Part 2: Stonehenge
Stonehenge visitor centre The visitor centre and car park are 2.5km from Stonehenge itself, but here you’ll come across a museum with finds from the site and a virtual tour as well as five recreation Neolithic roundhouses with resident volunteers to tell you about life 4,500 years ago. There’s also a café, a gift shop and
a shuttle bus to the stones themselves. As well as being able to walk round the perimeter of the monument, you can also book a ‘Stonehenge Experience’ which lets you wander around the stones (but not touch them) at dusk or dawn when the site is otherwise shut.
Woodhenge Just 70m from Durrington Walls and well inside the newly found outer ring of Durrington pits, Woodhenge was just thought to be the outer ditch and bank remains of a large ploughed-out barrow. Aerial photography showed dark patches that turned out to be the post holes for six slightly ovalised rings aligned on the
winter and summer solstice. Apart from deeper holes in the third ring suggesting larger, taller posts and dating evidence contemporary with Stonehenge and Durrington, little else is known about the site. The holes are now marked with concrete posts and it’s worth a quick diversion from the route if you have time.
Durrington Walls and pits Durrington Walls is the site of a Neolithic village containing up to 100 houses, making it the largest known settlement in Europe at the time. The village was arranged around a wood-posted henge and a stone avenue that were aligned with the midwinter and midsummer solstice. Archaeological remains show that the village was occupied for at least part of each year and there is evidence of regular feasting. The henge part was built several centuries later with a massive 5.5m-deep ditch and a bank several metres high and 30m across. With a similar timescale to both Stonehenge
and Woodhenge, that was already enough to make Durrington Walls a very significant site. However, in summer 2020 archaeologists scientifically surveying the wider area confirmed that huge 10m-wide, 5m-deep pits that had previously been passed off as natural pond depressions were dug in the same Neolithic period. Joining the dots formed by over 20 of these pits (at least another ten are assumed to exist but covered by modern buildings) created a 2km circle with Durrington right at its centre and, referencing the earlier Larkhill causewayed enclosure, make this the largest Neolithic monument in Europe. 37
