Two dark holes in the Wiltshire soil, each once holding a wooden post, have revealed a monument that quietly lined up with the sun 500 years before Stonehenge’s great stones were raised.
Discovered in the village of Bulford, 3 miles (5km) from the world heritage site, the structure has been carbon dated to around 3000BC – the same time as the earliest phase of Stonehenge itself, but half a millennium older than its famous trilithon alignment. The wooden poles, each between 2m and 4m high and positioned 120m (394ft) apart, were placed so that the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset fell directly along their axis.
“Two wooden posts predating Stonehenge by 500 years, aligned with solstices, found in Bulford, Wiltshire.”
It was a near miss that led to the discovery. Phil Harding, an archaeologist from Wessex Archaeology, was leading a dig ahead of new Ministry of Defence housing when his team uncovered two unusually large post pits surrounded by a jumble of smaller rubbish pits. “At first we didn’t recognise what we had,” said Harding, a former presenter on Channel 4’s Time Team. Only later, poring over the site plan, did he draw a line with pencil and ruler between the two holes. “The thing that struck me as soon as I saw that was that [the line was] about 50 degrees off the direct north, which was pretty much the line of the midsummer sunrise. And so I got really, really excited about that.”
Further analysis by Dr Fabio Silva, an archaeoastronomer from Bournemouth University and the Skyscape Academy, confirmed the alignment by reconstructing the sky as it appeared exactly 5,000 years ago. “The sky – the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars – they change very slowly throughout the centuries,” Silva said. “We don’t really notice it during our lifetimes. So we basically need to reconstruct the sky, what it looked like exactly 5,000 years ago, where the Sun was rising and what time it was rising in those places.”
The site has yielded a wealth of artefacts – pottery, flint tools and animal bone – suggesting prehistoric people held gatherings there. Harding called it “one of the greatest finds of my career” and “a once in a lifetime find”. Unlike Stonehenge’s enduring sarsen boulders, the Bulford monument left only the imprints of its posts, which rotted away long ago. But the discovery, a decade after the ground was first cleared for army housing, offers what Harding described as a rare glimpse into the minds of neolithic people: “Two post pits tell me [much] more about the people 5,000 years ago. This tells me about the whole community, this tells me about how they were thinking, how they were behaving, how they were revering the heavens.”