Think of Stonehenge and what inevitably springs to mind of course are those gargantuan monoliths. However, new research suggests that our Neolithic ancestors were not just building upwards on Salisbury Plain. They also set to work on another truly extraordinary feat: the digging of a ring of truly enormous pits. So wide is the circle that it forms what is now the largest known prehistoric structure in Britain.
That’s the conclusion drawn by University of Bradford’s Professor Vince Gaffney and a team of 14 other academics. Using a combination of archaeological techniques, they investigated pits that the professor and others had discovered in 2020.
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Each of the 20 or more pits measures up to 10 metres in diameter and five metres in depth. The circle located around Durrington Walls and Woodhenge – to the north-east of Stonehenge – is over two kilometres wide and encloses an area of over three square kilometres.
The pits have been gradually in-filled with fine clay silt over time – possibly deliberately in some cases – effectively hiding them from view.
When it was identified by Professor Gaffney and others five years ago, the circle sparked a debate in the academic world, with many archaeologists surmising that the pits were merely natural formations.
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A paper just published by Professor Gaffney et al. – entitled The Perils of Pits: further research at Durrington Walls henge (2021–2025) – seeks to put that discussion to bed. It charts how the team used "borehole coring, sediment analysis, geochemistry and cutting-edge techniques such as Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating and environmental DNA (sedaDNA)" to ascertain whether they had been created by human hands or natural causes.
Although it has not been possible to investigate every single pit (some are now inaccessible), the evidence gathered from those that have been studied points to human activity, with the work probably carried out around 2480 BCE. That puts it in the Late Neolithic period, during which Durrington Walls was also built. Furthermore, there’s such a precision to the way the pits have been arranged that those who dug them are likely to have possessed relatively advanced mathematical abilities.
Understandably excited by the team’s findings, Professor Gaffney declared, "The recent work confirms that the circle of shafts surrounding Durrington Walls is without precedent within the UK. These features were not simply dug and abandoned – they were part of a structured, monumental landscape that speaks to the complexity and sophistication of Neolithic society."
According to the team at Bradford University, this new research "moves the debate from 'big mysterious holes' to understanding their purpose, chronology, and environmental setting." Archaeologists now believe that "the pits may have marked a sacred boundary linked to ceremonial activity at Durrington Walls, echoing cosmological ideas that shaped the Stonehenge landscape."
The study of the pits at Durrington Walls is part of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, an international collaboration led by the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology, Vienna. It’s the largest project of its kind anywhere in the world and aims to fill in the many gaps in our understanding of Stonehenge and its meaning. It means that this latest revelation about the generations of prehistoric builders on Salisbury Plain is unlikely to be the last…
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