Stonehenge landscape

The Stonehenge Cursus, just to the north of Stonehenge is nearly two miles long! Its width is around 400 ft. A cursus is made up of two parallel ditches, joined at the ends in an elongated oval shape; there are around 200 of them spread over Britain.

The Stonehenge Cursus has been dated to between 3630 and 3375 BC, so dates to several hundred years before the earliest stages of construction at Stonehenge.

It was named in the early 1700s by a man named William Stukeley, who imagined it to have been used for chariot racing - due to its shape not unlike the Roman Cursus (or racetrack).

Clearly as it pre-dates the Romans by some 3,500 years this was not the case - as wheels had not been invented at this time! Nevertheless the name stuck, although archaeologists have not yet found an explanation for its use.

Its alignment is east-west (also with nearby Woodhenge); the whole lining up with the midsummer sunrise, although other alignments at the equinoxes have also been noted.

More recently, two pits have been discovered which show that when viewed from the heel stone at Stonehenge, they would have marked the rising and setting positions of the sun the summer solstice.

A gap at the northern end of the Cursus could have been an opening for processions to walk the pathway.

Winterbourne Stoke Barrows are situated one and a half miles west from Stonehenge, just to the right of the A360, the road that goes up to Stonehenge Visitor Centre. Winterbourne Stoke is a very impressive barrow cemetery, containing barrows of almost every conceivable shape including bowl, saucer, disc, bell and pond.

Here a Neolithic long barrow can be seen, as well as some later Bronze Age round barrows. Like other similar monuments, these barrows would have been the final resting places for some of the most important people of these periods.

Archaeological finds turned up include bronze daggers, urns, pottery, flints and amber beads. Most of the barrows were dug in a southwest-northeast alignment.

Woodhenge is two miles northeast of Stonehenge. Woodhenge was contemporary with Stonehenge. It has a diameter of around 95 yards, and just one entrance to the north-north east.

What can be seen now are simple colour coded concrete posts, set into six concentric rings, designed to show the visitor where timber posts would have been around 4.5-5,000 years ago. The concrete posts are graduated in size so that the largest of them form the band in the middle, with smaller ones on the inner and outer concentric rings. This led some to believe they could have supported a timber roof, but no further evidence has proved this to be the case.

Towards the centre of the circles you will see a low flint cairn, marking the spot where a young child was found in a pit, buried. Bones from a young adult male were also found in the ditch near the entrance. Various artefacts such as Grooved ware pottery and antler picks as well as flint tools were recovered from the site.