"Stonehenge came up for sale by auction on 21 September 1915, when the last private owner, Sir Edmund Antrobus, died in active service in World War I. The last attempt to buy the monument to preserve it had been made a few years earlier, when American philanthropist John Jacob Astor tried to buy it from Sir Edmund for £25,000, intending to gift it to the British Museum. Perhaps because of the economic downturn caused by the war, when it actually went under the hammer (not for the first time ;-)* it sold for just under £6,000, and was purchased by Mr Cecil Chubb, a local landowner."**

Sad innit - 90 odd years ago we could have bought Stonehenge for less than a second-hand Skoda, and we'd now be running an ice-cream stall there and planning for better things.

* Italics mine.
** The Stonehenge Companion by James McClintock. ISBN 1-90562-408-5, page 21.