Salisbury Cathedral's crossing tower and spire, added around 1320, reach 123 metres — the tallest surviving medieval spire in Britain. It was built on shallow foundations barely 1.2 metres deep, and its four corner piers have visibly bowed under roughly 6,500 tonnes of extra stone and lead ever since. Just 13 kilometres to the northwest, Stonehenge's sarsen circle and trilithon horseshoe were erected around 2500 BCE and carefully oriented on the midsummer sunrise / midwinter sunset axis running through the Heel Stone.
Salisbury Cathedral holds the world's oldest working mechanical clock (c.1386) and one of four surviving original copies of Magna Carta — both a short walk from the base of the spire you can compare here against a monument already 2,000 years old when the cathedral's first stone was laid.
A side-by-side 3D scene puts Salisbury Cathedral's record-breaking medieval spire next to Stonehenge's megalithic stone circle under one shared, controllable sun.
The cathedral's 123m spire casts a shadow whose length tracks the sun's elevation, while Stonehenge's fixed solstice axis lights up when the sun's azimuth lines up with the Heel Stone — the same alignment prehistoric builders engineered by eye.
Scrub the time-of-day slider and pick a season to move the sun. Toggle the 1320 spire on and off to see the tower before its dramatic addition, and toggle the alignment ray to watch it glow at solstice sunrise or sunset.
Salisbury's spire is so heavy that its four crossing piers have visibly bent inward over 700 years — yet it remains the tallest surviving church spire built in medieval England.