Mysterious Ring Of Ritual Shafts Surrounding Durrington Walls Dated
A ring of large shafts discovered near Stonehenge in 2020 form the largest prehistoric monument ever discovered in Britain
The ring of at least 20 shafts, each up to 10 metres wide and five metres deep, appears to completely surround the ancient settlement of Durrington Walls, two miles from Stonehenge.
“The size of the shafts and circuit is without precedent in the UK,” said Prof Vince Gaffney, a lead researcher.
The 1.2 mile-wide (2km) circle of large shafts measuring more than 10 metres (30ft) in diameter and five metres (15ft) in depth are significantly larger than any comparable prehistoric monument in Britain.
A team of academics from the universities of St Andrews, Birmingham, Warwick, Bradford, Glasgow and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David worked on the project.
Prof Gaffney, of the University of Bradford, said the discovery demonstrated:
“…the capacity and desire of Neolithic communities to record their cosmological belief systems in ways, and at a scale, that we had never previously anticipated”. The area around Stonehenge is amongst the most studied archaeological landscapes on earth.
It is remarkable that the application of new technology can still lead to the discovery of such a massive prehistoric structure. When these pits were first noted, it was thought they might be natural features. Only through geophysical surveys, could we join the dots and see there was a pattern on a massive scale.”
Prof Gaffney said a “proper excavation” was required to determine the exact nature of the pits but that the team believed they acted as a boundary, perhaps marking out Durrington Walls as a special place, or emphasising the difference between the Durrington and Stonehenge areas.
He said it was difficult to speculate how long they would have taken to create, but using manual stone tools, there would have been “considerable organisation of labour to produce pits on this scale”.
“The pits are massive by any estimate. As far as we can tell they are nearly vertical sided; that is we can’t see any narrowing that might imply some sort of shaft. Some of the silts suggest relatively slow filling of the pits. In other words they were cut and left open,” added Prof Gaffney.
Dr Richard Bates, from St Andrews’ School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said it had given an insight to “an even more complex society than we could ever imagine”. His colleague Tim Kinnaird said sediments from the shafts had allowed archaeologists to “write detailed narratives of the Stonehenge landscape for the last 4,000 years”.
Dr Nick Snashall, National Trust archaeologist for the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, hailed the discovery as “astonishing”.
She said:
“As the place where the builders of Stonehenge lived and feasted, Durrington Walls is key to unlocking the story of the wider Stonehenge landscape, and this astonishing discovery offers us new insights into the lives and beliefs of our Neolithic ancestors.
The Hidden Landscapes team have combined cutting-edge, archaeological fieldwork with good old-fashioned detective work to reveal this extraordinary discovery and write a whole new chapter in the story of the Stonehenge landscape.”
Professor Vince Gaffney is the brother of Chris Gaffney, who appeared regularly on the tv programme Time Team, as part of the geophysics team with John Gater.
When first announced, critics argued the pits were natural “solution hollows” (sinkholes common in chalk landscapes). The research team used a novel combination of scientific techniques to study the soil profiles. The results showed clear, sharp human cut-marks and engineering uniformity across the pits, proving beyond doubt that they were intentionally excavated.
Further mapping of the 20 known shafts () showed that they form an almost perfectly spaced circle over 2 kilometres (1.2 miles) wide. Professor Gaffney noted that the precision suggests Late Neolithic builders physically paced out exact distances from the centre of Durrington Walls to ensure mathematical alignment across hills and valleys.
Using Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating—which determines when mineral grains were last exposed to sunlight—scientists confirmed the pits were dug roughly 4,500 years ago, placing their construction exactly in the Late Neolithic period, and making them completely contemporaneous with the main building phases of Durrington Walls, Woodhenge, and Stonehenge itself.
Borehole coring and sediment analysis revealed that the pits did not contain massive posts, nor were they filled in quickly. Instead, fine clay-silt layers show they silted up naturally over centuries.
Archaeologists now widely believe the pits served a purely symbolic and ritual function. Rather than building upwards toward the heavens (like Stonehenge), the builders were digging into the earth.
The ring likely acted as a colossal sacred boundary or cosmic underworld barrier, separating the major ritual zones of Woodhenge and Durrington Walls (where Mike Parker-Pearson’s team found the remains of vast quantities of feasting that took place during the winters as celebrations of life), from the Stonehenge landscape, which seems to have been the place of the ancestors.
The team has deployed sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) testing on the deeper core samples. This ongoing work is mapping the ancient vegetation, animals, and microscopic life present when the pits were open, giving us an incredibly detailed look at the changing environment around Durrington during its peak use.
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All images: University of St Andrews / PA Wire