7

Rivalry among the Megalithic Complexes

THE GIANT STONE CIRCLES, often surrounded by henge earthworks and accompanied by outlying monoliths, artificial hills, and avenues leading to smaller rings, are collectively referred to as megalithic complexes. They were built in specific stages that occurred simultaneously throughout many parts of Britain:

Circa 2600 BCE: The building of the grand, larger-scale stone circles, usually enclosed by massive henge constructions

Circa 2400 BCE: The attachment of long avenues of standing stones and parallel linear embankments

Circa 2200 BCE: The creation of smaller satellite stone circles, sometimes at the end of existing avenues, sometimes involving extensions to or the addition of further avenues

Circa 2000 BCE: The building of enormous artificial hills near the grand stone circles

In Ireland, however, the Megalithic culture seems to have been abandoned during this period, until it was readopted around 2000 BCE (see chapter 6).

Avebury may have been the largest such complex, but it was not the most elaborate. That distinction belongs to Stonehenge. It is not its diameter, or the size of its stones, that so distinguishes it among this new generation of stone circles, but its extraordinary design. Stonehenge seems to have started life during the very first phase of stone circle building, around 3000 BCE. It is thought to have originally consisted of fifty-six stones, averaging about 6 feet high, set in a ring some 280 feet in diameter (see chapter 1). As such, it had more monoliths than any of the early stone circles and by far the greatest circumference apart from the Twelve Apostles in Scotland, which was about the same size (see chapter 5). It is also unique, in that the stones from which it was created—the bluestones—came from so far away: from Pembrokeshire in South Wales, where there is evidence that they had previously formed an already existing stone circle in the Carn Menyn district of the Preseli Hills. As stone circle building seems to have ceased throughout Wales for some centuries after it briefly became established around 3000 BCE, it’s possible that there was migration into southern England, where the Welsh merged with the population of settlements such as Durrington Walls and, astonishingly, brought one of their own stone circles with them (see chapter 5).

At Stonehenge, in 2008, excavations led by archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, Ph.D., of the University of Sheffield dated the pits, the so-called Aubrey Holes (see chapter 1), thought to have contained the first ring of bluestones, to around 3000 BCE. The erection of the much larger sarsen stones, quarried from the Marlborough Downs, 20 miles north of Stonehenge, occurred around four hundred years later, the same time that other henge circles, such as Avebury, Stanton Drew, and the Ring of Brodgar, were being built. However, this new circle at Stonehenge was very different from any of its competitors. Called the Sarsen Circle, it was composed of thirty standing stones, each some 13 feet high and weighing around 25 tons, spaced just over 3 feet apart, with a further thirty 6-ton blocks placed on top of them to create a continuous ring of rectangular arches 108 feet in diameter.

Despite how Hollywood often depicts ancient stone circles with lintel stones joining the monoliths to form such arches, no other stone circle in the British Isles is known to have had anything like them. There were lintel megaliths incorporated into various burial structures, such as long barrows, dolmens, and passage tombs, but they are not found linking the monoliths of any stone circle other than at Stonehenge. It certainly wasn’t a lack of resources in other locations that left Stonehenge unique in this respect. The work needed to create much larger monuments such as Avebury would have required vastly more people toiling significantly longer than was needed to create the famous Sarsen Circle, no matter how impressive it appears. We have already noted that the specific diameter of any particular stone circle, its size, and number of monoliths do not appear to have been regarded as essential aspects of whatever primary function the stone circles were meant to serve (see chapter 6). The same reasoning must also apply to the arches of Stonehenge. As the arrangement was evidently never copied elsewhere, the addition of lintel stones could in no way have been considered a necessary feature for stone circles generally, in order for them to serve the mysterious purpose for which they were built.

Although circles of standing stones were ultimately erected all over the British Isles, we do find a few minor regional adaptations: for example, the recumbent stone circles of northern Scotland. Around 2700 BCE, the stone-circle-building tradition was adopted on the mainland of the far north of Scotland, mirroring the expansion of the Megalithic culture elsewhere in Britain at this time as it spread out from its earlier enclaves in the Orkneys, northwestern Britain, and southwestern England. The only difference with the stone circles in this part of Scotland is that they are typified by the incorporation of a large monolith lying horizontally between two of the ring’s standing stones: the “recumbent stone,” from which the monuments get their name.¹ As many of these horizontal monoliths are found on the southwest side of the recumbent circles, the direction of the midwinter sunset, they may have served a similar purpose to king stones elsewhere (although some scholars have suggested the possibility of lunar alignments).

In the far southwest of Britain, another slight variation is found. In Cornwall, some stone circles have a standing stone set inside the ring, such as at Boscawen-Un (old Cornish for “elder farm field”) near the village of St. Buryan, where it seems to have been deliberately positioned at an angle pointing northeast, the direction of the midsummer sunrise. Once again, this might be a local variant of the outlying king stones, while in Devon, some stone circles, such as Down Tor Circle on Dartmoor, have single-stone rows, rather than double-stone avenues, leading up to the rings. This is also found on the Isle of Lewis, where the main Callanish Stone Circle had no fewer than three single-stone rows added to complement its existing avenue. Perhaps Stonehenge’s Sarsen Circle was a similar local embellishment on a much grander scale,² so grand, in fact, that it was never repeated. The precision workmanship required to shape stones to the exact dimensions needed to create such a monument may simply have been considered too much of an unnecessary extravagance to be replicated by anyone else.

But it was not only the lintels that so distinguished Stonehenge; its surrounding henge is also unusual in that the embankment lies inside the ditch. At other megalithic henge monuments the embankment was built outside the ditch, which is a perplexing arrangement. During the later Bronze and Iron Ages, when regional feuding seems to have occurred in Britain—possibly due to colder, less fertile conditions and a consequent decline in food production—large fortifications were created around settlements. Commonly referred to as hillforts, as many were built on the summit of hills, they consisted of circular ditches and embankments on top of which timber stockades were erected. The hill-fort ditches were dug outside the embankments, meaning that attackers would need to descend into a deep, wide trench before climbing a steep embankment to reach the primary fortifications. Very often the ditch would fill with water to create a moat, or at the very least to become a muddy quagmire, bogging down the enemy. The whole thing was constructed to slow and tire adversaries so they could be more easily picked off by spears, arrows, and other projectiles hurled from atop the defensive stockade.³ If the ditch had been built inside the embankment, the ramparts would not only be considerably less effective, they would be self-defeating, hampering defenders within the fort. Intriguingly, this bizarre inside-out arrangement was exactly how nearly all the megalithic henge earthworks were constructed, with the ditch on the inside of the embankment. Whatever function they served, it was clearly not defensive. However, Stonehenge is an exception. There the embankment, about 6 feet high and 20 feet wide, was built inside the ditch of approximately the same dimensions, as would be expected for defensive reasons.

Intriguingly the henge at Stonehenge seems to have existed even before the first stone circle was built: the bones of deer and oxen excavated from the bottom of the ditch have been radiocarbon dated to around 3100 BCE, about a century earlier than the bluestone circle.⁴ It is uncertain whether the stones of the original ring were left standing when the Sarsen Circle was erected, but most archaeologists think that they were removed and initially dragged away. The henge is about 360 feet in diameter and stands just outside the first stone circle, which measured some 280 feet in diameter. The Sarsen Circle, with a diameter of only 108 feet, stands well inside the encircling ditch and embankment, implying that the henge was already there when the new circle was erected—otherwise it would have been built closer to the sarsen stones. And if the dating is right, the first bluestone circle was built inside this already existing feature.

The area around Stonehenge was a well-populated region by 3100 BCE, and its people had already built some impressive earthworks, such as the 400-foot-wide, 2-mile-long Cursus, less than 0.5 mile to the north, which dates from around 3500 BCE (see chapter 5). Like the Cursus, might the Stonehenge ditch and embankment have been created for some ceremonial purpose before the stone-circle-building tradition was adopted in southern England? There are a few isolated examples of Neolithic henge earthworks that appear to have lacked stone circles or any accompanying monoliths. For example, in Cumbria there stands the romantically named King Arthur’s Round Table, just outside the village of Eamont Bridge, an approximately 300-foot-diameter circular embankment, 35 feet wide and 6 feet high, with an internal ditch 45 feet wide and 5 feet deep. And in the county of Derbyshire, near the town of Buxton in north-central England, there is a monument called the Bull Ring (although it never was one). It is a roughly 200-footdiameter circular embankment, originally about 7 feet high by 30 feet wide, with an inner ditch around the same depth and width. The former has never been conclusively dated, but the Bull Ring seems to date from around the time that Avebury and the other henge monuments were being built. These, and a handful of other henges without stones, may represent the abandonment of a site before completion, but some scholars argue that such earthworks are rare but complete monuments in their own right.⁵ One way or the other, unlike these earthworks, at Stonehenge the ditch is on the outside of the embankment. Not only does it appear to date from five hundred years before the other henge monuments were created—even before the very first stone circles were built—it also is consistent with a defensive structure and unlike a true henge. On balance of evidence, therefore, it would seem that the ditch and embankment at Stonehenge were originally built to protect some kind of existing shrine or settlement, the evidence for which has been eradicated by the extensive remodeling of the site over many centuries. Although the Sarsen Circle was indeed one of the imposing new stone circles created around 2600 BCE, it may share more in common with the few grand stone circles where a henge was not constructed, such as Long Meg and Her Daughters in Cumbria (see chapter 6). It is more likely to have been happenstance that the first circle at Stonehenge was built inside preexisting defensive ramparts that superficially resembled a henge. Ironically it would seem that, despite its name, Stonehenge is not actually a henge monument at all.

Because radiocarbon dating is not a precise art, we can only say that the grand stone circles were erected around 2600 BCE. In what order they were built is a matter of guesswork. Which came first: Stonehenge, Avebury, Stanton Drew, the Ring of Brodgar, or one of the others? Some researchers believe it was Stonehenge. The builders of the other monuments, it is proposed, may have been unable to replicate Stonehenge’s imposing arches, but the surrounding ditch and embankment arrangement was copied. This notion, however, seems most unlikely. Those who built the henge monuments went to extraordinary lengths to create them. If they were following the lead of Stonehenge, why build them the wrong way around? Those who built the grand stone circles around 2600 BCE clearly did not duplicate Stonehenge’s apparently defensive ramparts. Its surrounding ditch and embankment may have been older, but it must have served a different purpose to henge earthworks such as Avebury and cannot as such be regarded as evidence for Stonehenge’s being the first of what were to become the splendid megalithic complexes. Others have suggested that Stenness, dated at about 3100 BCE, was the first stone circle to be surrounded by a true henge. Although there is little visible evidence of it today, excavations indicate that at one time the monument did have an encircling bank and ditch. If this was contemporary with the monoliths—seemingly the oldest stone circle of all (see chapter 4)—then it would indeed be the first henge stone circle in the British Isles. However, due to weathering and movement of the soil over time impairing radiocarbon tests, it is difficult to tell when the Stenness earthwork was actually created. It may have been added much later, around 2600 BCE, in an attempt to turn the Stones of Stenness into a henge monument before the Ring of Brodgar was built nearby (see chapter 6). As things stand at present, all that can be said with any degree of certainty is that the large stone circles, most with henges, all began to appear around the same time. Where the idea started is far from clear.

Fig. 7.1. Stonehenge and its surrounding monuments.

Returning to Stonehenge, as its Sarsen Circle was built at the same time as the true henge monuments and the other grand stone circles, it does fit into the overall picture of the synchronous development of megalithic complexes as a whole. This also applies to its later accompaniments, such as an avenue built around 2400 BCE, the same period as the first avenues were created at Avebury and elsewhere. The original avenue at Stonehenge consisted of a pair of parallel banks, originally about 6 feet high and 20 feet wide, set about 70 feet apart, with a ditch outside them, which ran straight for about 1,500 feet. Geophysics surveys conducted in the 1980s indicated that uniformly spaced standing stones ran along these embankments: about fifty in each row. As the avenue runs directly in line with the Heel Stone (see chapter 1), as viewed from the center of the circle, in a northeasterly direction, it has been suggested that it may have marked a processional way aligned to the midsummer sunrise. Around two hundred years later the earthen avenue was extended at an angle for three-quarters of a mile to the east, before bending around to follow a relatively straight course for a farther three-quarters of a mile in a southeasterly direction.⁶ Due to severe erosion, it is not known whether this extension included standing stones like the original avenue. As at so many other megalithic complexes, a further stone circle was erected at the end of the lengthened avenue at this time.

Excavations conducted in 2008, led by Parker Pearson, uncovered evidence that a long-vanished stone circle, about 30 feet in diameter, consisting of about twenty-five monoliths, had been erected on the spot; further work the following year by Timothy Darvill of the University of Bournemouth and Geoff Wainwright of the Society of Antiquaries provided evidence to date the monument to around 2200 BCE.⁷ It is now referred to as West Amesbury Henge.

Like many of the other megalithic complexes, Stonehenge also seems to have had an artificial hill erected nearby about 2000 BCE. Stonehenge is surrounded by many artificial mounds, but these are later burial tumuli (see chapter 9). However, some half a mile northwest of Stonehenge, in an area referred to by archaeologists as Amesbury 50, there are the remains of what seems to have been an earlier man-made hillock. It is now just a circular rise, about 65 feet in diameter and just a couple of feet high, but a land survey of 1913 records it as being very much larger. The exact size is not revealed, but it was referred to as a “hill,” which it could in no way be called today. Archaeologists reckon that it was originally over 20 feet high, but it seems to have been leveled by farmers in the mid-twentieth century to create an open field. Excavations and geophysics surveys conducted in 2010, initiated by the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology of Vienna, revealed it to have likely been an artificial hill without internal structures, similar to Silbury Hill at Avebury and built about the same time.⁸

By around 2000 BCE there may have been as many as fifty megalithic complexes throughout Britain. Based on their distribution in regions where evidence of them still survives, it seems that the complexes were the principal monuments of the tribal district they served. Due to the astonishing diversity of topography in such a small country, the tribes of Britain appear to have been tiny by international standards—nothing like the huge Native American nations, the tribes of Africa, or the Germanic peoples of the Roman era. Even when the Romans invaded Britain in 43 CE, what is now England, Scotland, and Wales was divided into at least forty major tribes. From excavations of Neolithic settlements, archaeologists believe that there were around fifty primary tribal regions in Britain during the Megalithic era, which tallies with the estimated number of complexes. By 2000 BCE, the population of Britain is thought to have risen to around three hundred thousand, an average of six thousand per tribe. However, these tribal regions varied considerably in size. Some fertile areas around sites such as Avebury might have had populations as large as thirty thousand, while others, in harsher districts such as Dartmoor in Devon, had tribal groups consisting of less than a thousand people. This is typified by the size of monuments. For example, the Scorhill Circle, the principle stone circle of Dartmoor’s Gidleigh Moor megalithic complex, is only about 80 feet in diameter, compared to Avebury’s enormous 1,088 feet, while its stones average just 4 feet tall, as opposed to Avebury’s average of 15 feet. In addition to these complexes there were thousands of smaller, individual stone circles spread throughout the countryside.⁹ We could perhaps compare the megalithic complexes to the city cathedrals of medieval England, each catering to a diocese (a clerical district) approximating a modern British county. Every diocese had many individual parishes—towns and villages—all having their own local church, which might be compared to the ordinary stone circles. During the Middle Ages parishioners would regularly attend their home chapel, but on special occasions, such as Christmas and Easter, they would make a pilgrimage to the cathedral. We can only assume that, broadly speaking, this is how the stone circle culture functioned, although whether the religious context of this analogy is appropriate remains to be seen.

Something that the two most impressive megalithic complexes certainly seem to have shared with medieval cathedrals is their rivalry. During the Middle Ages, there was intense competition between the two senior figures of the Church in England: the archbishop of Canterbury, who held jurisdiction over the South, and the archbishop of York in the North. Their cathedrals were the most splendid in the country, and over a period of some four centuries, between 1100 and 1500 CE, a succession of these archbishops made ever more elaborate embellishments to their respective buildings in the hope of gaining the greater prestige. It seems that something similar occurred during the late Neolithic era between Avebury and Stonehenge. Although it all began on the Orkney Isles around 3100 BCE, by 2600 BCE the Wiltshire area had become the thriving heart of megalithic activity. Stonehenge and Avebury were both situated in this region, only 17 miles apart, and the communities they served seem determined to outdo each other. When the Sarsen Circle was erected at Stonehenge, it was a far more sophisticated structure than any other stone circle in the British Isles. Being so close, the Avebury community may well have feared they would lose their “congregation” to the lure of the more impressive monument of their immediate neighbors to the south. Perhaps, lacking the know-how to construct a lintel circle, they decided instead to impress by sheer size. In diameter, Avebury is almost ten times larger than the Sarsen Circle at Stonehenge, and its surrounding henge was enormous compared to its rival’s diminutive ditch and embankment. It could of course have occurred the other way around. It might have been the people of Avebury deciding to create the largest henge circle ever built that began this megalithic pride race, with those at Stonehenge reacting to this gigantic undertaking by opting for magnificence over size and constructing something never before accomplished. Even with the most modern dating techniques, it is still impossible to know exactly which of the stone circles was built first. The dating of the various phases of Stonehenge has been made relatively easy due to the monument’s isolation. Avebury, on the other hand, is in the middle of a village.

By the Middle Ages a sizable farming community had grown up around the Avebury stones, complete with a parish church, and during the early fourteenth century the priest instructed his parishioners to destroy what he considered to be a heathen monument in their midst. The villagers began to systematically pull down the stones and bury them in pre-dug pits where they fell. After much work, a fatal accident occurred. While one of the huge 13-ton megaliths was being toppled, it collapsed early, crushing one of the workers to death. As the monolith could not be lifted, the corpse remained beneath the stone until it was moved by archaeologists in 1938. Underneath was the skeleton of a man together with the belongings he had with him the day he died. These included three silver coins dating from the 1320s, along with a pair of rusted scissors and a razor. Because of these items he is thought to have been a barber, and after the monolith was re-erected it became known as the Barber’s Stone. The destruction of the megaliths appears to have ceased after the death of the “barber.” Perhaps the local people feared the curse of the stones more than the wrath of their own priest.

Sadly the Barber’s Stone incident was not the last religious vandalism that Avebury endured. In the mid-1600s the Puritan régime of Oliver Cromwell seized power in England, and the destruction of the megalithic complex resumed with a vengeance. This time the stones were smashed to pieces with sledgehammers, their fragments used to construct and repair buildings in and around the village.¹⁰ Even though the Puritans only ruled England for a short while, once people started breaking up the stones for building material it didn’t stop. Nearly all the stones that still stood were destroyed by the end of the eighteenth century. By a strange irony, however, a reasonable number managed to survive: those that the medieval priest had ordered to be buried. Today they have been uncovered and re-erected by archaeologists, but because they are no longer in situ it is impossible to obtain reliable dating from organic or ceramic remains that lie beneath them.

So what do we know? There does appear to have been some kind of monument at Avebury at the time the first bluestone ring was built at Stonehenge, although it was not a stone circle. Well inside the Avebury ring there are two particularly large stones—the tallest, a bulky megalith 14 feet high—standing close together. Called the Cove, these stones somehow managed to escape the vandalism and remained standing without disturbance. (There were originally three monoliths in the group, in a triangular formation, but one of them was broken up in 1713.) Consequently it has been possible to date them to around 3000 BCE, the same period as the original stone circle at Stonehenge. Avebury and Stonehenge, therefore, both appear to have been ceremonial sites well before their grand stone circles were created. Although dating the monoliths of the Avebury stone circle is problematic, its henge can be dated. Antler picks excavated from the embankment—presumably the remains of the tools used to create it—have been radiocarbon dated to around 2600 BCE.¹¹ As this is the same period that the other great henge monuments were being constructed, it is fairly safe to assume that the stone circle was a contemporary undertaking. Archaeologists have also been able to establish the layout of the Avebury stone circle by using both excavations and geophysics surveys, determining that it originally consisted of about a hundred stones, of which thirty survive. Judging by the remaining monoliths, they averaged about 13 feet in height and, being much bulkier than the Stonehenge megaliths, weighed as much as 40 tons (as opposed to the Sarsen Circle’s 25 tons). So we can say with a fair degree of certainty that the Avebury henge and its grand stone circle did date from the same period as the Sarsen Circle at Stonehenge, and it is quite possible that the builders of each site were attempting to outdo each other: one community with sheer size, the other with splendor.

In addition to the usual accompaniment of avenues, outlying stone circles, and artificial hills found at other megalithic complexes, the builders of Stonehenge and Avebury made further modifications to their respective monuments not found elsewhere. The most amazing accomplishment of this stone-raising contest occurred with the erection of even larger rectangular arches at Stonehenge. Soon after the Sarsen Circle was created, its builders erected some mammoth constructions inside this ring: five pairs of massive sarsen megaliths, each over 20 feet high and weighing up to 50 tons, on top of which were set 8-ton lintel stones. Called trilithons, these five separate freestanding arches were arranged in an open-oval shape, some 45 feet across at its widest point, facing toward the Heel Stone (which was probably erected around the same time). Called the Trilithon Horseshoe, it towers over six feet above the surrounding Sarsen Circle.¹²

Fig. 7.2. Avebury stone circle by 2000 BCE.

At Avebury, geophysics and subsequent excavations have revealed that two further stone circles were created, one to the north and one to the south, inside the main ring. Approximately the same size and measuring well over 300 feet in diameter, they each consisted of about thirty stones up to 10 feet tall. Four and five stones survive, respectively, from these northern and southern inner circles, but as with the main circle, dating has proved difficult as they were re-erected, having been toppled centuries ago. Nevertheless, it has been possible to date them indirectly. Today, twenty-seven stones stand upright for the first half of the West Kennet Avenue (see chapter 6). Although most have been re-erected, four of them managed to survive the carnage of the past, probably because they stood well outside the village, and still remained standing when the Scottish archaeologist Alexander Keiller excavated the site in the 1930s. Animal bones unearthed from beneath these stones, thought to have been used to line the pits into which the stones were set, were later radiocarbon dated to provide a central date of around 2400 BCE. As similar organic remains dating from the same period have been excavated from a hole that originally contained one of the inner circle’s monoliths, it is thought that both features were contemporary. If so, then Avebury’s inner circles were created a century or two after trilithons at Stonehenge.¹³

By this time, Stonehenge saw the creation of its own inner circle: 80 feet in diameter, it consisted of thirty stones, averaging about 6 feet high, set between the 108-foot-diameter Sarsen Circle and the Trilithon Horseshoe. Known as the Bluestone Ring, it was not made from newly cut monoliths, but from the bluestones that are thought to have once formed the original circle at the site, presumably having survived being discarded somewhere nearby. Later, around 2000 BCE, another feature was added within the Sarsen Circle. Made from a further twenty of the original bluestones, it was an open-oval arrangement inside the Trilithon Horseshoe. Called the Bluestone Horseshoe, it measured some 35 feet across and matched the arrangement of the trilithon formation.¹⁴

If Stonehenge, with its extraordinary arches, had once bettered Avebury, it seems that by 2000 BCE circumstances had reversed. These new features at Stonehenge, the Bluestone Ring and the Bluestone Horseshoe, had no lintel stones and required none of the work and ingenuity needed to create the earlier Sarsen Circle and the trilithons. As existing monoliths were employed, these new features did not even necessitate the quarrying, cutting, and hauling of new megaliths. At Avebury, on the other hand, the builders were still going strong. Not only had they created two long avenues, rather than Stonehenge's one, but they also had built a completely new type of feature in the middle of the southern inner circle. Geophysics surveys in the summer of 2017 revealed that at the center of the ring about twenty new stones had been erected in a 100-foot-square arrangement, surrounding what is estimated to have been a huge, 20-foot-tall obelisk.¹⁵ This giant freestanding megalith dwarfed the 6-foot-tall monolith, now confusingly called the Altar Stone (see chapter 1), erected in the center of Stonehenge by this time. And when Silbury Hill, the largest artificial mound in the British Isles, was added to the Avebury complex around 2000 BCE, the people of Stonehenge were just not up to the competition. Silbury is enormous, 548 feet in diameter, compared to Stonehenge’s artificial hill of just 65 feet across. The Stonehenge mound would probably not have been much more than 20 feet high, whereas Silbury was a gigantic 130 feet high.

Although at Stonehenge and Avebury we find the same synchronous developments that occurred at the other megalithic complexes, like the addition of avenues, satellite circles, and artificial hills, the significant internal embellishments, such as the large-scale and elaborate arrangement of other monoliths, are limited to these two sites. There are a few isolated examples of inner rings being added to some smaller stone circles. For instance, the 90-foot-diameter Gunnerkeld Stone Circle in Cumbria, consisting of forty 5-foot stones, had a 30-foot-diameter ring of thirty stones erected inside it sometime around 2600 BCE, which might have been an attempt to outdo the nearby, similarly sized Castlerigg Stone Circle, about 18 miles to the west. Apart from Avebury and Stonehenge, of all the thousands of stone circles that would have existed in Britain, less than thirty are known to have had inner rings, and most of these were small monuments with stones less than a couple of feet high, and they were erected during the later Bronze Age, after 1500 BCE. Hence, it is difficult to interpret the exceptional embellishments found at Stonehenge and Avebury as anything other than evidence of local rivalry.

So by 2000 BCE we have around fifty large megalithic complexes all over Britain, the most imposing being Stonehenge and Avebury, each perhaps serving a particular tribal region in which there were hundreds of simple stone circles. But there is another type of monument that survives from the Megalithic era, and there are thousands of them. These are the solitary monoliths known as menhirs that stood alone and isolated from the stone circles. These lone standing stones are just as mysterious as anything created during Neolithic times, perhaps more so. Their existence has ignited one of the greatest controversies concerning the prehistoric British Isles: the enigma of the infamous ley lines.