostly about size. Black Sabbath took a life-size replica on tour in 1983 and found it wouldn't fit in most of the venues. A year later "This Is Spinal Tap" lowered a version that measured 18 inches, and the real thing has been fighting for its dignity ever since. It doesn't need to. You stand next to a sarsen at dawn and the joke goes out of you.

On Tuesday, Dec. 22, English Heritage opens the monument for its winter solstice managed access, and entry is free. The car park opens at 5:15 a.m., the last entry for the sunrise is 7 a.m., and the sun is due around 8:09. Parking has to be booked ahead (cars without a booking get turned away), or you can take the special Salisbury Reds buses from Salisbury station and the city center. The rules are short and sensible: don't climb or touch the stones, no alcohol, no glass, no drones, no candles or lanterns, no amplified music. Acoustic instruments are welcome, which explains the drum.

Make a weekend of it. December is the season for this kind of trip, from Salzburg's Krampus runs to Sweden's straw goat, and a cold sunrise on a plain is the most honest version of all of them.

Wear the boots you'd wear to a festival, bring the torch they tell you to bring and a blanket for the ground. When the sun finally clears the horizon, the crowd cheers like a band just walked on. The stones, as usual, don't react. They've seen this one before.