Woodhenge

Woodhenge is a Neolithic henge and timber circle near Durrington in Wiltshire. It lies two miles northeast of Stonehenge within the same World Heritage Site. The monument stands on flat ground in a shallow valley north of Amesbury. Aerial photographs taken in 1926 first revealed its layout to the pilot Gilbert Insall. Earlier, in the 19th century, local people had called it ‘Dough Cover’ and thought it a burial mound. Maud and Ben Cunnington excavated the site between 1926 and 1929 and proved it was a henge. The site is worth visiting because it shares important links with Stonehenge. Its ditch has been dated to between 2470 and 2000 BCE, around the time Stonehenge’s stone circle was built. Excavations found grooved ware pottery typical of the middle Neolithic period. A child burial at the centre and a teenager’s grave in the ditch show ritual use. Traces of five standing stones suggest the circle once held massive posts up to seven and a half metres tall. The entrance aligns with midsummer sunrise, echoing Stonehenge’s design. Visitors today see six oval rings of concrete posts marking where wooden uprights once stood. The rings sit inside a wide ditch and low outer bank that form a circle one hundred and ten metres across. A single entrance faces northeast, giving a clear view of the surrounding fields. The remains of feasting, including bones of butchered pigs, hint at large gatherings. Nearby, the Southern Circle and the Cuckoo Stone add to the sense of a wider ceremonial landscape. The site offers a quiet place to walk among the shadows of ancient posts and imagine the ceremonies that once took place here.