Stonehenge may have had a precursor just three miles away.
Archaeologists from Wessex Research say a prehistoric structure uncovered in Bulford, England, could represent an early model for the famous monument. The discovery was announced just ahead of June 21, when thousands of visitors are expected to gather at Stonehenge for the summer solstice.
The site was found during required excavations carried out between 2015 and 2017 before the British Ministry of Defense built new housing in the area. At the center of the find were two postholes, separated by 400 feet and aligned so that the vanished poles would have pointed to the rising sun at summer solstice and the setting sun at winter solstice — the same celestial relationship marked today by Stonehenge’s altar and heel stones.
The excavations also uncovered pits radiocarbon dated to around 2950 BC, a period that overlaps with the earliest phase of Stonehenge’s construction. Alongside those features were fragments of pottery, animal bones, and charcoal, evidence that people gathered there in significant numbers at certain times of year.
Dr Fabio Silva of Skyscape, who confirmed the alignment of the postholes, said the discovery shows communities were already engaging with the solstices in the Stonehenge landscape centuries before the monument’s sarsen stones were raised. In his view, Stonehenge appears less like an isolated beginning than the culmination of older traditions rooted in the same terrain.
Matt Leivers of Wessex Archaeology described the find as evidence of “the religion of the stone age” made visible in the ground, while Phil Harding called it a rare opportunity in a career spent on the archaeology of Britain’s ancient past.
For scholars of Stonehenge, the Bulford site adds a new layer to a landscape already dense with ritual meaning. It suggests that the monument’s solar alignments were not invented in a single moment, but inherited from practices that had been taking shape for centuries.
