(That’s how you always have to say it the first time, with a pregnant pause whenever you introduce the subject of … Foamhenge.)

On Friday afternoon, some of us visited Natural Bridge Caverns (which is a post for another day, because we caught it just before it closed for the season, given over to the bazillion bats that are about to fill the place and hibernate until March), and on the way back we pulled off Route 11 at Foamhenge, a faithful, full-scale replica of Stonehenge created by fiberglass sculptor Mark Cline. I’d been dying to see the site ever since we ran a wonderful piece on Cline by Don Harrison, in Virginia Living’s August 2007 issue.

Cline, whose creations also include the Haunted Monster Museum, Professor Cline’s Time Machine, Dinosaur Kingdom and more, has variously been called “the P.T. Barnum of the Blue Ridge” and “the poor man’s Disney.” I wondered if we might run into him while we were there—a sign warned prospective ’henge-scratching vandals, “… sometimes I hide + watch …”—but we didn’t see him.

We did see Merlin, though. A fiberglass sculpture of Merlin, with robes permanently windswept and a serene face that, a sign told us, was cast from a mold Cline had made of his friend Jamie Jordan’s face after his death in 2007.

Signage highlights a couple of differences between Foamhenge and the original, back in Wiltshire, England, including the fact that Stonehenge apparently took 1,500 years, 50-ton stones and up to 1,000 men to make, whereas the foam version took a few weeks, 420-pound Styrofoam blocks and “four Mexicans and one crazy white man to construct.”

One of our party pointed out another difference between the henges: Cline’s floats. The whipping wind, before sending us back on our way, revealed another: Foamhenge squeaks.

Go. Experience the wacky majesty of … Foamhenge.