At first, archaeologists thought they were just watering holes — ponds dug into the chalk around Salisbury for thirsty livestock. But when they investigated the series of “anomalies” near Stonehenge, ground-penetrating radar showed that they were far too deep for that.
Then they plotted them on a map and saw something even more extraordinary: these shafts, sunk more than 4,000 years ago, formed part of a circle nearly 1.3 miles in diameter.
Here, only a few miles from Britain’s most famous neolithic monument, lies another that is even bigger. In a sacred complex whose gods have been lost to time, the team have uncovered a vast effort of prehistoric engineering, logistics and worship — a patch of land where our ancestors depicted the celestial on
