Durrington Walls

Stand still for a moment and feel the ground under your boots. It is soft turf over chalk, and it dips gently away in a long, wide curve. On a breezy day you hear the wind in the grass, the bleat of sheep, perhaps the hum of traffic on the nearby road. It looks like ordinary farmland. But that slow curve in the land is the outline of one of the largest prehistoric enclosures in Britain.

This is Durrington Walls, just north of the town of Amesbury in Wiltshire. It is a henge, which means a circular earthwork made of a bank with a ditch inside it. Here the circle is enormous, roughly five hundred metres across. You could fit several Stonehenges inside it with room to spare. The River Avon runs close by to the east, and the whole site sits in a natural bowl of land. That shape is easy to miss when you are standing inside it.

The great bank and ditch were dug in the late Stone Age, around 2500 BCE. The builders had no metal tools. They used picks made from red deer antler, and probably shovels made from the shoulder blades of cattle. The ditch was cut deep into solid chalk. When it was new, the bank would have shone bright white against the green downland. Today, centuries of ploughing and weather have softened it into the low swell you see now.

Here is the first surprise. Stonehenge stands only about three kilometres to the southwest, and the two places were closely linked. Archaeologists now believe that Durrington Walls was busy at roughly the same time the great sarsen stones of Stonehenge were raised. Many researchers think this may have been where the builders lived, or at least where people gathered for great ceremonies. Stonehenge was the monument. This place may have been the town.

For a long time, that idea was only a guess. Then, in the early 2000s, a team called the Stonehenge Riverside Project excavated here. Under the turf they found the remains of small houses. Each had a floor of packed chalk, a hearth in the middle, and traces of wooden furniture set against the walls. The layout looks very similar to the stone houses of Skara Brae, a Neolithic village far away in Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland. Ideas, it seems, travelled the whole length of Britain.

The rubbish these people left behind tells a lively story. The excavators found huge numbers of animal bones, most of them from pigs. Studies of the pigs' teeth suggest many were killed in midwinter, at around nine months old. That points to feasting at a set time of year, possibly around the winter solstice. Some bones show the meat was roasted, and some joints were thrown away half-eaten. Picture great fires, smoke, and crowds of people eating together on this very slope.

And here is the second surprise. Scientists analysed chemical signatures in the bones of some of these animals. These signatures change depending on where an animal grew up and what it grazed on. The results suggest that some pigs and cattle were raised far from Wiltshire, possibly as far away as Scotland. People did not just walk here. They drove their animals with them, across hundreds of kilometres, to share in whatever happened here.

Inside the henge there once stood great rings of timber posts. The best known is called the Southern Circle, built from tall wooden posts set in concentric rings. From it, a broad avenue surfaced with flint and gravel led down to the River Avon. The excavators argued that this avenue was aligned with the sun at the solstice. Stonehenge also has an avenue leading to the same river. The two monuments seem to have been joined by water and by ritual.

This has led to one popular theory, put forward by the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson and his colleagues. In this idea, wood stood for living, changing things, and stone stood for the permanent world of the ancestors. So Durrington Walls, built of timber, was a place for the living. Stonehenge, built of stone, was a place for the dead. It is only a theory, and scholars still debate it. But it is a powerful way to look at this landscape.

The discoveries did not stop there. In 2015, a radar survey detected a line of buried objects under the southeastern bank. Newspapers quickly called it a hidden superhenge of standing stones. When archaeologists dug down, they found something different: large pits that had once held timber posts, later removed and filled in. A few years after that, another team identified a vast ring of deep pits around the henge, spreading out across the countryside about two kilometres across. Their purpose is still an open question.

Now look around at the modern landscape. A road cuts straight through the eastern side of the henge. When engineers improved that road in the 1960s, archaeologists rushed to excavate ahead of the work, and those digs first showed how important this site was. Just to the south, across the road, lies Woodhenge, a smaller timber circle whose post positions are now marked by low concrete posts. Seeing the two together helps you imagine the wooden structures that once stood here.

As you walk, try to read the land. Follow the gentle rise of the old bank with your eyes. Notice where the ground falls towards the river, and where the trees along the Avon break the skyline. Molehills sometimes throw up white chalk and small flints from below the soil. Most of the site is still buried and unexcavated. Every footstep you take crosses ground that has never been studied.

So pause here a little longer before you leave. The quiet field around you was once filled with smoke, music, animals and thousands of voices. Feel the wind come up the slope from the river. Then, as you walk back towards the road or on to Woodhenge, keep watching that long curve in the turf. Once you have seen it, you will not see this field as ordinary again.