Stonehenge #3

Durrington Walls — The Land of the Living?

Come visit the people who built Stonehenge

Durrington Walls, c2500BC: a henge enclosure, part of the Stonehenge Sacred Landscape. The closer southern henge ring came to approx where the centre sheep grazes, ploughed flat over centuries. The henge extends well beyond the line of trees to the right. Image taken August 2023 © Linda Acaster.

Two miles north-east of Stonehenge stands Durrington Walls. It is a henge of gigantic proportions — a diameter of 470 metres (1500 feet) with an earth and chalk bank in some places still standing to the height of 3 metres (18ft). To walk it you would cover just under a mile.

But it wasn’t the first structure here, nor the second.

Around 4,800–4,600 years ago, on a sloping south-east hillside above the looping River Avon (right, beyond the image), Neolithic people began to build a metropolis of tightly-packed, family-sized houses of wattle & daub walls and thatched roofs.

Despite their rounded construction, the puddled chalk floors were starkly rectangular, and held a central hearth. Smaller internal post holes, and lengthy yet shallow slots in the flooring, matched those of the stone-built houses of Skara Brae on the Isles of Orkney 680 miles to the north. Archaeologists were looking at the same furnishing layout, except built of wood, long decayed. There was even evidence of wattle & daub fencing separating the houses, just as semi-subterranean corridors of stone separate the houses of Skara Brae.